There are little rubber feet on the side without vents, presumably for horizontal use.
As for why contemporary consoles, unlike their predecessors, are always vertical in press glamor shots, I can only assume that some consumer psychology study determined that vertical orientation can, with subtle changes in camera angle, magically make a device either look 60% more butch, or increase wife acceptance factor by 39%.
Given that it is a USB device, the first PC connection should be more or less immediate. I'd assume that(unless MS is being actively evil just for the sake of it, or is taking a loss on each unit sold) rough-but-usable work in the direction of interpreting whatever data it sends to and demands from the host will have been done shortly thereafter.
What is not clear(from my admittedly non-comprehensive reading) is how much of the fancy image-processing magic is done in firmware, on some sort of embedded processor, and how much is basically just dumping raw sensor data to software running on the console. If the former(as with the IR dot detection on the wiimotes), hobbyists will likely have access to it about as fast as they can get the communications protocol figured out. If the latter, there might well be various sorts of interesting applications(it would, for example, be totally unsurprising to discover that the sensors in this thing are extremely interesting for the price, again like the wiimote); but actually doing project-natal-like stuff on the PC will either require Microsoft benevolence or some genuinely nontrivial re-implementation work, quite possibly of stuff that is still patent encumbered.
Unless they are losing money per-unit, though, it wouldn't wholly surprise me if they offered some sort of support, if only as a hobbyist/university type thing, for PCs running suitably recent versions of Windows.
Fixing their no-doubt-creaky-and-hideously-flawed-empire-of-security-by-obscurity will be a costly pain in the ass. Every day that they didn't have to do that was money saved, never mind the fact that the better grade of black hat could well have been doing targeted attacks against high value individuals for all that time. But now that the NYT has the story, they'll have to do something. Total bummer. Bad for shareholder value.
This is why so many vendors use the phrase "responsible disclosure" as a polite synonym for "shut the fuck up, never tell anybody except us, and don't think that telling us entitles you to any ETA on a fix."
Support varies by manufacturer and model; but it is quite common for laptops to have a designated "charge" usb port that is powered any time the laptop is on, or if the laptop is off; but on its AC adapter.
Some; but by no means all, desktop motherboards energize one or more USB ports from the +5 standby rail.
It certainly isn't required by the USB spec or anything; but it is doable enough, and would have been a pretty reasonable move.
(Things do get a little tricky because of how the packing of rectangular prisms in a cylindrical container works, so while 1 hogshead is 504 pints, 1 hogshead of SD cards is actually a fair bit more data storage than 504 pints of SD cards. Storage pedlars, of course, always insert "*1 hogshead = 504 pints" in tiny print somewhere on their packaging...)
I suspect(aside from those who just have a direct bias one way or the other) that this is because Mozilla is(whether they like it or not) basically just a scrappy little software dev house. When you get to the level of extensions, it's at least one level further away from "sinister corporation" than that. Most extensions exist just because some guy hacked them together. Apple, on the other hand, has an entire vertically-integrated and fairly tightly-interlocking ecosystem.
More specifically, in this case, the doomsday scenario that seems to be most popular among those considering it is as follows: "Apple pledges undying love for HTML5, also puppies, kittens, and freedom. Apple introduces new browser feature to bring industrial strength ad-blocking to the masses. Apple introduces a new advertising framework(functionally inescapable on their cryptographically closed iDevices) available to those who embrace the app store, and agree to share a cut of the take with The Jobs."
Anybody who develops for the web now has the choice of starving(if this catches on broadly), paywalling(good luck with that), or spinning a trivial mobilesafari-in-a-wrapper iDevice App, with the same content and Apple's unskippable iAds...
It depends pretty substantially on what the rack is full of. You basic "small shop" rack, lazilly part-filled with 2U boxes of no particular compute density, along with a tape drive, a KVM, maybe a switch or two, is pulling well under 8kW.
72Us of fully loaded blade chassis, fully kittted out, might draw as much as the rack above, just spinning its cooling fans...
Depends on your storage medium. A hogshead'sfull of class-6 SD cards will be nice and zippy. If your enterprise data pedlar stiffs you with a bunch of class-2s, it'll take a lot longer.
You could adopt the alternate strategy, of forcing them to play with a "Child's First Call Center Playset: Now with over 500 recordings of angry, clueless, customers and verbally abusive managers!" for 14 hours a day.
This won't actually teach them anything; but it will fill them with a burning desire to acquire job skills.
What does it tell us about the business of software development when one of the world's foremost autocratic hellholes is seen as a good place to do it?
Can you honestly not think of any areas of "true productive work" where minor matters like "precision" and "details" and "getting it right" matter at least as much as they do in philosophy?(arguably more, since fucking up a philosophy paper just means risking the disesteem of your peers, while fucking up an engineering project means buffer overflows and/or explosions...)
For anybody who isn't a liberal, pointy-headed elitist who hates America and freedom of speech, that should be more than enough!
(The above represents sarcasm. If you find yourself experiencing even a twinge of agreement, please report for euthanasia at your earliest convenience.)
That isn't really the question, though. The question isn't how people of a particular type will interact with technology X, the question is what sorts of people regular interaction with technology X, from early childhood up, will produce.
Unless you adopt the (almost certainly nonsensical) position that everybody is entirely born, not made, you have to concede some degree of environmental influence on people's eventual properties(the degree of that influence is certainly a matter of debate; but almost certainly isn't zero).
Now, I'm largely of the opinion that most of the "old media" types are basically whiny, nostalgic, curmugeons, who look back fondly on the days when we had "quality" and "gatekeepers"(that consisted largely of people like them deciding what did or didn't get printed). Some truly excellent stuff has, certainly, been printed; but most of print has always been yellow journalism, pulp novels, tabloids, picture books, and propaganda. The same shit as the internet; but less convenient. The other thing that irks me about the "old media" types is that many of them seem blind to the fact that much of what may have made their medium valuable(see any of the stuff about he value of the "fourth estate"/journalism to democracy) had already been gutted and sold for scrap by the rise of TV well before the internet was anything more than a research toy for a few tech-heads with university affiliations.
The internet is the new and shiny, and thus catches the flack; but, in many respects, the "old media" that it is busy killing is basically a shambling, undead, caricature of itself. A bunch of 24-hour talking heads opinion-driven shout-down shows, supine corporate mouthpiece newspapers, and parasitic journals selling scientists their own work at a fat markup. The "old media" types seem to make the mistake of assuming that the "new media" kiddies hate them and want to accelerate their demise because they are just juvenile vandals who wouldn't know a cogently expressed thought if it bit them in the ass, rather than considering the possibility that they are either ossified or rotten.
Perhaps, in the spirit of applying naturally-evolved-oil-eating-bacteria, naturally produced in oceans exposed to oil, to the problem of oil spills; we could apply naturally-evolved-angry-former-fishermen, naturally produced on coasts exposed to oil, to the problem of oil spillers...
Technically, they are required to. Unfortunately, the agency responsible for signing off on their response plans is basically a textbook case of regulatory capture. Thus, companies routinely get away with either ridiculously under-specced contingency plans, or just outright lying about what capabilities they possess. Corruption is cheaper than actual hardware and it isn't as though the US is a very good place to be cast as the "mean evil regulator who hates business, and wants your gas to be expensive"...
You only get 10 password changes.(not that face readers are any better in that regard).
More realistically, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that fingerprint readers have a per-unit hardware cost, and are typically used to identify the laptop as a "corporate" model, while facial recognition is just software on top of the webcam that virtually all consumer laptops get anyway. It didn't cost nothing to write; but each copy costs nothing to load.
If the costs are that low, and the prospects that rosy, how is ITER stopping them? I would think that they'd be fending off the VCs with baseball bats, just to avoid being crushed by the piles of investment money...
Obviously, an ideal power generation technology would be one that neatly scales from "smart dust" to "dyson sphere" and everything in between; but we are still waiting for the magic pony to deliver that one.
I think, though, that you underestimate the potential utility of technologies that can't easily be scaled down. Assuming an ITER-like fusion system actually works(obviously, if it doesn't, or is absurdly uneconomic, all bets are off), it isn't going to replace the legions of tiny, little, fast-spin-up gas turbine units; but there are still things you can do with it.
In areas of very high population density, you can just run power lines. That won't work for the boonies; but much of the world population doesn't live in the boonies(they wouldn't be the boonies if they did).
Of broader use, though, is the fact that a fair number of industrial and chemical processes are extremely energy intensive; but create a product that can be fairly easily transported, thus effectively "shipping electricity". Things like aluminum refining. Were some sort of very-large-scale fusion widget to work, one would expect to see a relatively small number of installations worldwide, each surrounded either by extremely dense populations, or by massive industrial hubs, shipping things in and out by (presumably electric) rail.
That doesn't change the fact, though, that a major toxic release near the spawning grounds is very likely to have an effect on the population equivalent to a huge amount of fishing. A mass kill of sexually mature adults and their gametes or early-stage juveniles is about the most efficient way of hitting a population good and hard.
Even without the BP spill, we'd probably still be hunting them to extinction, one adult at a time; but this could accelerate the decline substantially.
I think you answered your own question there. Tapes are relatively cheap. Tape Drives are Not. Therefore, unless you are a large enough outfit to be amortizing the cost of the tape drive across a large number of tapes, tapes are effectively expensive. If you are, though, tapes are effectively cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
There are little rubber feet on the side without vents, presumably for horizontal use.
As for why contemporary consoles, unlike their predecessors, are always vertical in press glamor shots, I can only assume that some consumer psychology study determined that vertical orientation can, with subtle changes in camera angle, magically make a device either look 60% more butch, or increase wife acceptance factor by 39%.
Given that it is a USB device, the first PC connection should be more or less immediate. I'd assume that(unless MS is being actively evil just for the sake of it, or is taking a loss on each unit sold) rough-but-usable work in the direction of interpreting whatever data it sends to and demands from the host will have been done shortly thereafter.
What is not clear(from my admittedly non-comprehensive reading) is how much of the fancy image-processing magic is done in firmware, on some sort of embedded processor, and how much is basically just dumping raw sensor data to software running on the console. If the former(as with the IR dot detection on the wiimotes), hobbyists will likely have access to it about as fast as they can get the communications protocol figured out. If the latter, there might well be various sorts of interesting applications(it would, for example, be totally unsurprising to discover that the sensors in this thing are extremely interesting for the price, again like the wiimote); but actually doing project-natal-like stuff on the PC will either require Microsoft benevolence or some genuinely nontrivial re-implementation work, quite possibly of stuff that is still patent encumbered.
Unless they are losing money per-unit, though, it wouldn't wholly surprise me if they offered some sort of support, if only as a hobbyist/university type thing, for PCs running suitably recent versions of Windows.
And point c) is why AT&T is bitching.
Fixing their no-doubt-creaky-and-hideously-flawed-empire-of-security-by-obscurity will be a costly pain in the ass. Every day that they didn't have to do that was money saved, never mind the fact that the better grade of black hat could well have been doing targeted attacks against high value individuals for all that time. But now that the NYT has the story, they'll have to do something. Total bummer. Bad for shareholder value.
This is why so many vendors use the phrase "responsible disclosure" as a polite synonym for "shut the fuck up, never tell anybody except us, and don't think that telling us entitles you to any ETA on a fix."
Support varies by manufacturer and model; but it is quite common for laptops to have a designated "charge" usb port that is powered any time the laptop is on, or if the laptop is off; but on its AC adapter.
Some; but by no means all, desktop motherboards energize one or more USB ports from the +5 standby rail.
It certainly isn't required by the USB spec or anything; but it is doable enough, and would have been a pretty reasonable move.
1 hogshead = 504 US pints
(Things do get a little tricky because of how the packing of rectangular prisms in a cylindrical container works, so while 1 hogshead is 504 pints, 1 hogshead of SD cards is actually a fair bit more data storage than 504 pints of SD cards. Storage pedlars, of course, always insert "*1 hogshead = 504 pints" in tiny print somewhere on their packaging...)
On the plus side, you can still use them on civilian rioters...
I suspect(aside from those who just have a direct bias one way or the other) that this is because Mozilla is(whether they like it or not) basically just a scrappy little software dev house. When you get to the level of extensions, it's at least one level further away from "sinister corporation" than that. Most extensions exist just because some guy hacked them together. Apple, on the other hand, has an entire vertically-integrated and fairly tightly-interlocking ecosystem.
More specifically, in this case, the doomsday scenario that seems to be most popular among those considering it is as follows: "Apple pledges undying love for HTML5, also puppies, kittens, and freedom. Apple introduces new browser feature to bring industrial strength ad-blocking to the masses. Apple introduces a new advertising framework(functionally inescapable on their cryptographically closed iDevices) available to those who embrace the app store, and agree to share a cut of the take with The Jobs."
But very clever, in an evil sort of way.
Anybody who develops for the web now has the choice of starving(if this catches on broadly), paywalling(good luck with that), or spinning a trivial mobilesafari-in-a-wrapper iDevice App, with the same content and Apple's unskippable iAds...
It depends pretty substantially on what the rack is full of. You basic "small shop" rack, lazilly part-filled with 2U boxes of no particular compute density, along with a tape drive, a KVM, maybe a switch or two, is pulling well under 8kW.
72Us of fully loaded blade chassis, fully kittted out, might draw as much as the rack above, just spinning its cooling fans...
Depends on your storage medium. A hogshead'sfull of class-6 SD cards will be nice and zippy. If your enterprise data pedlar stiffs you with a bunch of class-2s, it'll take a lot longer.
You could adopt the alternate strategy, of forcing them to play with a "Child's First Call Center Playset: Now with over 500 recordings of angry, clueless, customers and verbally abusive managers!" for 14 hours a day.
This won't actually teach them anything; but it will fill them with a burning desire to acquire job skills.
It would be so much simpler if Epigenetics didn't have a hand, wouldn't it?
What does it tell us about the business of software development when one of the world's foremost autocratic hellholes is seen as a good place to do it?
Can you honestly not think of any areas of "true productive work" where minor matters like "precision" and "details" and "getting it right" matter at least as much as they do in philosophy?(arguably more, since fucking up a philosophy paper just means risking the disesteem of your peers, while fucking up an engineering project means buffer overflows and/or explosions...)
I feel very strongly about my opinions!
For anybody who isn't a liberal, pointy-headed elitist who hates America and freedom of speech, that should be more than enough!
(The above represents sarcasm. If you find yourself experiencing even a twinge of agreement, please report for euthanasia at your earliest convenience.)
That isn't really the question, though. The question isn't how people of a particular type will interact with technology X, the question is what sorts of people regular interaction with technology X, from early childhood up, will produce.
Unless you adopt the (almost certainly nonsensical) position that everybody is entirely born, not made, you have to concede some degree of environmental influence on people's eventual properties(the degree of that influence is certainly a matter of debate; but almost certainly isn't zero).
Now, I'm largely of the opinion that most of the "old media" types are basically whiny, nostalgic, curmugeons, who look back fondly on the days when we had "quality" and "gatekeepers"(that consisted largely of people like them deciding what did or didn't get printed). Some truly excellent stuff has, certainly, been printed; but most of print has always been yellow journalism, pulp novels, tabloids, picture books, and propaganda. The same shit as the internet; but less convenient. The other thing that irks me about the "old media" types is that many of them seem blind to the fact that much of what may have made their medium valuable(see any of the stuff about he value of the "fourth estate"/journalism to democracy) had already been gutted and sold for scrap by the rise of TV well before the internet was anything more than a research toy for a few tech-heads with university affiliations.
The internet is the new and shiny, and thus catches the flack; but, in many respects, the "old media" that it is busy killing is basically a shambling, undead, caricature of itself. A bunch of 24-hour talking heads opinion-driven shout-down shows, supine corporate mouthpiece newspapers, and parasitic journals selling scientists their own work at a fat markup. The "old media" types seem to make the mistake of assuming that the "new media" kiddies hate them and want to accelerate their demise because they are just juvenile vandals who wouldn't know a cogently expressed thought if it bit them in the ass, rather than considering the possibility that they are either ossified or rotten.
I'd say that it passed, and is now busy accruing extra credit...
Perhaps, in the spirit of applying naturally-evolved-oil-eating-bacteria, naturally produced in oceans exposed to oil, to the problem of oil spills; we could apply naturally-evolved-angry-former-fishermen, naturally produced on coasts exposed to oil, to the problem of oil spillers...
Technically, they are required to. Unfortunately, the agency responsible for signing off on their response plans is basically a textbook case of regulatory capture. Thus, companies routinely get away with either ridiculously under-specced contingency plans, or just outright lying about what capabilities they possess. Corruption is cheaper than actual hardware and it isn't as though the US is a very good place to be cast as the "mean evil regulator who hates business, and wants your gas to be expensive"...
You only get 10 password changes.(not that face readers are any better in that regard).
More realistically, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that fingerprint readers have a per-unit hardware cost, and are typically used to identify the laptop as a "corporate" model, while facial recognition is just software on top of the webcam that virtually all consumer laptops get anyway. It didn't cost nothing to write; but each copy costs nothing to load.
If the costs are that low, and the prospects that rosy, how is ITER stopping them? I would think that they'd be fending off the VCs with baseball bats, just to avoid being crushed by the piles of investment money...
Obviously, an ideal power generation technology would be one that neatly scales from "smart dust" to "dyson sphere" and everything in between; but we are still waiting for the magic pony to deliver that one.
I think, though, that you underestimate the potential utility of technologies that can't easily be scaled down. Assuming an ITER-like fusion system actually works(obviously, if it doesn't, or is absurdly uneconomic, all bets are off), it isn't going to replace the legions of tiny, little, fast-spin-up gas turbine units; but there are still things you can do with it.
In areas of very high population density, you can just run power lines. That won't work for the boonies; but much of the world population doesn't live in the boonies(they wouldn't be the boonies if they did).
Of broader use, though, is the fact that a fair number of industrial and chemical processes are extremely energy intensive; but create a product that can be fairly easily transported, thus effectively "shipping electricity". Things like aluminum refining. Were some sort of very-large-scale fusion widget to work, one would expect to see a relatively small number of installations worldwide, each surrounded either by extremely dense populations, or by massive industrial hubs, shipping things in and out by (presumably electric) rail.
Obviously fishing gets the bulk of the blame.
That doesn't change the fact, though, that a major toxic release near the spawning grounds is very likely to have an effect on the population equivalent to a huge amount of fishing. A mass kill of sexually mature adults and their gametes or early-stage juveniles is about the most efficient way of hitting a population good and hard.
Even without the BP spill, we'd probably still be hunting them to extinction, one adult at a time; but this could accelerate the decline substantially.
I think you answered your own question there. Tapes are relatively cheap. Tape Drives are Not. Therefore, unless you are a large enough outfit to be amortizing the cost of the tape drive across a large number of tapes, tapes are effectively expensive. If you are, though, tapes are effectively cheap.
Think "sushi" not "can".