but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple Google search?"
A simple google search for London CCTV Webcams just brought me up a couple of streaming sites for CCTV (China), and a few London traffic cams and a couple of skyline cams. Wondering what terms the author used.
True, but WebP is not lossless. They are converting JPEG to WebP. Therefore, the WebP, and therefore, the resulting PNG, is not going to be as sharp as the original JPEG
I was thinking the same thing, but I think the issue here is that the WebP graphics were compressed twice - to PNG because browsers do not currently support WebP.
The sample images were all pulled off of Wikipedia, and could have been JPEG to begin with, so you are then converting JPEG -> WebP -> PNG. WebP is a lossy compression format, according to the summery, so it only goes to show that if they are starting from a JPEG and recompressing, the WebP (and final PNG) will be worse than the original JPEG
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
It's unclear when the outage began. PCWorld has not been able to reach Facebook for comment, but Mashable reports the company has confirmed the outage.'"
PCWorld needs to read http://www.facebook.com/facebook Yeah, yeah, I know, posting articles to their own site about an outage on their site, but it says quite clearly what is going on, and that they were expecting futher issues after Wednesday's outage.
At home, I usually browse in full-screen mode, but at work, its windowed. Too many things I am running symoltaniously. That being said, I seldom have more than 4 tabs open. I could see a need for some people having more, but there also comes to a point where you have to start asking someone why they have so many tabs open. I have gone down to work on customer's computers, and they will have 30 or 40 tabs open. If you look at it, they are all stuff like espn, weather.com, a fantasy football page, etc. While I am guilty of some non-work-related surfing from time to time myself, I certainly couldn't justifu having mroe than, say, six tabs open at a time, and that would be if I was doing research as well and comparing stuff over a few different pages.
Truthfully, though, if I have mroe than three tabs open, i normally launch another window. Makes it easier to sort through stuff, have a browser window with a few tabs for my work stuff, a browser window with a few tabs for what I am researching at the time, and maybe a third browser window with slashdot, HDDigest, e-mail or facebook in it. Makes it MUCH easier to find tabs then scrolling through stuff on your tab-bar.
The problem stems from an extreamely large corporation, over 100,000 users, with an undersized IT department, stuff so departmentalized that groups are not even allowed to talk to each other, and managers who have NEVER been a tech.
One of our biggest issues right now, and we don't even know who to scream at, is that a Going Green initiative has swept the company asking people to turn off and, in some cases, unplug, computers to conserve power. What they don't realize is that this means the second the computer hits the network, for a major conference or something, it suddenly hits forced reboots and stuff for installing six months of updates. The IT department has screamed about this, but no one seems to be listening. They would much rather inconvienance a few people giving a presentation than waste a few hundred dollars from PCs in low-power mode.
We are currently looking at isolating PCs that are missing certain updates from connecting to the network. Apparently it took me screaming about it for several months before middle management finally started to consider it. I am not sure if the other 120 IT people have never thought of it, or have just never thought to mention it. The company is just so big, that to get anything done requires making a loud ruckus, months of strategic poking at management, and hope you don't get so annoying that they look at dismissing you.
Few people are allowed laptops, although we do have a fair amount. Even those who are allowed laptops will a lot of times opt out, because encryption software slows down the machine so much. Not even sure why we are using this encryption software - there are MUCH better solutions out there for much cheaper prices.
Firewalls are turned off on XP, rather than exceptions made, my guess is because a tech at one time was looking for a quick fix to something. It went up the chain, and now that is the standard. Like I said, issues with managers who don't know a thing about computers making technical decisions.
Yes, all your suggestions would work. Sadly, most have been stuff we have been yelling about for years. Oh, but that is not our department, surely we don't have a clue what we are talking about.
AMD's new chips include the fastest AMD Phenom II X6 1075T six-core processor, which is priced 'under $250' for 1,000 units, AMD said. AMD also introduced a range of dual-core and quad-core Athlon II and Phenom II desktop microprocessors priced between $76 and $185.
I am not sure about the 1075T, but I picked up a 2.8Ghz 6-core and motherboard combo six months ago for $200. I would say that is WAY less than than "under $250 for 1,000 units", Also, at the time, the comparable Intel was around $480, and did not include the motherboard.
As other people have said, AMD gives you more bang for your buck, but Intels are cheaper. I will take this one step futher. Not sure if this is still true, but my experience have been that Intels are better at raw-number-crunching, whereas AMDs seem to handle multitasking better. On my six core, I can be processing h264 video over all six cores, still run photoshop and have it exporting a movie to my TV all at the same time. I would think the i7 could do that as well, but man, what a price jump!
That being said, there is a point to this. If you are in a purely server / desktop enviornment (that is, DESKTOPS, not laptops), security really should be done at the networking side (routers, switches, servers, proxies). It is MUCH easier to update a hand full of servers with your current rules than to hit every single PC on the network, and hope the tens of thousands of PCs you have got their GP update or SMS push. Shoot, we have PCs in conference rooms and training rooms that may not get turned on for months at a time. Are you going to take the chance that the desktop, after your policy has been in place for months, suddenly logs into the network and gets exploited before it pulls its firewall updates?
There are also issues to desktop firewalls in a corporate enviornment. In ours, for example, the firewall in XP tends to block the machine from communicating with the SMS server. So there are multiple reasons to NOT run Firewall on the desktop side.
Completely agree. I also like to see MS trying something new. The new UI is sweet, and this is FREAKIN FAST on my dual-core laptop with Win7. I haven't installed on the 6-core desktop yet, because its still rather buggy (several text fields on Facebook refuse to work), but I guess it wouldn't really matter, I still am a pretty big Firefox user and have it set to the default browser.
I was in shock with the HTML5 and the speed increase from going to GPU. Their Beauty of the Web pages are jawdropping, and I think this is REALLY going to change the web forever. I would have to say this (GPU accelleration and HTML5) is probably the biggest thing to hit the web since Flash / Shockwave came out 12 or 13 years ago.
I also like the increase in real-estate when browsing. Yes, I know I can turn my other browsers into fullscreen mode, but then I loose the address and search bars.
Actually, is it just me, or did IE9 practically copy Chrome's interface?
Yeah, until you actually have a product, I won't believe it. I wonder how many people still have reservations on TWA's moon-shuttle vehicle that they were promoting back in 1969.
It should be noted that each time, i got tied into the price that was available at the time. The stupid providers normally won't give you a cheaper price if you are an existing customer, so this is where you cut them and go with their competitor for a year or two. I am sure taht when AT&T DOES role fiber out in my area, it will be cheaper per megabyte than what I am paying Charter.
In 1997, the University I was at paid $150 a piece for two 128k ISDN lines.
In 2002, I paid $40 a month for 1.5Mbps/640k DSL
In 2004, I paid $40 a month for 3Mbps/768k cable.
In 2006, I went DSL only (no phone), and went 6Mbps/1.5 DSL for $50 a month.
In 2010, when AT&T said they didn't offer fiber in my area even though they have fiber on the pole right outside my house, I ditched them, and went back to cable . $55 a month, 25Mbps down/3Mbps up.
I would say at this price, the price per megabyte has deffiantely decreased over the past 8 years.
Um, wow, are you late to the show. This is already being done. Has been since the first Blu-Ray and HD-DVD came out. HDCP had done NOTIHNG to stop piracy. Don't believe me? http://thepiratebay.org/ Absolutely nothing. The only thing it has done is limited component cables to 1080i, and limit upconversions on HDMI only cables, forcing people to upgrade televisions, cables, and other components in their Home Theaters. It prevented HD audio over Toslink (claiming that it didn't have enough bandwidth, which is BS) and other digital cables except HDMI. It causes handshake problems in cheaper equipment, causing audio or video dropouts, or resolution suddenly dropping, or other weird oddities on cheaper equipment.
No, HDCP did nothing to stop piracy, and breaking HDCP will not increase piracy. In fact, there will probably be no practical apps to this. If someone trys to build a device that circumvents HDCP, they will probably endure court costs that will drive them out of business.
About the only practical app that may come from this is software Blu-Ray players for Linux, if they don't already exist.
So please don't bring piracy into this. It really has nothing to do with this.
Then again, don't most search engines offer a filter function? I'm a Christian, and I still use Google. Oh no, I saw something about evolution! Big deal. I read a bit of the Koran the other day, and quoted a bit of the book of Mormon. Does this mean that I am going to burn in hell because I was looking at something that wasn't consistant with my religious views?
That being said, I got some older family members who are strict on their ways and lifestyle. Filtered search engines for a group of people are not a bad idea. That being said, my experience is that, outside of the big name search engines, most you find are paid advertisements, and many of the links you get may not even be relevant to what you are searching for. Truthfully, if these search engines don't use Google as a back end, they are probably going to be useless.
The other option, which I talked a few family members into, is filtered internet. Stuff like Net Nanny, Integrity Online, and stuff like that. You will be surprised how many people I have asking me if I can set up filtering on their internet. Normally, I just turn on the parental controls in Vista and Windows 7, and it seems to keep them happy. They seem to think that when they log into Facebook, some big, nasty Internet is going to come in and redirect them to some porn site. I gave up trying to educate, and just install the filters.
I think Windows 95 is greatly under-appreciated. I remember one of the biggest jokes was "Oh, its more Mac Like!". People who made that claim seem to not remember the horrors that was MacOS 7, 8 or 9. I did not become familer with Linux until 1997, so I cannot compare, but, as far as I can remember, the only thing even in the same league with Windows '95 OS/2, which Microsoft wrote a good deal of the code for, if I remember right. It pretty much standardized Plug N Play on the PC platform (granted, it was buggy, still had to manually reassign the IRQs on my Awe32 because Windows kept wanting to assign it the same IRQ as my video card), and it really started pushing the demand for faster processors (before that, people were like, my 286 can run Windows and I can run Word Perfect, why do I need a new computer). Windows '95 included Winsock intergrated into the OS, as well as dialers, so this made connecting to an ISP much easier than it had ever been. I was amazed with the concept that I could download multiple files at once! It made people want to upgrade to 256-color and high-color displays. The introduction of APIs ment that software manufactorors no longer had to write their software for each individual piece of hardware out there, you just had to have it complient to the API, and hope the sound card / video card / printer supported Windows specifications.
While it may have been insecure, prone to crashes, and the butt of many jokes, Windows '95 really did kind of revolutionize computing. I think credit is due.
I thought the iPhone's antenna was inside. If I grasp my iPhone the wrong way, i loose signal. are you telling me that an iPhone doesn't have an antenna? It magically gets its wifi and cell signal from something else?
Shoot, I already have an App on my iPhone that gives me access to most of the radio stations in my area, as well as around the world. However, an fm reciever will probably draw less power than having my wifi / cell running whenever I want to listen to the radio.
But I agree, why FM? I have an HD Radio at home. I turn the thing on maybe once a month. I have NEVER used the tuner in my reciever. I don' have the sound system in my car pimped out either - I listen to Kidd Kraddon my way to work and Ryan Seacreast on the way home, and that is only for background noise. I may ocassionally Shazam a song.
Why pay for something I am not going to use? Last time I used a radio in a phone was 9 years ago, and that was because I didn't own an iPod yet and was traveling throughout Europe. Hearing regional stations and different music was cool. I seriously doubt I would use that now.
Wow, this story JUST appeared in my RSS feeds, and out of the 20 or so commetns on the story so far, I am the 4th or 5th to suggest that the Porn industry will love this!
Really? I found iOS4 to be MUCH faster on the iPhone 3G than the latest iPhoneOS3 update was. It was almost unusable before. But I won't be using this update - jailbreakme allowed me to finally add backgrounding functionality to the iPhone 3G.
I have found a few reasons for jailbreaking - and I used Jailbreakme to break it. The first is backgrounding Apps. Apple, in their "brilliance", decided to limit this to just the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. I can now run Pandora in background on my iPhone 3G. Second are things that add or compete with Apple apps. Being able to download files in Safari is a huge thing. So are running ports of VLC that allow me to play files other than in the crazy resolution and.h264 that Apple requires - i can now play MPEGs as well as a few other formats. Another app I have lets me download youtube videos. Sure, I can fire up my PC, use firefox and flashgot, pull the videos, run them MediaCoder or Adobe Meida Encoder, import them into iTunes then sync my iPhone, but this is way more convienent.
Actually, it was what I was first thinking of. IF, instead of sitting in harbor, they went out past 3 miles from shore, they could technically host anything they wanted to. The quesition would be, where would they get their bandwidth from, because courts can still cut bandwidth.
But software pirates are just the start - if you go out beyond three miles (12 miles for communist nations, if memory serves), you could host ANYTHING, as no laws could touch you (well, you could still be held liable by which ever country you reside in). Point is, you would have a mecca for pirates and pornographers
Slashdot Mirror
but what difference does it make when you can find said webcams with a simple Google search?"
A simple google search for London CCTV Webcams just brought me up a couple of streaming sites for CCTV (China), and a few London traffic cams and a couple of skyline cams. Wondering what terms the author used.
True, but WebP is not lossless. They are converting JPEG to WebP. Therefore, the WebP, and therefore, the resulting PNG, is not going to be as sharp as the original JPEG
I was thinking the same thing, but I think the issue here is that the WebP graphics were compressed twice - to PNG because browsers do not currently support WebP.
The sample images were all pulled off of Wikipedia, and could have been JPEG to begin with, so you are then converting JPEG -> WebP -> PNG. WebP is a lossy compression format, according to the summery, so it only goes to show that if they are starting from a JPEG and recompressing, the WebP (and final PNG) will be worse than the original JPEG
Of course I don't read russian, so it might also be a carnival ride rusting.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mk.ru%2Fphoto%2Fsocial%2F1090-buran-prinesennyiy-v-zhertvu.html
Seriously, how hard is that?
Here is the actual article straight from Facebook
Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.
The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.
The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.
Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.
To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.
This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.
We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.
Actually, http://facebook.com/ is still having problems, http://www.facebook.com/ works.
It's unclear when the outage began. PCWorld has not been able to reach Facebook for comment, but Mashable reports the company has confirmed the outage.'"
PCWorld needs to read http://www.facebook.com/facebook Yeah, yeah, I know, posting articles to their own site about an outage on their site, but it says quite clearly what is going on, and that they were expecting futher issues after Wednesday's outage.
At home, I usually browse in full-screen mode, but at work, its windowed. Too many things I am running symoltaniously. That being said, I seldom have more than 4 tabs open. I could see a need for some people having more, but there also comes to a point where you have to start asking someone why they have so many tabs open. I have gone down to work on customer's computers, and they will have 30 or 40 tabs open. If you look at it, they are all stuff like espn, weather.com, a fantasy football page, etc. While I am guilty of some non-work-related surfing from time to time myself, I certainly couldn't justifu having mroe than, say, six tabs open at a time, and that would be if I was doing research as well and comparing stuff over a few different pages.
Truthfully, though, if I have mroe than three tabs open, i normally launch another window. Makes it easier to sort through stuff, have a browser window with a few tabs for my work stuff, a browser window with a few tabs for what I am researching at the time, and maybe a third browser window with slashdot, HDDigest, e-mail or facebook in it. Makes it MUCH easier to find tabs then scrolling through stuff on your tab-bar.
The problem stems from an extreamely large corporation, over 100,000 users, with an undersized IT department, stuff so departmentalized that groups are not even allowed to talk to each other, and managers who have NEVER been a tech.
One of our biggest issues right now, and we don't even know who to scream at, is that a Going Green initiative has swept the company asking people to turn off and, in some cases, unplug, computers to conserve power. What they don't realize is that this means the second the computer hits the network, for a major conference or something, it suddenly hits forced reboots and stuff for installing six months of updates. The IT department has screamed about this, but no one seems to be listening. They would much rather inconvienance a few people giving a presentation than waste a few hundred dollars from PCs in low-power mode.
We are currently looking at isolating PCs that are missing certain updates from connecting to the network. Apparently it took me screaming about it for several months before middle management finally started to consider it. I am not sure if the other 120 IT people have never thought of it, or have just never thought to mention it. The company is just so big, that to get anything done requires making a loud ruckus, months of strategic poking at management, and hope you don't get so annoying that they look at dismissing you.
Few people are allowed laptops, although we do have a fair amount. Even those who are allowed laptops will a lot of times opt out, because encryption software slows down the machine so much. Not even sure why we are using this encryption software - there are MUCH better solutions out there for much cheaper prices.
Firewalls are turned off on XP, rather than exceptions made, my guess is because a tech at one time was looking for a quick fix to something. It went up the chain, and now that is the standard. Like I said, issues with managers who don't know a thing about computers making technical decisions.
Yes, all your suggestions would work. Sadly, most have been stuff we have been yelling about for years. Oh, but that is not our department, surely we don't have a clue what we are talking about.
DANG IT! That's what I get for getting on Slashdot at 6:30 in the morning. Meant Intels are FASTER, not cheaper!
AMD's new chips include the fastest AMD Phenom II X6 1075T six-core processor, which is priced 'under $250' for 1,000 units, AMD said. AMD also introduced a range of dual-core and quad-core Athlon II and Phenom II desktop microprocessors priced between $76 and $185.
I am not sure about the 1075T, but I picked up a 2.8Ghz 6-core and motherboard combo six months ago for $200. I would say that is WAY less than than "under $250 for 1,000 units", Also, at the time, the comparable Intel was around $480, and did not include the motherboard.
As other people have said, AMD gives you more bang for your buck, but Intels are cheaper. I will take this one step futher. Not sure if this is still true, but my experience have been that Intels are better at raw-number-crunching, whereas AMDs seem to handle multitasking better. On my six core, I can be processing h264 video over all six cores, still run photoshop and have it exporting a movie to my TV all at the same time. I would think the i7 could do that as well, but man, what a price jump!
That being said, there is a point to this. If you are in a purely server / desktop enviornment (that is, DESKTOPS, not laptops), security really should be done at the networking side (routers, switches, servers, proxies). It is MUCH easier to update a hand full of servers with your current rules than to hit every single PC on the network, and hope the tens of thousands of PCs you have got their GP update or SMS push. Shoot, we have PCs in conference rooms and training rooms that may not get turned on for months at a time. Are you going to take the chance that the desktop, after your policy has been in place for months, suddenly logs into the network and gets exploited before it pulls its firewall updates?
There are also issues to desktop firewalls in a corporate enviornment. In ours, for example, the firewall in XP tends to block the machine from communicating with the SMS server. So there are multiple reasons to NOT run Firewall on the desktop side.
Completely agree. I also like to see MS trying something new. The new UI is sweet, and this is FREAKIN FAST on my dual-core laptop with Win7. I haven't installed on the 6-core desktop yet, because its still rather buggy (several text fields on Facebook refuse to work), but I guess it wouldn't really matter, I still am a pretty big Firefox user and have it set to the default browser.
I was in shock with the HTML5 and the speed increase from going to GPU. Their Beauty of the Web pages are jawdropping, and I think this is REALLY going to change the web forever. I would have to say this (GPU accelleration and HTML5) is probably the biggest thing to hit the web since Flash / Shockwave came out 12 or 13 years ago.
I also like the increase in real-estate when browsing. Yes, I know I can turn my other browsers into fullscreen mode, but then I loose the address and search bars.
Actually, is it just me, or did IE9 practically copy Chrome's interface?
Yeah, until you actually have a product, I won't believe it. I wonder how many people still have reservations on TWA's moon-shuttle vehicle that they were promoting back in 1969.
It should be noted that each time, i got tied into the price that was available at the time. The stupid providers normally won't give you a cheaper price if you are an existing customer, so this is where you cut them and go with their competitor for a year or two. I am sure taht when AT&T DOES role fiber out in my area, it will be cheaper per megabyte than what I am paying Charter.
In 1997, the University I was at paid $150 a piece for two 128k ISDN lines.
In 2002, I paid $40 a month for 1.5Mbps/640k DSL
In 2004, I paid $40 a month for 3Mbps/768k cable.
In 2006, I went DSL only (no phone), and went 6Mbps/1.5 DSL for $50 a month.
In 2010, when AT&T said they didn't offer fiber in my area even though they have fiber on the pole right outside my house, I ditched them, and went back to cable . $55 a month, 25Mbps down/3Mbps up.
I would say at this price, the price per megabyte has deffiantely decreased over the past 8 years.
Um, wow, are you late to the show. This is already being done. Has been since the first Blu-Ray and HD-DVD came out. HDCP had done NOTIHNG to stop piracy. Don't believe me? http://thepiratebay.org/ Absolutely nothing. The only thing it has done is limited component cables to 1080i, and limit upconversions on HDMI only cables, forcing people to upgrade televisions, cables, and other components in their Home Theaters. It prevented HD audio over Toslink (claiming that it didn't have enough bandwidth, which is BS) and other digital cables except HDMI. It causes handshake problems in cheaper equipment, causing audio or video dropouts, or resolution suddenly dropping, or other weird oddities on cheaper equipment.
No, HDCP did nothing to stop piracy, and breaking HDCP will not increase piracy. In fact, there will probably be no practical apps to this. If someone trys to build a device that circumvents HDCP, they will probably endure court costs that will drive them out of business.
About the only practical app that may come from this is software Blu-Ray players for Linux, if they don't already exist.
So please don't bring piracy into this. It really has nothing to do with this.
Then again, don't most search engines offer a filter function? I'm a Christian, and I still use Google. Oh no, I saw something about evolution! Big deal. I read a bit of the Koran the other day, and quoted a bit of the book of Mormon. Does this mean that I am going to burn in hell because I was looking at something that wasn't consistant with my religious views?
That being said, I got some older family members who are strict on their ways and lifestyle. Filtered search engines for a group of people are not a bad idea. That being said, my experience is that, outside of the big name search engines, most you find are paid advertisements, and many of the links you get may not even be relevant to what you are searching for. Truthfully, if these search engines don't use Google as a back end, they are probably going to be useless.
The other option, which I talked a few family members into, is filtered internet. Stuff like Net Nanny, Integrity Online, and stuff like that. You will be surprised how many people I have asking me if I can set up filtering on their internet. Normally, I just turn on the parental controls in Vista and Windows 7, and it seems to keep them happy. They seem to think that when they log into Facebook, some big, nasty Internet is going to come in and redirect them to some porn site. I gave up trying to educate, and just install the filters.
I think Windows 95 is greatly under-appreciated. I remember one of the biggest jokes was "Oh, its more Mac Like!". People who made that claim seem to not remember the horrors that was MacOS 7, 8 or 9. I did not become familer with Linux until 1997, so I cannot compare, but, as far as I can remember, the only thing even in the same league with Windows '95 OS/2, which Microsoft wrote a good deal of the code for, if I remember right. It pretty much standardized Plug N Play on the PC platform (granted, it was buggy, still had to manually reassign the IRQs on my Awe32 because Windows kept wanting to assign it the same IRQ as my video card), and it really started pushing the demand for faster processors (before that, people were like, my 286 can run Windows and I can run Word Perfect, why do I need a new computer). Windows '95 included Winsock intergrated into the OS, as well as dialers, so this made connecting to an ISP much easier than it had ever been. I was amazed with the concept that I could download multiple files at once! It made people want to upgrade to 256-color and high-color displays. The introduction of APIs ment that software manufactorors no longer had to write their software for each individual piece of hardware out there, you just had to have it complient to the API, and hope the sound card / video card / printer supported Windows specifications.
While it may have been insecure, prone to crashes, and the butt of many jokes, Windows '95 really did kind of revolutionize computing. I think credit is due.
What, you didn't like the butterfly commercial? Where do you want to go today?
I thought the iPhone's antenna was inside. If I grasp my iPhone the wrong way, i loose signal. are you telling me that an iPhone doesn't have an antenna? It magically gets its wifi and cell signal from something else?
Shoot, I already have an App on my iPhone that gives me access to most of the radio stations in my area, as well as around the world. However, an fm reciever will probably draw less power than having my wifi / cell running whenever I want to listen to the radio.
But I agree, why FM? I have an HD Radio at home. I turn the thing on maybe once a month. I have NEVER used the tuner in my reciever. I don' have the sound system in my car pimped out either - I listen to Kidd Kraddon my way to work and Ryan Seacreast on the way home, and that is only for background noise. I may ocassionally Shazam a song.
Why pay for something I am not going to use? Last time I used a radio in a phone was 9 years ago, and that was because I didn't own an iPod yet and was traveling throughout Europe. Hearing regional stations and different music was cool. I seriously doubt I would use that now.
Wow, this story JUST appeared in my RSS feeds, and out of the 20 or so commetns on the story so far, I am the 4th or 5th to suggest that the Porn industry will love this!
Really? I found iOS4 to be MUCH faster on the iPhone 3G than the latest iPhoneOS3 update was. It was almost unusable before. But I won't be using this update - jailbreakme allowed me to finally add backgrounding functionality to the iPhone 3G.
I have found a few reasons for jailbreaking - and I used Jailbreakme to break it. The first is backgrounding Apps. Apple, in their "brilliance", decided to limit this to just the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. I can now run Pandora in background on my iPhone 3G. Second are things that add or compete with Apple apps. Being able to download files in Safari is a huge thing. So are running ports of VLC that allow me to play files other than in the crazy resolution and .h264 that Apple requires - i can now play MPEGs as well as a few other formats. Another app I have lets me download youtube videos. Sure, I can fire up my PC, use firefox and flashgot, pull the videos, run them MediaCoder or Adobe Meida Encoder, import them into iTunes then sync my iPhone, but this is way more convienent.
Actually, it was what I was first thinking of. IF, instead of sitting in harbor, they went out past 3 miles from shore, they could technically host anything they wanted to. The quesition would be, where would they get their bandwidth from, because courts can still cut bandwidth.
But software pirates are just the start - if you go out beyond three miles (12 miles for communist nations, if memory serves), you could host ANYTHING, as no laws could touch you (well, you could still be held liable by which ever country you reside in). Point is, you would have a mecca for pirates and pornographers