Like most of/. I expected "ho-hum, something with diodes, how do they handle the voltage drop". Also like most of/. I didn't make myself look like a total mucking foron by posting crap like that without even so much as a quick look at TFA.
I'm surprised nobody came up with it years ago, especially since I've seen so many battery compartments in rechargers designed to merely not work when a battery was inserted backwards. You still have to put both batteries in the same direction if you have more than one end-to-end, but this is really pretty damn clever.
Of course it may turn out that after five years of heavy use it wears out or something, but that's no reason for someone not to have patented it long ago.
It was probably a bad bit in your disk cache. Did you check it again after a reboot?
Last year I ended up with a random stick of Patriot PC3200 that someone had discarded. So I stuck it in my old G4, which uses PC2700. A few days later, BitTorrent was complaining that the contents of a file were wrong. It knew this because a.torrent file is a very good checksum of the file that you are downloading. I think I even rebooted and it did it again a couple of days later.
That's when I realized that it must have been due to a bad RAM bit, and that bit kept ending up in the disk cache area. Since BT was downloading data equivalent to a sizable proportion of the installed RAM, most of the disk cache would have contained the downloaded files.
I took the stick out and the problem hasn't come back since. Maybe that had something to do with why the stick was discarded. (And I can't run memtest86 since a G4 has no "86" in it.)
Any old converter box will do... for an SD set. But if yours was one of the "HD-Ready" sets, you'll probably be out of luck for HD. If they still sell ATSC tuners with HD outputs, they'll probably still be much more expensive (like $200+) than the cheapie converter boxes.
Then again, I only use the component outputs on mine in 480p mode. The HD scan mode on my Sony is annoying, and the picture is good enough in letterboxed mode. And so many stations broadcast 4:3 content with black bars that I usually leave the tuner aspect ratio in "zoom" mode anyhow. The better color resolution of component video matters more than the pixel resolution.
ATSC is not intended for connecting devices to a TV set. The lag involved in the MPEG-2 encoding and decoding would be at least 1-2 seconds. Try playing a video game under those conditions.
The proper connections are HDMI, component (Y pR pB), S-video, or bog-standard NTSC composite. Guess who was the first to use S-video, even before the 4-pin mini-DIN plug we know today?
Unfortunately, HDMI seems to be displacing S-video connections on TVs and home theatre amps. I got one of the last generation of S-video HT amps as an open-box discount with no remote. (It had a few codes different from my previous generation of that brand, with the main loss being the power on/off code.)
More likely you're too close to the transmitter. Strong multipath interference (called "ghosting" on analog) can totally wreck the signal, especially with older DTV receivers, making the signal very directional. You can't just stick two metal rods in the air and have it work.
Search wiki for articles containing the word "vidya". 4chan/v/-ers have been sneaking "vidya" references into many obscure articles. These aren't your typical meme-spamming assburgers/b/-tards either, these guys are subtle and have been doing this for months.
But they still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to rewrite their products (Flash isnt their only product) to stop using APIs from two deprecations ago. They apparently love Microsoft even more than Apple.
Hmm... a quick check of Wiki, and it appears that things did change when Delphi came out, not surprising since it post-dated the 386. And now I remember what horrified me so much about the original Turbo Pascal dialect. It was that the "object" datatype was basically a "record" with method procedures attached, and you had to declare a separate pointer type for each one. Ugg-lee.
More specifically, Object Pascal is what Borland fucked up, compared to what Apple originally came up with. What Borland produced was a bastard child of Object Pascal, basically implementing C++ with a Pascal syntax, such as most objects being stored as non-relocatable structs (records) on the stack, rather than being exclusively refrerences to relocatable pointers. Back in the day, I was already doing "real" Object Pascal on the Mac, and I was banging my head into the desk over what Borland did.
However, I do understand that they were working with the 8086 and its horrible segment memory architecture, and they had nothing like the memory manager from MacOS. No large (>64k) memory blocks, no automatically relocatable handles, and the 640k limit.
Are you saying that there is something wrong with Apollo-style capsules? Try telling that to the Soviets.
The reason we lost seven astronauts back in the '80s was precisely because the Shuttle wasn't an Apollo-style capsule. When you put the crew vehicle beside the rockets, instead of above them, you remove a lot of important emergency abort capability.
See that little pointy thing on top of an Apollo Saturn V stack? That's a little rocket that can fly the capsule away from the rest of the rocket if there is a problem shortly after launch.
The "it's old so it must be crap, it's new so it must be better" attitude is stupid, and way too many people believe in it.
Post implied Apple would never make something with dual-battery support. Reply showed that Apple did in fact do so in the past.
But as time has gone by, they have decided that the weight and space restrictions of swappable batteries (in particular, the module and the docking hardware) is not worth it for most of their customer base.
...because it's not possible to distribute it as a patch to the upgrader that is freely downloadable from Sony, like the PSP people have been doing for years now? (Sure, you can get a "magic memory stick" image with the hacked firmware pre-installed, but the "official" way is to run a patcher program on a PSP which derypts and patches an official update.)
Correction... it's a console that they're not manufacturing any more (they never supported OtherOS on the Slim), what significant hardware changes could there be with the Fat, which was the only model that supported OtherOS?
Slashdot Mirror
Bonus exercise: try to find a jinja on Google street view. At least the one best shot of the entrance will probably be "unavailable".
Before or after the next iPhone update?
Ah, but this is from Microsoft, so "planned obsolence" is a feature, not an obstacle.
Like most of /. I expected "ho-hum, something with diodes, how do they handle the voltage drop". Also like most of /. I didn't make myself look like a total mucking foron by posting crap like that without even so much as a quick look at TFA.
I'm surprised nobody came up with it years ago, especially since I've seen so many battery compartments in rechargers designed to merely not work when a battery was inserted backwards. You still have to put both batteries in the same direction if you have more than one end-to-end, but this is really pretty damn clever.
Of course it may turn out that after five years of heavy use it wears out or something, but that's no reason for someone not to have patented it long ago.
This whole fe-line of inquiry is giving me paws. I just cat take it any meow.
It was probably a bad bit in your disk cache. Did you check it again after a reboot?
Last year I ended up with a random stick of Patriot PC3200 that someone had discarded. So I stuck it in my old G4, which uses PC2700. A few days later, BitTorrent was complaining that the contents of a file were wrong. It knew this because a .torrent file is a very good checksum of the file that you are downloading. I think I even rebooted and it did it again a couple of days later.
That's when I realized that it must have been due to a bad RAM bit, and that bit kept ending up in the disk cache area. Since BT was downloading data equivalent to a sizable proportion of the installed RAM, most of the disk cache would have contained the downloaded files.
I took the stick out and the problem hasn't come back since. Maybe that had something to do with why the stick was discarded. (And I can't run memtest86 since a G4 has no "86" in it.)
Any old converter box will do... for an SD set. But if yours was one of the "HD-Ready" sets, you'll probably be out of luck for HD. If they still sell ATSC tuners with HD outputs, they'll probably still be much more expensive (like $200+) than the cheapie converter boxes.
Then again, I only use the component outputs on mine in 480p mode. The HD scan mode on my Sony is annoying, and the picture is good enough in letterboxed mode. And so many stations broadcast 4:3 content with black bars that I usually leave the tuner aspect ratio in "zoom" mode anyhow. The better color resolution of component video matters more than the pixel resolution.
ATSC is not intended for connecting devices to a TV set. The lag involved in the MPEG-2 encoding and decoding would be at least 1-2 seconds. Try playing a video game under those conditions.
The proper connections are HDMI, component (Y pR pB), S-video, or bog-standard NTSC composite. Guess who was the first to use S-video, even before the 4-pin mini-DIN plug we know today?
Unfortunately, HDMI seems to be displacing S-video connections on TVs and home theatre amps. I got one of the last generation of S-video HT amps as an open-box discount with no remote. (It had a few codes different from my previous generation of that brand, with the main loss being the power on/off code.)
More likely you're too close to the transmitter. Strong multipath interference (called "ghosting" on analog) can totally wreck the signal, especially with older DTV receivers, making the signal very directional. You can't just stick two metal rods in the air and have it work.
I was wondering about privacy trousers myself.
WOOOOOOSH!
That's the sound of two memes flying past you while performing some sort of perverted sexual act.
Many years ago, a friend of mine came up with the term "thereware". As in "if it's there, you can use it".
Search wiki for articles containing the word "vidya". 4chan /v/-ers have been sneaking "vidya" references into many obscure articles. These aren't your typical meme-spamming assburgers /b/-tards either, these guys are subtle and have been doing this for months.
But they still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to rewrite their products (Flash isnt their only product) to stop using APIs from two deprecations ago. They apparently love Microsoft even more than Apple.
Hmm... a quick check of Wiki, and it appears that things did change when Delphi came out, not surprising since it post-dated the 386. And now I remember what horrified me so much about the original Turbo Pascal dialect. It was that the "object" datatype was basically a "record" with method procedures attached, and you had to declare a separate pointer type for each one. Ugg-lee.
More specifically, Object Pascal is what Borland fucked up, compared to what Apple originally came up with. What Borland produced was a bastard child of Object Pascal, basically implementing C++ with a Pascal syntax, such as most objects being stored as non-relocatable structs (records) on the stack, rather than being exclusively refrerences to relocatable pointers. Back in the day, I was already doing "real" Object Pascal on the Mac, and I was banging my head into the desk over what Borland did.
However, I do understand that they were working with the 8086 and its horrible segment memory architecture, and they had nothing like the memory manager from MacOS. No large (>64k) memory blocks, no automatically relocatable handles, and the 640k limit.
Are you saying that there is something wrong with Apollo-style capsules? Try telling that to the Soviets.
The reason we lost seven astronauts back in the '80s was precisely because the Shuttle wasn't an Apollo-style capsule. When you put the crew vehicle beside the rockets, instead of above them, you remove a lot of important emergency abort capability.
See that little pointy thing on top of an Apollo Saturn V stack? That's a little rocket that can fly the capsule away from the rest of the rocket if there is a problem shortly after launch.
The "it's old so it must be crap, it's new so it must be better" attitude is stupid, and way too many people believe in it.
...cashiers will still swipe it with that special marker pen.
so... tl;dr: Objective C merely sucks less?
I can agree with that.
(I'm still annoyed about what Borland did to Object Pascal, for what it's worth.)
Post implied Apple would never make something with dual-battery support. Reply showed that Apple did in fact do so in the past.
But as time has gone by, they have decided that the weight and space restrictions of swappable batteries (in particular, the module and the docking hardware) is not worth it for most of their customer base.
There is no spoon.
Oh, and the cake is a lie.
...because it's not possible to distribute it as a patch to the upgrader that is freely downloadable from Sony, like the PSP people have been doing for years now? (Sure, you can get a "magic memory stick" image with the hacked firmware pre-installed, but the "official" way is to run a patcher program on a PSP which derypts and patches an official update.)
did the MAC address end in UU:CK?
When the PS2 was new, writable DVDs and burners were expensive too. And HDs were in the 10GB range.
Correction... it's a console that they're not manufacturing any more (they never supported OtherOS on the Slim), what significant hardware changes could there be with the Fat, which was the only model that supported OtherOS?