Investors want a return on their money. Built into growth expectations are things like capital depreciation and inflation. A dollar loses about 2% of its buying power every year so $1,000 sitting in a mayonnaise jar under your bed is only worth $980 next year and $960 the next year. If you give that mayonnaise jar to a business (investing) with no profit planned they would hand you back $1,000 in five years that only had about $900 worth of buying power. To simply pay you back what you invested them the business needs to grow at least 2% per year. In order to give more money back to investors as a reward for them investing the business needs to grow somewhere north of 2% every year. Even an entirely private company needs to grow somewhere above the inflation rate just to be able to give their employees cost of living pay increases, ignoring entirely giving them actual raises to keep them from leaving the company. If someone's paycheck stays stagnant for five years they have about 10% less buying power than when they started working.
No the difference is accountability. The people performing sit-ins were willing to be held accountable for their actions. They could have opted not to give their names if confronted but they put a face and a body to their protest. They actually had a confrontation with their opposition. Participating in a DDoS is not putting a body or face to the protest nor is it actually confronting the opposition. It's little better than throwing rocks through store front windows and running away. Julian Assange putting himself on the line for Wikileaks actions or someone hosting a Wikileaks mirror is protesting. DDoSing websites is throwing rocks and breaking windows.
The people performing sit-ins were not attempting to be anonymous and running away as soon as they were challenged. They were willing to act in public and be arrested for what they believed in. Participating in a DDoS is not remotely similar no matter what delusions of grandeur they might have. It's troubling that these people are equating DDoSing a website with activism or protest.
The TOW is fired from a helicopter or possible a IFV. While the structure the missile hits is obviously going to suffer damage as long as the helicopter of IFV isn't right next to another building when it fires the damage is going to be largely limited to the target. The AT-4 has to be fired by somebody in the middle of the urban environment, the back blast of the AT-4 is significant.
The standard AT-4 model has a roughly 300ft 90 backblast cone. Anyone inside this cone could be seriously hurt by debris from the baseplate debris and the force of the blast itself. Firing an AT-4 from a confined space (inside a building) can do significant damage to that building and people inside it. Here's a video of an AT-4 being fired. Watch the shock wave around the guy as the weapon fires and then imagine that inside a building. You'd do almost as much damage to yourself as to the poor bastard you shot the thing at. Here's another video not only explaining the problem but describing the CS (confined space) variant of the AT-4 meant to solve this problem.
I think Google is interested in the meta tag approach because it's a dead simple thing to add to a CMS. RDF and it's microdata cousins are much harder to shoehorn into existing CMSes and require a lot more effort on the part of the copy writer to add to an entry.
BEVs are commuter cars, you don't drive cross-country in them but to work and back every day. Most people don't drive more than 75 miles a day even including side trips for errands. For most people having a car that can drive 200 miles on a tank of gas is overkill for their actual driving needs. For everything a BEV commuter can't handle there's rental cars or a second family vehicle. The car transportation system would be on the whole more efficient if we bought cars closer to our actual needs and shared (rentals etc) cars whose utility was used only rarely.
There's a lot more to it than that. Shooting in 3D limits the number of in-camera effects that are available and requires the director to make hard choices about focus and focal points. Once principal production is complete (with those limitations) all of the post-production needs to take the 3D projection into account. Having to project in 3D is going to affect every edit, effect, and color grading. It's a lot of extra work to shoot in 3D and then actually project in 2D.
With current telescopes what's the distance limit that we can use astrometry with any hope of accuracy (how many parsecs out can this technique be used)? In a similar vein are you using a single viewing session with one (or a single set) of telescopes or are you making multiple observations at different points in the year to create a virtual optical array? Does this increase the astrometric measurements in a meaningful way?
Microsoft's J++ was not fully compatible with the Java spec at the time and introduced it's own class libraries in the standard Java namespaces IIRC. They claimed their JVM was compatible with Sun's Java even though it really wasn't. If you targeted J++ your app wouldn't run in any other Java environments. Apple's Java implementation is a full implementation of the J2SE spec and all the Cocoa bridging stuff was properly labeled as extenstions. If you write a J2SE app on Apple's JVM it will run on any other J2SE JVM.
The JPEG standard is not perfect. There's several more efficient and effective image codecs available now that were impractical in 1992. However it's relative simplicity and age mean it is trivial to handle on contemporary machines and is available everywhere. Just about any graphical web browser you can find supports JPEG images. While WebP might offer best case space savings over JPEGs of equivalent size the idea that it's somehow appropriate for mass consumption is absurd. The justification of JPEGs slowing down load times for web pages is ludicrous, JavaScript doing a half-assed job of loading resources and unoptimized server access causes far more problems than additional kilobyte in an image. It's yet another half-baked Google project released because there's not enough parental supervision going on.
WebP does not offer any compelling reason except a promise of space/bandwidth savings over JPEG. It doesn't currently support multiple color spaces, color correction, an alpha channel, or animation. It's promise of space savings at various quality levels is ridiculous because like they did with VP8/WebM Google is only focusing on PSNR measurements. PSNR makes for nice graphs but is not an effective measurement of how images actually look to people. An image that scores well in a PSNR test might look like shit when you actually compare it to the source image. Most JPEG encoders are tuned for psychovisual performance, not to score well in PSNR tests. Testing WebP vs JPEG with VQM tests would be far more appropriate but I suspect WebM would do far worse than with PSNR (since that's what VP8 is tuned for).
Without a VQM test it's really not appropriate to say that at a given size WebP has better visual quality than JPEG. Even if this turned out to be the case it's missing a lot of other important features that JPEG either has or a truly viable replacement for JPEG should have. WebP only supports a single color space and color profile so if your source images look like shit in that space or with that profile you're out of luck. JPEG can declare an image's color profile or provide its own ICC. It doesn't support lossless encoding or an alpha channel (right now) so it won't be appropriate to replace PNGs and GIFs which are often less optimized for the web than JPEG. It also doesn't support animation which for good or ill is still an important use of GIF files.
Yet another image format to not get widely accepted on the web doesn't do anyone any good. Why not help support JPEG-2000 or JPEG-XR? Help PNG out with a F/OSS compatible LZMA library. No camera manufacturers will support it because they can't just write a few Exif tags and attach an ICC profile and have a usable image. Converting your personal library means you get not only a lossy-to-lossy conversion but lose the ability to do lossless editing (rotation etc). Because WebP has more complicated encoding than JPEG it's going to require more CPU power to decode, your iPhone an Droid will get worse battery life browsing WebP content than JPEG content. The reduced file size (assuming WebP lives up to its promises) isn't going to make up for the vastly more complicated decoding. So hooray, Google managed to reuse their VP8 encoder for still images while simultaneously not solving any actual problems with images on the web.
The Fomalhaut comparison is one being made by a journalist in the article and then the submitter. To scientists studying or looking for exoplanets it's an interesting thing to note but comparing press images is not the same as comparing scientific images. This article doesnt specify the simulated parallax measurements of the images, the spectrographic data, or anything else of scientific importance. I suspect the actual data includes these things but a cool looking amalgam of that data was chosen for a press release. Just as the Fomalhaut images is a press-ready amalgam of different bits of scientific data. No one is going to cite this YouTube video in an article about solar system dynamics in a scientific journal article.
Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.
The $450-range Toshibas are pieces of shit. The 15" laptops have horrible ergonomics and build quality. They feel like they're going to fall apart if you move them around too much and the keyboards are off-center from the screen which makes them horribly uncomfortable to type on. The number pad they so "thoughtfully" include isn't used nearly enough to make up for the ridiculous ergonomics. Even the smaller laptops are bulky and don't fit well in backpacks or messenger bags. The power supplies are monsters and have very fragile feeling DC connectors. If you tilt your laptop back a little too far you're likely to snap the damn thing off in the plug. They're also really unbalanced so tilting your screen back too far will cause your laptop to topple backwards.
You can (and obviously will) naysay Mac laptops but at least some thought went into their industrial design. They fit neatly into bags because they don't have oddly shaped bottom panels that catch on things. The MagSafe adapter has saved me from destroying my computer on a number of occasions, and they go to sleep and then wake up from sleep very quickly. I'll spend the extra money to get a laptop with features that actually make it nice to use. Bullet point features like a faster CPU or RAM don't mean a whole lot when I'm putting it into or pulling it out of a bag a hundred times a week.
The justification would be the same as for the nicer car, if the car feels nice and has better fit and finish it's probably worth the extra money. You interact with the fit and finish every single second you're using the thing. If it's build cheaply you feel it every time you touch it. I'll get a car with power windows and locks so I don't have to check every door handle when I get out like a rube to make sure they're all locked. I can roll all the windows down at once when it's been sitting in the sun so I don't need to crank the AC when I get in it. I'll get the more comfortable seat that's easier to adjust because I sit in it every single day.
At the beginning of June when AT&T's new data plans were announced I was a little miffed as an iPhone owner but curious what my actual usage was. I had gotten used to the idea of "unlimited" data and wondered how close to the 5GB soft cap I was getting. I figured the new 2GB cap for "unlimited" would really screw me over. On June 2nd I reset the data counter on my iPhone and checked it against at the end of the month and reading this story I checked it again. I'm only averaging about 170MB of cellular data a month. If this trend bears out I may go crazy and drop down to the 200MB plan and save myself $60 a year.
I've got WiFi at work and at home so there's a lot of browsing and e-mail checking I do that never goes over the cell network. While I'm out and not around a WiFi connection I tend to browse mobile versions of blogs and new sites. I really appreciate sites adding mobile-friendly stylesheets and such. Even over 3G browsing on a cellular connection is slow going and the full blown versions of even simple pages are between 1-2MB anymore. For instance Engadget's mobile page is only about 300K worth of resources while their normal page is between 1.5-2MB. That's a ridiculous amount of superfluous shit you've got to download to read a web page that's mostly text. It's not just the size of resources but the number of separate files (and therefore separate HTTP connections) that cause problems. Even the fastest 3G has latency of at least a quarter of a second, every separate file is a separate HTTP connection that needs to be negotiated and with everyone using CDNs and advertising affiliates often a dozen or so DNS lookups.
As an aside: if you administer a website please optimize your resources. It's not the most difficult thing in the world and it benefits everyone, not just people with smart phones. I've got a 10Mbps DSL connection and while it's not the fastest connection in the world pages don't load any faster than my 512Kbps connection from ten years ago.
Southwest is my BFF airline. I use them all the time to fly back home from the Bay Area and the prices for the service are fantastic. Last year I was able to find round-trip tickets for under $100 and even this past year I found some really cheap fares when I booked far enough in advance. I appreciate no baggage fees but when I go home to visit my family I try to pack as much as possible in my backpack. When I print my boarding pass from home I just get a ride to the airport and walk right up to the security line. I think Southwest has done about as much as they can to remove normal flying inconveniences which means I keep giving them money.
While it existed I had similar praise for United's Ted brand. I only flew on them a few times but they had good prices and no first-class section so the space savings was distributed to coach. I don't recall being more comfortable on an airplane than on my Ted flights. I'm built like a brick shithouse so normal airline seats are really cramped and I've usually got no leg room at all. Southwest's flights can be a bit cramped unless you check in early enough and snag a front row or exit row seat.
Most FOMA and Au phones in Japan run Symbian on the backend. They're not running Nokia's S60 environment but their own custom environments ad defined by DoCoMo and KDDI. There's also a handful of UIQ phones which are a Symbian base system with the UIQ environment on top. The Symbian parts of the phone are like the Linux base OS or DOS, they run the hardware and basic functionality of the phone with some other environment sitting on top.
It's not possible to solve all the world's problems. Most major problems are societal or political, not technological or financial. There's lots of food and water in the world yet people starve every day. There's a lot of roadblocks between that food and people's mouths. Those roadblocks won't magically go away because we throw money at them or postpone some other task. Putting any sort of scientific endeavor behind "solving the world's problems" will just mean those endeavors will never be accomplished.
I do follow game developers twitters like http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2 [twitter.com] to get almost realtime news, and you can even ask something directly to them and get an answer sometimes, things like this were unthinkable just a few years ago
Uh...how few is a few? People have been interacting with software developers directly for years. We used to use BBSes, Usenet, mailing lists or sometimes direct emails. Maybe vie finally hit some "old fogey" point but I refuse to be awed by communicating via 140 character messages. The only reason we kept BBS postings short is we were charged by the minute and had slow modems.
What the fuck are you complaining about? Content that goes through Apple's media framework gets hardware acceleration. The same content going through entirely different (non-QuickTime) code paths isn't hardware accelerated. Hardware acceleration isn't disabled for non-QuickTime containers, the plugins or apps that handle these containers aren't using QuickTime's H.264 decoders and therefore aren't getting any hardware acceleration. Do you think Perian and VLC get magic hardware decoding somehow?
Your comment can best be summarized as "I don't know what the shit I'm talking about but I'm cool because I'm complaining about Apple!"
I would say the juiciest targets for botnets are not the big high bandwidth server class machines but the overpowered home desktops. Part of a botnet's power comes from its distributed nature, a big multi-CPU behemoth connected to a T3 would concentrate a lot of power and bandwidth in a single place but if it is ever removed from the botnet it makes for a serious blow to the overall power of the botnet. While a handful of desktop PCs wouldn't be singularly more powerful than the behemoth combined they have a fair amount of power and the loss of any one of them doesn't meaningfully reduce the overall power of the botnet. Also being that the desktop PCs are low hanging fruit security wise it makes way more sense to concentrate more effort on them since you'll get a much better return. There's a hojillion unsecured Windows PCs connected to always-on internet connections in the world.
T-Mobile is a GSM carrier but they don't offer 3G service on the same frequency bands as AT&T and in fact a totally different band. In order to support T-Mobile's 3G a phone has to have a baseband radio that supports it. You can't just take a random phone from AT&T and use 3G on T-Mobile's network. Ask anyone with a SIM unlocked iPhone, they're stuck on EDGE with T-Mobile. So in the US you really only have the option of AT&T if you want to put a commonly available baseband in your phone.
While Macs comprise a small percentage of the overall PC market they have much larger representation in segments of the market. They're popular consumer machines and have much higher penetration in the consumer market than they have in say the business market. You'll see very few Macs used as POS terminals or in office drone cubicles. If you sell light duty consumer ink jet printers a good percentage of your target market has a Mac at home. You'll damn well be obliged to support them and even offer them unique products. When the original iMac was released several printer manufacturers released printers not only with USB ports and Mac drivers but even styled similarly to the casing of iMacs.
That doesn't make him omniscient nor immune to logic. It is entirely too late for the human race to hide. It's not our radio emissions that will give us away to advanced aliens but the natural radiation the Earth is currently reflecting into space. With our current technology we've found (and confirmed) 452 exoplanets and managed to image several. A new generation of planet hunting telescopes is beginning to come online (they're largely funding limited and not technologically limited) and they'll find and image even more exoplanets. It won't be too long before we're able to detect and get spectra from terrestrial planets around stars.
Any species with the means and desire to fly around the galaxy is going to do a survey of exoplanets before they leave home. If they're out there they've seen us already. They know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, they have a good idea of what its made of, and they know something lives here. They may not know specifically that humans live here and are armed to the teeth but they know something lives here. Damn near every inch of the Earth is covered in living organisms, the chlorophyll in spectra will make that abundantly clear. Check out NASA's Earth Observatory page. We can gather that sort of data with dedicated instruments in orbit but it's all being broadcast to the rest of the galaxy. A sufficiently advanced and large enough interferometry telescope would be able to gather the same data about the Earth from the aliens' home system.
Hiding from advanced alien species that want to pay us a visit is impossible. Radio emissions won't make any difference at all. If anything radio emissions would likely be a deterrent for a resource gathering alien species. Why bother coming here and fighting us for our resources when they can head over to the uninhabited system next door and take what the want without a fight? Even if our radio emissions aren't a deterrent they're hyper advanced aliens that can travel interstellar distances. They know the Earth is here and if they want it there's not a lot we can do besides becoming hyper advanced ourselves providing our current technology wouldn't be adequate for our defense.
The only Ares V that will fly in the next decade will be miniature hobby rockets. The Ares V exists only on paper at this point. Worse it doesn't even have a real design specced out at this point so if you said "build an Ares V starting tomorrow" it couldn't be done.
I want to see these networks unwittingly replay some of these "promoted Tweets". I want to hear Wolf Blitzer read something like the following: "and here we go to DoritosRGr8 - America is #1 LOL n I hear Obama luvs new Peppermint Ranch Doritos!" It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Investors want a return on their money. Built into growth expectations are things like capital depreciation and inflation. A dollar loses about 2% of its buying power every year so $1,000 sitting in a mayonnaise jar under your bed is only worth $980 next year and $960 the next year. If you give that mayonnaise jar to a business (investing) with no profit planned they would hand you back $1,000 in five years that only had about $900 worth of buying power. To simply pay you back what you invested them the business needs to grow at least 2% per year. In order to give more money back to investors as a reward for them investing the business needs to grow somewhere north of 2% every year. Even an entirely private company needs to grow somewhere above the inflation rate just to be able to give their employees cost of living pay increases, ignoring entirely giving them actual raises to keep them from leaving the company. If someone's paycheck stays stagnant for five years they have about 10% less buying power than when they started working.
No the difference is accountability. The people performing sit-ins were willing to be held accountable for their actions. They could have opted not to give their names if confronted but they put a face and a body to their protest. They actually had a confrontation with their opposition. Participating in a DDoS is not putting a body or face to the protest nor is it actually confronting the opposition. It's little better than throwing rocks through store front windows and running away. Julian Assange putting himself on the line for Wikileaks actions or someone hosting a Wikileaks mirror is protesting. DDoSing websites is throwing rocks and breaking windows.
The people performing sit-ins were not attempting to be anonymous and running away as soon as they were challenged. They were willing to act in public and be arrested for what they believed in. Participating in a DDoS is not remotely similar no matter what delusions of grandeur they might have. It's troubling that these people are equating DDoSing a website with activism or protest.
The TOW is fired from a helicopter or possible a IFV. While the structure the missile hits is obviously going to suffer damage as long as the helicopter of IFV isn't right next to another building when it fires the damage is going to be largely limited to the target. The AT-4 has to be fired by somebody in the middle of the urban environment, the back blast of the AT-4 is significant.
The standard AT-4 model has a roughly 300ft 90 backblast cone. Anyone inside this cone could be seriously hurt by debris from the baseplate debris and the force of the blast itself. Firing an AT-4 from a confined space (inside a building) can do significant damage to that building and people inside it. Here's a video of an AT-4 being fired. Watch the shock wave around the guy as the weapon fires and then imagine that inside a building. You'd do almost as much damage to yourself as to the poor bastard you shot the thing at. Here's another video not only explaining the problem but describing the CS (confined space) variant of the AT-4 meant to solve this problem.
I think Google is interested in the meta tag approach because it's a dead simple thing to add to a CMS. RDF and it's microdata cousins are much harder to shoehorn into existing CMSes and require a lot more effort on the part of the copy writer to add to an entry.
BEVs are commuter cars, you don't drive cross-country in them but to work and back every day. Most people don't drive more than 75 miles a day even including side trips for errands. For most people having a car that can drive 200 miles on a tank of gas is overkill for their actual driving needs. For everything a BEV commuter can't handle there's rental cars or a second family vehicle. The car transportation system would be on the whole more efficient if we bought cars closer to our actual needs and shared (rentals etc) cars whose utility was used only rarely.
There's a lot more to it than that. Shooting in 3D limits the number of in-camera effects that are available and requires the director to make hard choices about focus and focal points. Once principal production is complete (with those limitations) all of the post-production needs to take the 3D projection into account. Having to project in 3D is going to affect every edit, effect, and color grading. It's a lot of extra work to shoot in 3D and then actually project in 2D.
With current telescopes what's the distance limit that we can use astrometry with any hope of accuracy (how many parsecs out can this technique be used)? In a similar vein are you using a single viewing session with one (or a single set) of telescopes or are you making multiple observations at different points in the year to create a virtual optical array? Does this increase the astrometric measurements in a meaningful way?
Microsoft's J++ was not fully compatible with the Java spec at the time and introduced it's own class libraries in the standard Java namespaces IIRC. They claimed their JVM was compatible with Sun's Java even though it really wasn't. If you targeted J++ your app wouldn't run in any other Java environments. Apple's Java implementation is a full implementation of the J2SE spec and all the Cocoa bridging stuff was properly labeled as extenstions. If you write a J2SE app on Apple's JVM it will run on any other J2SE JVM.
The JPEG standard is not perfect. There's several more efficient and effective image codecs available now that were impractical in 1992. However it's relative simplicity and age mean it is trivial to handle on contemporary machines and is available everywhere. Just about any graphical web browser you can find supports JPEG images. While WebP might offer best case space savings over JPEGs of equivalent size the idea that it's somehow appropriate for mass consumption is absurd. The justification of JPEGs slowing down load times for web pages is ludicrous, JavaScript doing a half-assed job of loading resources and unoptimized server access causes far more problems than additional kilobyte in an image. It's yet another half-baked Google project released because there's not enough parental supervision going on.
WebP does not offer any compelling reason except a promise of space/bandwidth savings over JPEG. It doesn't currently support multiple color spaces, color correction, an alpha channel, or animation. It's promise of space savings at various quality levels is ridiculous because like they did with VP8/WebM Google is only focusing on PSNR measurements. PSNR makes for nice graphs but is not an effective measurement of how images actually look to people. An image that scores well in a PSNR test might look like shit when you actually compare it to the source image. Most JPEG encoders are tuned for psychovisual performance, not to score well in PSNR tests. Testing WebP vs JPEG with VQM tests would be far more appropriate but I suspect WebM would do far worse than with PSNR (since that's what VP8 is tuned for).
Without a VQM test it's really not appropriate to say that at a given size WebP has better visual quality than JPEG. Even if this turned out to be the case it's missing a lot of other important features that JPEG either has or a truly viable replacement for JPEG should have. WebP only supports a single color space and color profile so if your source images look like shit in that space or with that profile you're out of luck. JPEG can declare an image's color profile or provide its own ICC. It doesn't support lossless encoding or an alpha channel (right now) so it won't be appropriate to replace PNGs and GIFs which are often less optimized for the web than JPEG. It also doesn't support animation which for good or ill is still an important use of GIF files.
Yet another image format to not get widely accepted on the web doesn't do anyone any good. Why not help support JPEG-2000 or JPEG-XR? Help PNG out with a F/OSS compatible LZMA library. No camera manufacturers will support it because they can't just write a few Exif tags and attach an ICC profile and have a usable image. Converting your personal library means you get not only a lossy-to-lossy conversion but lose the ability to do lossless editing (rotation etc). Because WebP has more complicated encoding than JPEG it's going to require more CPU power to decode, your iPhone an Droid will get worse battery life browsing WebP content than JPEG content. The reduced file size (assuming WebP lives up to its promises) isn't going to make up for the vastly more complicated decoding. So hooray, Google managed to reuse their VP8 encoder for still images while simultaneously not solving any actual problems with images on the web.
The Fomalhaut comparison is one being made by a journalist in the article and then the submitter. To scientists studying or looking for exoplanets it's an interesting thing to note but comparing press images is not the same as comparing scientific images. This article doesnt specify the simulated parallax measurements of the images, the spectrographic data, or anything else of scientific importance. I suspect the actual data includes these things but a cool looking amalgam of that data was chosen for a press release. Just as the Fomalhaut images is a press-ready amalgam of different bits of scientific data. No one is going to cite this YouTube video in an article about solar system dynamics in a scientific journal article.
Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. They got to tour PARC with permission from Xerox's upper management and compensated Xerox with pre-IPO shares. What the Mac did with the ideas from PARC was very different from what Xerox did with the ideas out of PARC. This is also very different from Microsoft sending an employee to copy implementation details from Apple. Do go waving some out of context quote around without knowing the actual history of the situation.
The $450-range Toshibas are pieces of shit. The 15" laptops have horrible ergonomics and build quality. They feel like they're going to fall apart if you move them around too much and the keyboards are off-center from the screen which makes them horribly uncomfortable to type on. The number pad they so "thoughtfully" include isn't used nearly enough to make up for the ridiculous ergonomics. Even the smaller laptops are bulky and don't fit well in backpacks or messenger bags. The power supplies are monsters and have very fragile feeling DC connectors. If you tilt your laptop back a little too far you're likely to snap the damn thing off in the plug. They're also really unbalanced so tilting your screen back too far will cause your laptop to topple backwards.
You can (and obviously will) naysay Mac laptops but at least some thought went into their industrial design. They fit neatly into bags because they don't have oddly shaped bottom panels that catch on things. The MagSafe adapter has saved me from destroying my computer on a number of occasions, and they go to sleep and then wake up from sleep very quickly. I'll spend the extra money to get a laptop with features that actually make it nice to use. Bullet point features like a faster CPU or RAM don't mean a whole lot when I'm putting it into or pulling it out of a bag a hundred times a week.
The justification would be the same as for the nicer car, if the car feels nice and has better fit and finish it's probably worth the extra money. You interact with the fit and finish every single second you're using the thing. If it's build cheaply you feel it every time you touch it. I'll get a car with power windows and locks so I don't have to check every door handle when I get out like a rube to make sure they're all locked. I can roll all the windows down at once when it's been sitting in the sun so I don't need to crank the AC when I get in it. I'll get the more comfortable seat that's easier to adjust because I sit in it every single day.
At the beginning of June when AT&T's new data plans were announced I was a little miffed as an iPhone owner but curious what my actual usage was. I had gotten used to the idea of "unlimited" data and wondered how close to the 5GB soft cap I was getting. I figured the new 2GB cap for "unlimited" would really screw me over. On June 2nd I reset the data counter on my iPhone and checked it against at the end of the month and reading this story I checked it again. I'm only averaging about 170MB of cellular data a month. If this trend bears out I may go crazy and drop down to the 200MB plan and save myself $60 a year.
I've got WiFi at work and at home so there's a lot of browsing and e-mail checking I do that never goes over the cell network. While I'm out and not around a WiFi connection I tend to browse mobile versions of blogs and new sites. I really appreciate sites adding mobile-friendly stylesheets and such. Even over 3G browsing on a cellular connection is slow going and the full blown versions of even simple pages are between 1-2MB anymore. For instance Engadget's mobile page is only about 300K worth of resources while their normal page is between 1.5-2MB. That's a ridiculous amount of superfluous shit you've got to download to read a web page that's mostly text. It's not just the size of resources but the number of separate files (and therefore separate HTTP connections) that cause problems. Even the fastest 3G has latency of at least a quarter of a second, every separate file is a separate HTTP connection that needs to be negotiated and with everyone using CDNs and advertising affiliates often a dozen or so DNS lookups.
As an aside: if you administer a website please optimize your resources. It's not the most difficult thing in the world and it benefits everyone, not just people with smart phones. I've got a 10Mbps DSL connection and while it's not the fastest connection in the world pages don't load any faster than my 512Kbps connection from ten years ago.
Southwest is my BFF airline. I use them all the time to fly back home from the Bay Area and the prices for the service are fantastic. Last year I was able to find round-trip tickets for under $100 and even this past year I found some really cheap fares when I booked far enough in advance. I appreciate no baggage fees but when I go home to visit my family I try to pack as much as possible in my backpack. When I print my boarding pass from home I just get a ride to the airport and walk right up to the security line. I think Southwest has done about as much as they can to remove normal flying inconveniences which means I keep giving them money.
While it existed I had similar praise for United's Ted brand. I only flew on them a few times but they had good prices and no first-class section so the space savings was distributed to coach. I don't recall being more comfortable on an airplane than on my Ted flights. I'm built like a brick shithouse so normal airline seats are really cramped and I've usually got no leg room at all. Southwest's flights can be a bit cramped unless you check in early enough and snag a front row or exit row seat.
Most FOMA and Au phones in Japan run Symbian on the backend. They're not running Nokia's S60 environment but their own custom environments ad defined by DoCoMo and KDDI. There's also a handful of UIQ phones which are a Symbian base system with the UIQ environment on top. The Symbian parts of the phone are like the Linux base OS or DOS, they run the hardware and basic functionality of the phone with some other environment sitting on top.
It's not possible to solve all the world's problems. Most major problems are societal or political, not technological or financial. There's lots of food and water in the world yet people starve every day. There's a lot of roadblocks between that food and people's mouths. Those roadblocks won't magically go away because we throw money at them or postpone some other task. Putting any sort of scientific endeavor behind "solving the world's problems" will just mean those endeavors will never be accomplished.
Uh...how few is a few? People have been interacting with software developers directly for years. We used to use BBSes, Usenet, mailing lists or sometimes direct emails. Maybe vie finally hit some "old fogey" point but I refuse to be awed by communicating via 140 character messages. The only reason we kept BBS postings short is we were charged by the minute and had slow modems.
What the fuck are you complaining about? Content that goes through Apple's media framework gets hardware acceleration. The same content going through entirely different (non-QuickTime) code paths isn't hardware accelerated. Hardware acceleration isn't disabled for non-QuickTime containers, the plugins or apps that handle these containers aren't using QuickTime's H.264 decoders and therefore aren't getting any hardware acceleration. Do you think Perian and VLC get magic hardware decoding somehow?
Your comment can best be summarized as "I don't know what the shit I'm talking about but I'm cool because I'm complaining about Apple!"
I would say the juiciest targets for botnets are not the big high bandwidth server class machines but the overpowered home desktops. Part of a botnet's power comes from its distributed nature, a big multi-CPU behemoth connected to a T3 would concentrate a lot of power and bandwidth in a single place but if it is ever removed from the botnet it makes for a serious blow to the overall power of the botnet. While a handful of desktop PCs wouldn't be singularly more powerful than the behemoth combined they have a fair amount of power and the loss of any one of them doesn't meaningfully reduce the overall power of the botnet. Also being that the desktop PCs are low hanging fruit security wise it makes way more sense to concentrate more effort on them since you'll get a much better return. There's a hojillion unsecured Windows PCs connected to always-on internet connections in the world.
T-Mobile is a GSM carrier but they don't offer 3G service on the same frequency bands as AT&T and in fact a totally different band. In order to support T-Mobile's 3G a phone has to have a baseband radio that supports it. You can't just take a random phone from AT&T and use 3G on T-Mobile's network. Ask anyone with a SIM unlocked iPhone, they're stuck on EDGE with T-Mobile. So in the US you really only have the option of AT&T if you want to put a commonly available baseband in your phone.
While Macs comprise a small percentage of the overall PC market they have much larger representation in segments of the market. They're popular consumer machines and have much higher penetration in the consumer market than they have in say the business market. You'll see very few Macs used as POS terminals or in office drone cubicles. If you sell light duty consumer ink jet printers a good percentage of your target market has a Mac at home. You'll damn well be obliged to support them and even offer them unique products. When the original iMac was released several printer manufacturers released printers not only with USB ports and Mac drivers but even styled similarly to the casing of iMacs.
That doesn't make him omniscient nor immune to logic. It is entirely too late for the human race to hide. It's not our radio emissions that will give us away to advanced aliens but the natural radiation the Earth is currently reflecting into space. With our current technology we've found (and confirmed) 452 exoplanets and managed to image several. A new generation of planet hunting telescopes is beginning to come online (they're largely funding limited and not technologically limited) and they'll find and image even more exoplanets. It won't be too long before we're able to detect and get spectra from terrestrial planets around stars.
Any species with the means and desire to fly around the galaxy is going to do a survey of exoplanets before they leave home. If they're out there they've seen us already. They know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, they have a good idea of what its made of, and they know something lives here. They may not know specifically that humans live here and are armed to the teeth but they know something lives here. Damn near every inch of the Earth is covered in living organisms, the chlorophyll in spectra will make that abundantly clear. Check out NASA's Earth Observatory page. We can gather that sort of data with dedicated instruments in orbit but it's all being broadcast to the rest of the galaxy. A sufficiently advanced and large enough interferometry telescope would be able to gather the same data about the Earth from the aliens' home system.
Hiding from advanced alien species that want to pay us a visit is impossible. Radio emissions won't make any difference at all. If anything radio emissions would likely be a deterrent for a resource gathering alien species. Why bother coming here and fighting us for our resources when they can head over to the uninhabited system next door and take what the want without a fight? Even if our radio emissions aren't a deterrent they're hyper advanced aliens that can travel interstellar distances. They know the Earth is here and if they want it there's not a lot we can do besides becoming hyper advanced ourselves providing our current technology wouldn't be adequate for our defense.
The only Ares V that will fly in the next decade will be miniature hobby rockets. The Ares V exists only on paper at this point. Worse it doesn't even have a real design specced out at this point so if you said "build an Ares V starting tomorrow" it couldn't be done.
I want to see these networks unwittingly replay some of these "promoted Tweets". I want to hear Wolf Blitzer read something like the following: "and here we go to DoritosRGr8 - America is #1 LOL n I hear Obama luvs new Peppermint Ranch Doritos!" It would make my day to have a vacuous twat read some marketroid tweet on live TV.