I think the point is more: Either the signal on the cable has distinguishable 0s and 1s, or it doesn't. Which is absolutely how it works. Over long distances, you might have some interference - that EVENTUALLY will lead to a 0 and a 1 not being that different anymore, or at least severely corrupted - but frankly it's entirely different than it was with analog cables, because so long as 0 and 1 are different enough for a given situation - it doesn't matter HOW DIFFERENT they are. Making them MORE different does NOT improve signal quality.
Therefore - with HDMI, or any other digital cable - you should buy a cable that is the cheapest that will do the job. A more expensive cable will not improve signal in the situation where the cheaper cable works. A more expensive cable might have better connectors - by which I do NOT mean "plated with gold" I mean "designed in such a way that the cable does not fall apart on repeated unplugging and plugging back in" - so if that's a common use case, by all means, factor that in.
If you are in the 0.00001% case where you absolutely need more sheilding around your cable, because there is just SO MUCH damned inteference, or because your cable run just HAS to be 200 un-amped feet over copper... well then, buy the more expensive cable. But there are $300 6-foot HDMI cables out there, with "features" that don't matter one damn, and nobody should be buying them.
However, they could have just said the ppi of the screen, instead of using a marketing buzz word which quite frankly requires you accept some average ability to discriminate pixels at a distance. ppi is specific.
I would just file as "Pretending to be someone else/fake account" - specifically pretending to be someone very much like them, but who is over 13 years of age, because they agreed to the TOS (so even if they are currently representing their birth age accurately, they are still pretending to be 13 by using the site.
I understand that I'm being asked to trust the actions of "TrojanHorse.exe". Which is what UAC really does - tells the user that the application is about to do something that requires you trust the application. It doesn't tell you what that application is going to do, just asks "Hey, do you trust this? It's doing things which are outside the bounds of normal trust". So the question isn't "Can I understand the prompt" per se - because it's always a relatively simple question. More often it's a question of "Should I trust this program?". On the install end, most installers throw UAC, so it's not particularly helpful. But these days, most applications DON'T throw UAC during normal operation. So the utility of UAC is "Before I click yes to this, I should reevaluate that I trust this program, because it's asking for special permissions to do something".
Some programs are going to require admin access to do certain things. The programs that the average slashdot user might use are actually probably more likely to legitimately require elevation to run properly compared to the programs the average user SHOULD be using. So it's actually probably harder for us - given the prompt's lack of detail - to reevaluate that trust - but it's - generally speaking - more black and white in normal user land.
It's not perfect. UAC could give more details, and then us nerds could create websites saying "Oh, app such and such asking for x, y, but not z is probably reasonabl" and then users could check the list, and blindly follow it... but is that better for them? Another list to blindly follow?... I dunno. This is why ChromeOS and iOS and the like take off with users. Any admin type access is "omgbad". That will never be true on a system that you actually administrate.
(UAC has the benefit, btw - of not actually just being "Cancel or Allow" if the user faced with the prompt is a normal non-admin user. It requires elevation to an account with that access. So if Joe Sixpack has a son that knows computers - maybe Joe should be running as a non-admin account - but I'm not going to ask that every machine in the world has users shipped as non-admin accounts as default - because those users are also the admins of those machines, and will have the admin password anyway... so... it doesn't actually change anything in that scenario, it's just replacing "press ok" with "type Username/password and press OK" - which is frankly, the same thing.)
You're assuming that the OS is the biggest hole. It's not. The USER is. No amount of protection will stop malware instalation that the user initiates. If they want to see that video their friend posted on facebook of Osama being shot, they damn well will do whatever they need to. What's that? New video codecs are needed? OK download this, install as admin...
Do you seriously think the same thing couldn't happen on Linux? Or OSX? "You must download this file and type sudo blah blah blah at the console..." So long as the user has administrator access to their machine, they are the biggest attack vector. You can solve this problem in two ways. A) Walled garden. So, for instance, iOS. Because - by design - the user isn't intended to admin their iOS device - an exploit first has to be found that specificially allows the user to admin the machine as part of an attack. These vectors exist, but there aren't as easy to exploit as if the user had the ability to admin by design. B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Seriously - how many people can be convinced to follow an arbitrary list of steps in order to fix a problem that is bugging them? When Apple made the top menu bar transparent in OSX, there were many pages with a list of instructions on how to adjust this - but how many people who followed those lists REALLY understood those lists? Do you think if someone had made "OSX Transparency Util" which was actually malware and included "1) Download OSX Transparency Util" and "2) Install OSX Transparentcy Util as Admin" as the first two instructions - people would stop and thing "No... no... I shouldn't do that..."? If the util actually did what was advertised - hey - bonus! And probably not difficult to code! The "People want x, so I'll promise to deliver x, and give y" is a huge problem in the Windows world. But I don't see how Microsoft - or anyone designing any OS for home use - is supposed to stop this. Users can install user-mode malware, and users with admin access - even if they aren't admins - can probably elevate their current access, if they know an admin password, to install system-level malware.
Are you sure? I've been able to report accounts for violating TOS before... did they remove that link? (It used to be on the left side, near the bottom...)
If total retail price = 100%, 70% is what you paid for the product wholesale, and someone else takes the 30% which was your profit, then you have 0% left. You were going to have 30% left. Now you don't.
Is that really Apple's base anymore? I mean, the story a few weeks back said that 50% of the company's profit came from iPhones. The PC market has grown significantly in the recording industry, video editing industry, and photo industry - not necessarily in places where OSX was entrenched, and I'm not saying that it's taking over, but I mean, it's now just as viable to use a non-Mac to do all that work - and given that the learning curve for most of that kind of work is very application oriented, not OS oriented so it's not even that hard to move between machines anymore. Heck, with the amount of cross platform compatibility between creative apps these days, I can work on the same recording project on my WIndows machine, and merge projects from my guitar player's Mac without problem. So though there may be a base of Mac users who do creative work, I think that the situation that existed a decade ago, where most people who did creative work used macs, doesn't exist any more - and as it's probably not a large base, and they probably don't depend on it... I can pretty much see them going down this road and having that not affect their business very much. I think it would do more harm to some of the Apple authorized resellers who have built brick and morter businesses based on the creative base than it will hurt Apple.
Believe me, there are applications that can make good practical use of that much power. Go record an orchestra in 24/192 and get back to me on how nothing needs something like that.
So wait, isn't that essentially "I overreact and I am stubborn about it?" I mean, sitting on a cold stove because it might be hot means that instead of learning to discern when a stove is hot and when it is cold, you're just shutting out the situation entirely. That seems rather an immature attitude to take... I mean, there's probably some reality to that - but shouldn't that be challenged? I mean, there are probably reasons not to sit on a stove that don't involve the heat of the stove - but I mean, gosh - don't we expect people to try Linux again, even though when they tried it 10 years ago, it didn't work on their computers easily? It seems really disengenuous to demand that people take time to reevaluate only some things...
That's interesting, because it seems to me you could manage to sell Blu-Ray as an upgrade where the consumer pays the cost for that "world of hurt". After all, people currently sell blu-ray drives that include blu-ray playing software. I got mine for $100 a few years ago... so... what, apple is unable to convince their customers to pay $100 - $200 for an upgrade option on their machines? Have you seen what they've chaged for like... RAM historically?
Unless you're doing specialized tasks - like something that could use a Wacom digitizer pen - the only reason I ever wanted [and still want] one! Basically a combination between doing some Photoshop stuff directly on the Photoshop screen itself with a digitizer (with pressure sensitivity hopefully, and all that funky brush direction stuff CS5 supports) and recording automation on more than one channel at once with a multi-touch tablet - I'm pretty sure there is an IBM tablet that does both multi-touch with fingers, AND digitizer pen... even more expensive but that's what I was and am looking for in a tablet...
You CAN set up your own personal BES server if you want / have the aptitude to - there's a free version avaliable though I think you need to run your own exchange server or something so... I mean, I don't think the requirements are free - and it does mean you admining the machine yourself - but there you have it. There is an option, and it's fairly well integrated with the Blackberry platform... although it probably doesn't get you much until you have a lot of content exchange between only your server and your blackberry...
Fine, maybe the touchscreen blackberries aren't great. The bold - still great. I have friends with iPhone 4s who are planning on moving to blackberries because of how bad they feel the iPhone 4 is as a phone.
To be fair, I do actually want IRV. I thnk it's a solid enough comprimise between simplicity and representing the preference of the voters [in electing a local representative]. It also has precidence in Canada already, as it is used in, for example, leaership conventions of a few of the parties. I think - at the very least, even if it does turn out not to be satisfactory, it is better than FPP, it gets people adjusted to a preferential ballot where they can have some idea of how that ballot works... it's still going to provide decent election day coverage, which is going to be important if you want the media on board supporting it... and without the media, I honestly don't think it would manage to sway Canadians in a referrendum.
The "None-of-the-above" option could be quite interesting too... It's something I haven't really considered - so far, I haven't felt that none of the candidates represents me, so it's not something I've looked for in the elections (federal, provincial, municipal) that I've voted in.
I WOULD like to see options for electoral reform that are not dependant on each other posed as different questions on an electoral reform ballot, so that one aspect that Canadians aren't ready for doesn't sabatoge movement forward, when that aspect could be introduced at a later date.
They barely have touchscreen devices? They've had the Torch out for a while, and the Storm out for even longer. They're adding touch to the curve and the bold this year.
And people don't buy blackberries because they "don't know jack about technology." I bough my blackberry, and will continue to buy blackberry phones in the future because:
a) The battery life is wonderful. Stock battery lasts me a good solid 3-4 days between charges. That means that when I switch to a heavy use scenario for some reason, I don't have to worry that I only have half of a battery left, I can still get it to a charger before it dies.
b) Phone quality. The Blackberry is a GREAT PHONE. The sound quality is good. The sound quality - for OTHER PEOPLE I'm calling is good. When I go to speakerphone, I can easily hear the other person - and generally those other people can hear me just as well as they could when I was not on speakerphone. It is important to me that the phone I buy be a damn good phone. I have never used a Blackberry that isn't.
c) Emphasis on communication first. The entire platform is build around communication. Facebook chat notifications are well integrated into the system. Twitter notifications of all sorts are well integrated into the system. E-mail management is wonderful - and on the BIS side - easy to control. And the keyboard is great. Well placed, and designed so that it took very few weeks before I could not only type without looking at either my keyboard or my screen, but also use symbols, etc. without looking.
Those are my priorities, and Blackberry is very very good at meeting those priorities. That's typically why most of my friends also buy blackberries. They don't care about apps - they want to communicate, and if something can take the occasional picture, or whatever - that's just a bonus to the desired use case of communication. And that, I think, is pretty clearly not having to do with not knowing about technology, just having entirely different priorities.
Seems to be working fine for them in Canada... most of the high school kids I know buy blackberry as their first smartphone... and I know that CIBC just bought a lot of blackberries for one of their departments about 3 weeks ago... (Replacing pagers and older non-BB phones)
Thank goodness there are people on the internet I DON'T know that want instant runoff in Canada. I was starting to think that the only people who wanted that were a small group of people in my small circle of friends.
Also - I totally agree on free votes, I happen to be (hopefully) represented yet again this election by an MP that has voted against his party (Liberal) quite a few times when it was called for, but I think it should happen a heck of a lot more often.
Does the 360 not offer backwards compatibility? I know they stopped adding to the backwards compatibility, but as it was entirely software from the get go, and I'm pretty sure the XBOX Originals avaliable on Marketplace use the same software, shouldn't it still work on the slim? I got my second 360 right before the slim came out, and my XBOX original games still work on it... (I mean, I only have like - Halo and Halo 2, but still...)
Yes, obviously, the XBOX Live side of things doesn't work on those games... but local multiplayer and system link still worked fine last time I checked...
SVG is vector animation, no? Wouldn't it be absolutely ridiculously awful at something like replacing this style of animated gif? Surely, what you SHOULD be advocating is something like APNG?
If only there were solutions to this problem. Maybe if Microsoft ever releases a new version of Windows, there might be a way around some of this stuff. Too bad they haven't released one or two versions since XP came out.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is more: Either the signal on the cable has distinguishable 0s and 1s, or it doesn't. Which is absolutely how it works. Over long distances, you might have some interference - that EVENTUALLY will lead to a 0 and a 1 not being that different anymore, or at least severely corrupted - but frankly it's entirely different than it was with analog cables, because so long as 0 and 1 are different enough for a given situation - it doesn't matter HOW DIFFERENT they are. Making them MORE different does NOT improve signal quality. Therefore - with HDMI, or any other digital cable - you should buy a cable that is the cheapest that will do the job. A more expensive cable will not improve signal in the situation where the cheaper cable works. A more expensive cable might have better connectors - by which I do NOT mean "plated with gold" I mean "designed in such a way that the cable does not fall apart on repeated unplugging and plugging back in" - so if that's a common use case, by all means, factor that in. If you are in the 0.00001% case where you absolutely need more sheilding around your cable, because there is just SO MUCH damned inteference, or because your cable run just HAS to be 200 un-amped feet over copper... well then, buy the more expensive cable. But there are $300 6-foot HDMI cables out there, with "features" that don't matter one damn, and nobody should be buying them.
However, they could have just said the ppi of the screen, instead of using a marketing buzz word which quite frankly requires you accept some average ability to discriminate pixels at a distance. ppi is specific.
How many songs have you recorded and released on line with your crappy instruments? How many of those sold well enough to support yourself?
Congrats, you've listed the areas of their patent portfolio. What about their claims? Is anything original or innovative in their claims?
I would just file as "Pretending to be someone else/fake account" - specifically pretending to be someone very much like them, but who is over 13 years of age, because they agreed to the TOS (so even if they are currently representing their birth age accurately, they are still pretending to be 13 by using the site.
I understand that I'm being asked to trust the actions of "TrojanHorse.exe". Which is what UAC really does - tells the user that the application is about to do something that requires you trust the application. It doesn't tell you what that application is going to do, just asks "Hey, do you trust this? It's doing things which are outside the bounds of normal trust". So the question isn't "Can I understand the prompt" per se - because it's always a relatively simple question. More often it's a question of "Should I trust this program?". On the install end, most installers throw UAC, so it's not particularly helpful. But these days, most applications DON'T throw UAC during normal operation. So the utility of UAC is "Before I click yes to this, I should reevaluate that I trust this program, because it's asking for special permissions to do something".
Some programs are going to require admin access to do certain things. The programs that the average slashdot user might use are actually probably more likely to legitimately require elevation to run properly compared to the programs the average user SHOULD be using. So it's actually probably harder for us - given the prompt's lack of detail - to reevaluate that trust - but it's - generally speaking - more black and white in normal user land.
It's not perfect. UAC could give more details, and then us nerds could create websites saying "Oh, app such and such asking for x, y, but not z is probably reasonabl" and then users could check the list, and blindly follow it... but is that better for them? Another list to blindly follow?... I dunno. This is why ChromeOS and iOS and the like take off with users. Any admin type access is "omgbad". That will never be true on a system that you actually administrate.
(UAC has the benefit, btw - of not actually just being "Cancel or Allow" if the user faced with the prompt is a normal non-admin user. It requires elevation to an account with that access. So if Joe Sixpack has a son that knows computers - maybe Joe should be running as a non-admin account - but I'm not going to ask that every machine in the world has users shipped as non-admin accounts as default - because those users are also the admins of those machines, and will have the admin password anyway... so... it doesn't actually change anything in that scenario, it's just replacing "press ok" with "type Username/password and press OK" - which is frankly, the same thing.)
You're assuming that the OS is the biggest hole. It's not. The USER is. No amount of protection will stop malware instalation that the user initiates. If they want to see that video their friend posted on facebook of Osama being shot, they damn well will do whatever they need to. What's that? New video codecs are needed? OK download this, install as admin... Do you seriously think the same thing couldn't happen on Linux? Or OSX? "You must download this file and type sudo blah blah blah at the console..." So long as the user has administrator access to their machine, they are the biggest attack vector. You can solve this problem in two ways. A) Walled garden. So, for instance, iOS. Because - by design - the user isn't intended to admin their iOS device - an exploit first has to be found that specificially allows the user to admin the machine as part of an attack. These vectors exist, but there aren't as easy to exploit as if the user had the ability to admin by design. B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society. Seriously - how many people can be convinced to follow an arbitrary list of steps in order to fix a problem that is bugging them? When Apple made the top menu bar transparent in OSX, there were many pages with a list of instructions on how to adjust this - but how many people who followed those lists REALLY understood those lists? Do you think if someone had made "OSX Transparency Util" which was actually malware and included "1) Download OSX Transparency Util" and "2) Install OSX Transparentcy Util as Admin" as the first two instructions - people would stop and thing "No... no... I shouldn't do that..."? If the util actually did what was advertised - hey - bonus! And probably not difficult to code! The "People want x, so I'll promise to deliver x, and give y" is a huge problem in the Windows world. But I don't see how Microsoft - or anyone designing any OS for home use - is supposed to stop this. Users can install user-mode malware, and users with admin access - even if they aren't admins - can probably elevate their current access, if they know an admin password, to install system-level malware.
Are you sure? I've been able to report accounts for violating TOS before... did they remove that link? (It used to be on the left side, near the bottom...)
If total retail price = 100%, 70% is what you paid for the product wholesale, and someone else takes the 30% which was your profit, then you have 0% left. You were going to have 30% left. Now you don't.
Is that really Apple's base anymore? I mean, the story a few weeks back said that 50% of the company's profit came from iPhones. The PC market has grown significantly in the recording industry, video editing industry, and photo industry - not necessarily in places where OSX was entrenched, and I'm not saying that it's taking over, but I mean, it's now just as viable to use a non-Mac to do all that work - and given that the learning curve for most of that kind of work is very application oriented, not OS oriented so it's not even that hard to move between machines anymore. Heck, with the amount of cross platform compatibility between creative apps these days, I can work on the same recording project on my WIndows machine, and merge projects from my guitar player's Mac without problem. So though there may be a base of Mac users who do creative work, I think that the situation that existed a decade ago, where most people who did creative work used macs, doesn't exist any more - and as it's probably not a large base, and they probably don't depend on it... I can pretty much see them going down this road and having that not affect their business very much. I think it would do more harm to some of the Apple authorized resellers who have built brick and morter businesses based on the creative base than it will hurt Apple.
Believe me, there are applications that can make good practical use of that much power. Go record an orchestra in 24/192 and get back to me on how nothing needs something like that.
So wait, isn't that essentially "I overreact and I am stubborn about it?" I mean, sitting on a cold stove because it might be hot means that instead of learning to discern when a stove is hot and when it is cold, you're just shutting out the situation entirely. That seems rather an immature attitude to take... I mean, there's probably some reality to that - but shouldn't that be challenged? I mean, there are probably reasons not to sit on a stove that don't involve the heat of the stove - but I mean, gosh - don't we expect people to try Linux again, even though when they tried it 10 years ago, it didn't work on their computers easily? It seems really disengenuous to demand that people take time to reevaluate only some things...
That's interesting, because it seems to me you could manage to sell Blu-Ray as an upgrade where the consumer pays the cost for that "world of hurt". After all, people currently sell blu-ray drives that include blu-ray playing software. I got mine for $100 a few years ago... so... what, apple is unable to convince their customers to pay $100 - $200 for an upgrade option on their machines? Have you seen what they've chaged for like... RAM historically?
Unless you're doing specialized tasks - like something that could use a Wacom digitizer pen - the only reason I ever wanted [and still want] one! Basically a combination between doing some Photoshop stuff directly on the Photoshop screen itself with a digitizer (with pressure sensitivity hopefully, and all that funky brush direction stuff CS5 supports) and recording automation on more than one channel at once with a multi-touch tablet - I'm pretty sure there is an IBM tablet that does both multi-touch with fingers, AND digitizer pen... even more expensive but that's what I was and am looking for in a tablet...
You CAN set up your own personal BES server if you want / have the aptitude to - there's a free version avaliable though I think you need to run your own exchange server or something so... I mean, I don't think the requirements are free - and it does mean you admining the machine yourself - but there you have it. There is an option, and it's fairly well integrated with the Blackberry platform... although it probably doesn't get you much until you have a lot of content exchange between only your server and your blackberry...
Fine, maybe the touchscreen blackberries aren't great. The bold - still great. I have friends with iPhone 4s who are planning on moving to blackberries because of how bad they feel the iPhone 4 is as a phone.
To be fair, I do actually want IRV. I thnk it's a solid enough comprimise between simplicity and representing the preference of the voters [in electing a local representative]. It also has precidence in Canada already, as it is used in, for example, leaership conventions of a few of the parties. I think - at the very least, even if it does turn out not to be satisfactory, it is better than FPP, it gets people adjusted to a preferential ballot where they can have some idea of how that ballot works... it's still going to provide decent election day coverage, which is going to be important if you want the media on board supporting it... and without the media, I honestly don't think it would manage to sway Canadians in a referrendum.
The "None-of-the-above" option could be quite interesting too... It's something I haven't really considered - so far, I haven't felt that none of the candidates represents me, so it's not something I've looked for in the elections (federal, provincial, municipal) that I've voted in.
I WOULD like to see options for electoral reform that are not dependant on each other posed as different questions on an electoral reform ballot, so that one aspect that Canadians aren't ready for doesn't sabatoge movement forward, when that aspect could be introduced at a later date.
They barely have touchscreen devices? They've had the Torch out for a while, and the Storm out for even longer. They're adding touch to the curve and the bold this year. And people don't buy blackberries because they "don't know jack about technology." I bough my blackberry, and will continue to buy blackberry phones in the future because: a) The battery life is wonderful. Stock battery lasts me a good solid 3-4 days between charges. That means that when I switch to a heavy use scenario for some reason, I don't have to worry that I only have half of a battery left, I can still get it to a charger before it dies. b) Phone quality. The Blackberry is a GREAT PHONE. The sound quality is good. The sound quality - for OTHER PEOPLE I'm calling is good. When I go to speakerphone, I can easily hear the other person - and generally those other people can hear me just as well as they could when I was not on speakerphone. It is important to me that the phone I buy be a damn good phone. I have never used a Blackberry that isn't. c) Emphasis on communication first. The entire platform is build around communication. Facebook chat notifications are well integrated into the system. Twitter notifications of all sorts are well integrated into the system. E-mail management is wonderful - and on the BIS side - easy to control. And the keyboard is great. Well placed, and designed so that it took very few weeks before I could not only type without looking at either my keyboard or my screen, but also use symbols, etc. without looking. Those are my priorities, and Blackberry is very very good at meeting those priorities. That's typically why most of my friends also buy blackberries. They don't care about apps - they want to communicate, and if something can take the occasional picture, or whatever - that's just a bonus to the desired use case of communication. And that, I think, is pretty clearly not having to do with not knowing about technology, just having entirely different priorities.
Seems to be working fine for them in Canada... most of the high school kids I know buy blackberry as their first smartphone... and I know that CIBC just bought a lot of blackberries for one of their departments about 3 weeks ago... (Replacing pagers and older non-BB phones)
Thank goodness there are people on the internet I DON'T know that want instant runoff in Canada. I was starting to think that the only people who wanted that were a small group of people in my small circle of friends. Also - I totally agree on free votes, I happen to be (hopefully) represented yet again this election by an MP that has voted against his party (Liberal) quite a few times when it was called for, but I think it should happen a heck of a lot more often.
I dunno, the keyboard on my Blackberry is pretty darned decent...
Does the 360 not offer backwards compatibility? I know they stopped adding to the backwards compatibility, but as it was entirely software from the get go, and I'm pretty sure the XBOX Originals avaliable on Marketplace use the same software, shouldn't it still work on the slim? I got my second 360 right before the slim came out, and my XBOX original games still work on it... (I mean, I only have like - Halo and Halo 2, but still...) Yes, obviously, the XBOX Live side of things doesn't work on those games... but local multiplayer and system link still worked fine last time I checked...
SVG is vector animation, no? Wouldn't it be absolutely ridiculously awful at something like replacing this style of animated gif? Surely, what you SHOULD be advocating is something like APNG?
Couldn't you do that with Kinect?
If only there were solutions to this problem. Maybe if Microsoft ever releases a new version of Windows, there might be a way around some of this stuff. Too bad they haven't released one or two versions since XP came out.