Not to be too pedantic, but you'd most likely be violating the terms of service of however you are getting on the internet, so while not maybe a civil offense in any country, you'd risk losing your connectivity..
I suspect this is the same reason that "progress bars" are always so crappy and inaccurate. The higher-paid (and generally high quality) programmers get set onto the hard problems like "best" vs "strongest" cell tower choosing. And the low man on the pole gets the "show the bars right" problem.. In this case, after low man wrote the code a while ago, no one went back to see if it was done right. There's your problem right there.
I bought one of the new T410s models with switchable graphics between nvidia and onboard GPU's. Seemed like a cool idea. I've owned it for a month and the nvidia chip starts failing due to heat - my laptop has shut down (no bluescreen just power off) due to overheating a few times. Just 15 minutes of use of the nvidia card causes overheating. I sent it in for repair - but I'm not really sure they can fix it - probably design problems.
So I definitely agree with previous posters - discrete gpu's (at least nvidia's) on laptops is not a great option..
If anyone has thoughts on how to convince lenovo to take their under-designed laptop back and credit me, I'd love to hear experiences on that..
Yeah double plus on this comment. It's interesting also that Microsoft at first threatened to shut down XDA's work in this area on the grounds that it was copyright violation, and they realized that this crew was basically an outside engineering force developing solutions and supporting customers for them.
I wonder if any of the radio and OS work that's happened in XDA has ever made it back into MS core?
Yeah - this is public theater. The trial lawyers demonstrate to shareholders that the company is on solid ground. The other team of lawyers work behind the scenes to hammer out cross-licensing. At some point the trial lawyers wink at the judge and he magnanimously declares: "You parties should work out a cross licensing agreement." Two days later they present one to the judge and the newspapers print the "news" and we then we start yet another thread on on/. about software patents. This is getting old.
"Clean" speed is really different from stepped on junk that's sold on the street corner. Just consider the contents. A lot of "crank" (as stepped on meth is sometimes called) has rat poison and/or bleach in it to give you a "burn" that makes it feel more like a pure drug. Plus talc or chalk to make the weight to price more favorable for dealers. Pure lab produced speed (whatever variations) are going to treat you a lot better in so many ways.
Apple went down this road in the 80's and got demolished by the DOS/Windows hegemony. I wonder if the market forces are different enough now to yield a different outcome? Desktops are way more irrelevant in the market with so many other choices like phones, readers, pads now and those new segments growing very rapidly.. So maybe it'll work out ok for Jobs the second time around.
I personally think he's nuts to try to close out the Mac OSX platform but he's running things over there.
For the real question is what percent of market apps abuse this capability? It's one thing to have the capability (and the installer is pretty clear about what an app can and can't do when you first install it), but it's another to have a bunch of spyware apps out there abusing users' data. My guess is this story is Apple FUD and that the market is working just fine with lots of well-behaved apps doing useful things with calling data, email and text capabilities.
I found these two docs pretty much cleared things up for me -- assuming you can program, they hopefully will for you too. Core concept: threaded messaging with real-time, programmatic interfaces (aka gadgets).
I have an android and there's a nice app called TimedWireless that puts my phone into airplane mode at night and wakes it up in the morning. I'm sure there's an app for that with the iphone..
If you are on an unlimited plan already, I don't think AT&T is going to make you switch to the 2GB cap plan. The 2GB cap is only for new customers and customers who want to change plans (or phones).. At least *I think* that's how it works.
Theoretically you are probably right but not in practice - I have personal experience (warning N-size one story coming up): My folks live up in a remote area where there is no cell service. If you take a cell phone up there and leave it on, the battery will get drained very rapidly (~ 8 hours). I think it's probably b/c it's hearing very distance signals and trying to connect and failing at max transmit power again and again. If you turn the radio off of course the power drain becomes very slow. Once you drive into town where there is signal, the battery drain becomes more typical.
These are great questions and I've never heard anyone provide a sensible answer.
My only reflection is that internet advertisers were bottom dwellers at the start (getting their start spamming usenet). So the culture comes from that, rather than Madison Ave (which while not the nicest guys in the world, have some pretense of propriety).
Now that Madison Ave is heavily involved in web ads, I think they are "learning how to do web" from the bottom dwellers, so we have no change in web ad behavior even though the clientele are higher grade than in the past.
It's the only explanation I can think of -- I'll be curious if anyone else has thoughts on this.
They can't be illegal b/c they have (and are used in) valid industrial processes. They may be restricted, and I'm sure there are regulations that limit how they are sold (for example, an earlier poster cited a rule that prevents high mW lasers from being sold as "laser pointers").
To add a second data point to your collection: I use Firefox on a Lenovo laptop with basically a factory installation/config. This update did install the search bar into FF for me.
My recently purchased T410s from Lenovo apparently came with this pre-installed. I have no idea about it or what it does b/c I never run IE (I've only opened it once to download firefox). So when I saw a search bar enhancement from MS in the recent updates I accepted it b/c it seemed to relate only to IE. But now I'm stuck with this in FF (no FF add-on GUI way to delete it). So I'm fairly geeky and I ended up with this search bar in Firefox that I didn't want.
This isn't old news. This happened for me with the most recent Windows 7 update set. I was notified of the updates this week. I saw this "search enhancement" update and it appeared to only affect IE so I accepted it. Now I'm stuck with this search add-on in Firefox. I disabled it but it's not possible to uninstall it from the FF add-on GUI. Probably if I delete some folders somewhere it will disappear but googling didn't turn up much when I searched -- mostly referring to older updates that sound similar -- possibly what you're referring to as well.
I'm one of those users. I recently bought a new laptop and who knows what the OEM put in IE because I never open IE. I was pissed when I saw an uninvited add-on in Firefox. A little research determined that it was related to this microsoft search update. But it's not possible uninstall it via the Firefox add-on GUI. So I disabled it and presumably someone will tell me the right way to get rid of it soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be too pedantic, but you'd most likely be violating the terms of service of however you are getting on the internet, so while not maybe a civil offense in any country, you'd risk losing your connectivity..
Would you like to place a bet on this?
http://www.longbets.org/
Put one up and post back here if you seriously think that will happen next year.
Great post. In addition to those references, if someone is actually implementing SQL, I've found that Celko's SQL for Smarties is a great way to develop skills to turn good design into effective code.. http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Celkos-SQL-Smarties-Programming/dp/1558605762
Just an addendum to your excellent post..
I suspect this is the same reason that "progress bars" are always so crappy and inaccurate. The higher-paid (and generally high quality) programmers get set onto the hard problems like "best" vs "strongest" cell tower choosing. And the low man on the pole gets the "show the bars right" problem.. In this case, after low man wrote the code a while ago, no one went back to see if it was done right. There's your problem right there.
I bought one of the new T410s models with switchable graphics between nvidia and onboard GPU's. Seemed like a cool idea. I've owned it for a month and the nvidia chip starts failing due to heat - my laptop has shut down (no bluescreen just power off) due to overheating a few times. Just 15 minutes of use of the nvidia card causes overheating. I sent it in for repair - but I'm not really sure they can fix it - probably design problems.
So I definitely agree with previous posters - discrete gpu's (at least nvidia's) on laptops is not a great option..
If anyone has thoughts on how to convince lenovo to take their under-designed laptop back and credit me, I'd love to hear experiences on that..
Yeah double plus on this comment. It's interesting also that Microsoft at first threatened to shut down XDA's work in this area on the grounds that it was copyright violation, and they realized that this crew was basically an outside engineering force developing solutions and supporting customers for them.
I wonder if any of the radio and OS work that's happened in XDA has ever made it back into MS core?
Yeah - this is public theater. The trial lawyers demonstrate to shareholders that the company is on solid ground. The other team of lawyers work behind the scenes to hammer out cross-licensing. At some point the trial lawyers wink at the judge and he magnanimously declares: "You parties should work out a cross licensing agreement." Two days later they present one to the judge and the newspapers print the "news" and we then we start yet another thread on on /. about software patents. This is getting old.
"Clean" speed is really different from stepped on junk that's sold on the street corner. Just consider the contents. A lot of "crank" (as stepped on meth is sometimes called) has rat poison and/or bleach in it to give you a "burn" that makes it feel more like a pure drug. Plus talc or chalk to make the weight to price more favorable for dealers. Pure lab produced speed (whatever variations) are going to treat you a lot better in so many ways.
Honest question here: would you consider iPad/iPod/iPhone platforms to be DRM-locked?
Apple went down this road in the 80's and got demolished by the DOS/Windows hegemony. I wonder if the market forces are different enough now to yield a different outcome? Desktops are way more irrelevant in the market with so many other choices like phones, readers, pads now and those new segments growing very rapidly.. So maybe it'll work out ok for Jobs the second time around.
I personally think he's nuts to try to close out the Mac OSX platform but he's running things over there.
For the real question is what percent of market apps abuse this capability? It's one thing to have the capability (and the installer is pretty clear about what an app can and can't do when you first install it), but it's another to have a bunch of spyware apps out there abusing users' data. My guess is this story is Apple FUD and that the market is working just fine with lots of well-behaved apps doing useful things with calling data, email and text capabilities.
Yes, there's really no info that can be shrunk into 140 chars. You could learn calculus that way but what's the point? http://bit.ly/9tE4fa
API overview: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html
Design principles: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/designprinciples.html
I found these two docs pretty much cleared things up for me -- assuming you can program, they hopefully will for you too. Core concept: threaded messaging with real-time, programmatic interfaces (aka gadgets).
Put your challenge on longbets.org and see if anyone bites! Your bet is on the short term for the site, but still a good bet!
I have an android and there's a nice app called TimedWireless that puts my phone into airplane mode at night and wakes it up in the morning. I'm sure there's an app for that with the iphone..
If you are on an unlimited plan already, I don't think AT&T is going to make you switch to the 2GB cap plan. The 2GB cap is only for new customers and customers who want to change plans (or phones).. At least *I think* that's how it works.
Theoretically you are probably right but not in practice - I have personal experience (warning N-size one story coming up): My folks live up in a remote area where there is no cell service. If you take a cell phone up there and leave it on, the battery will get drained very rapidly (~ 8 hours). I think it's probably b/c it's hearing very distance signals and trying to connect and failing at max transmit power again and again. If you turn the radio off of course the power drain becomes very slow. Once you drive into town where there is signal, the battery drain becomes more typical.
These are great questions and I've never heard anyone provide a sensible answer.
My only reflection is that internet advertisers were bottom dwellers at the start (getting their start spamming usenet). So the culture comes from that, rather than Madison Ave (which while not the nicest guys in the world, have some pretense of propriety).
Now that Madison Ave is heavily involved in web ads, I think they are "learning how to do web" from the bottom dwellers, so we have no change in web ad behavior even though the clientele are higher grade than in the past.
It's the only explanation I can think of -- I'll be curious if anyone else has thoughts on this.
They can't be illegal b/c they have (and are used in) valid industrial processes. They may be restricted, and I'm sure there are regulations that limit how they are sold (for example, an earlier poster cited a rule that prevents high mW lasers from being sold as "laser pointers").
Hear hear! Well said amigo. Someone mod P up please.
I have a link sitting deep in my bookmarks for a consumer grade throat mic:
www.bluekangarootechnologies.com
I tried visiting the site just now and it's down but maybe just for maintenance. Google still knows about the site, so probably they're still alive..
To add a second data point to your collection: I use Firefox on a Lenovo laptop with basically a factory installation/config. This update did install the search bar into FF for me.
My recently purchased T410s from Lenovo apparently came with this pre-installed. I have no idea about it or what it does b/c I never run IE (I've only opened it once to download firefox). So when I saw a search bar enhancement from MS in the recent updates I accepted it b/c it seemed to relate only to IE. But now I'm stuck with this in FF (no FF add-on GUI way to delete it). So I'm fairly geeky and I ended up with this search bar in Firefox that I didn't want.
This isn't old news. This happened for me with the most recent Windows 7 update set. I was notified of the updates this week. I saw this "search enhancement" update and it appeared to only affect IE so I accepted it. Now I'm stuck with this search add-on in Firefox. I disabled it but it's not possible to uninstall it from the FF add-on GUI. Probably if I delete some folders somewhere it will disappear but googling didn't turn up much when I searched -- mostly referring to older updates that sound similar -- possibly what you're referring to as well.
I'm one of those users. I recently bought a new laptop and who knows what the OEM put in IE because I never open IE. I was pissed when I saw an uninvited add-on in Firefox. A little research determined that it was related to this microsoft search update. But it's not possible uninstall it via the Firefox add-on GUI. So I disabled it and presumably someone will tell me the right way to get rid of it soon.