My company (about 3,500 employees; ~2,000 Windows PCs, the rest Macs) is over halfway done with our move to Win7! Might have passed 75% at the end of 2013, come to think of it. I'm now in I.T.* and I think they sent out an email with the stats in December. I got my laptop upgraded to 7 in the fall, but I have a Mac for my main machine so maybe they didn't rush on me.
Also, our migration to SharePoint 2010 from eRoom and SP 2007 is coming along nicely, thanks for asking.
* I like to tell people "I moved to I.T... I'm now part of the problem.":-)
Not for everyone, YMMV, etc. You can get an old Intel Mac Mini for around $150. If you're lucky, it'll come with the original little white remote. If not, you can buy the current silver one and it'll work. You want 10.6 (Snow Leopard) because it's the last version of OS X that came with Front Row. (More than that, Front Row won't run AT ALL (grr...) on 10.7 or newer. You can also run 10.4 or 10.5 if that's what it came with and you can't get your hands on a 10.6 disc.)
Intel Minis have a) an IR sensor for the remote, b) integrated graphics (meh) with H264 decoding in hardware (yay), c) and optical digital audio out. (It might not play perfect 1080 if it's old, but all should do 720p fine, and newer ones will handle 1080.) G4 minis have no remote sensor and their 32 MB dedicated video will play back MP4-encoded files OK but it'll gag a bit on H264, even at 720x400. Obviously, avoid the original Core Solo minis (they're rare) and go for a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo. But buy one old enough that it'll run 10.6.
Load your stuff into iTunes, set the properties on the files so they sort into TV/Movies/etc, and it's easy to use. I have one: 1.66 GHz Core Duo; 2 GB RAM; piped to a TV at 720p via DVI->HDMI; uses overscan but I can live with it. My wife can use it, and my son has been able to use it since he was about 5 or 6. I put a 500 GB hard drive into one and it has hundreds of hours of captured video and ripped DVDs. You can also drag entire DVD rips (i.e., with VIDEO_TS folders) into ~/Movies/ and it'll find those too, in case you have any DVDs that you want to use with menus. (As opposed to ripping to an MP4 file.)
It's not perfect -- what is? -- but it's easy to use, stable, and flexible. When not using Front Row, I can use a laptop to VNC in and run shows from network websites, Hulu, etc. And it also serves as a DVD player. Just pop a disc in and it'll appear in Front Row. It uses very little power, is basically silent, and for extra power savings I have it set to sleep every night at 1am. Pressing 'menu' on the remote wakes it. (And you can press and hold 'play' to put it to sleep.) Uptime is measured in months. I'm very sad that Apple quit making Front Row an app (the Apple TV is just way too limited for me) and I'll stockpile these things if I have to and use them for years.
You can build apps with Flash that get CONVERTED to apps that will run on various platforms, but Adobe KILLED Flash Player for ALL mobile platforms two years ago, didn't you hear?
"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook."
"Apple just doesn't like multiplatformed competition."
Apple had very good technical reasons not to want Flash on iDevices. They told Adobe for YEARS, "give us a good version of Flash for mobile" and Adobe couldn't deliver. Every review of Flash on an Android device talked about how crappy it was. Adobe eventually gave up. No matter how you want to read bullshit like "Over the past two years, weâ(TM)ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices" the fact is they killed it, and people rarely say "this product was too successful and beloved so we stopped making it."
You jest, but I'll be happy when I can know the status of every appliance, door, and window in my house from anywhere in the world, at any time. (Actual things I'm looking forward to: having the dryer ping me when it's done; making sure the front door is locked when I'm already in bed.)
Think of the kind of computer or phone you had 5 or 10 years ago. Do you want a 5-10 year old device hard-wired into your car 5-10 years from now?
And no matter how "open" Google tries to make things, vehicle OEMs are just as bad as handset OEMs and cellular carriers and they WILL make these things suck. I know a guy who has a $100 windshield-mount GPS in his GPS-equipped car because he didn't want to pay the dealer $hundreds to update the maps in his built-in unit. So now he has a device on his windshield with a dangling cord and some dead space in his dash.
"The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme. This 48-bit address space contains potentially 2^48 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses."
2^48 / 2^24 = 2^24 so OMG NOES they're getting one-sixteen-millionth of the available space!
If 16 million other companies do this we're TOTALLY SCREWED!
(Unless I did my math wrong or there are other things I'm unaware of, which is totally possible. I'm sure someone who actually knows about networking will either correct me, or confirm that this is a total non-story. If they wanted 16M IPv4 addresses this would be a little different.)
Even if you don't want to watch it, I want the company heads to say "Sweet jeebus, that video got 93 quadrillion views!" Let them think they're in for the PR shitstorm of the century and maybe they'll make things right with this guy. (If not, I hope he sues and wins.)
They have them all (along with catalogs, etc.) and you can browse by genre, eg. Classic Space, Castle, etc. Then, hit http://reddit.com/r/lego and see what fans are doing today. There's some amazing stuff out there. Enjoy!
OK, fine. Most have SOME amount of IR filtering because yeah, you need to filter IR to get good pics in natural light, but some have more, some have less. Speaking of things that take 3 minutes to research, I just tested with my iPhone 5S: Shining a remote into the back camera, literally as close to the lens as I could get, I see nothing. With the front camera, the light is visible from over a meter away. (Phone in one hand, remote in the other.)
The OP's point was, plastic that "looks" black to humans can, in fact, let IR light through. (It's the stuff they mold onto the ends of remotes to make them look nice -- they've been doing that for over 20 years.) And many digital cameras can pick up that light. Every point and shoot I've owned, from 1.3 (in 1997) to 8MP, and many cameras on laptops and phones, including BOTH cameras on the iPhone 4, could do that trick of seeing remote lights. So yeah, all cameras might have SOME amount of IR filter, but I don't do astronomy. For me, the distinction is "enough filter to block a remote's light, or not." Or, to work with the IR illumination LED that came with my 10-year-old Sony DV camcorder.
I just tested more with my iPhone 5S. With the back camera, literally as close to the lens as I could get, I see nothing. With the front camera, the lights are visible from over a meter away. (Phone in one hand, remote in the other.)
My first digital camera was a 1.3MP unit in 1997. The last point-and-shoot I got was an 8MP one about 4 years ago. Those, and all in between, showed IR light as I describe. As did all iPhones before the 4S.
So all digital cameras might have *some* IR filtering, but some much more than others. To me, "IR filter" means does it filter out just enough to make pics look good in natural light, or do they also filter out strong IR beams.
Anyway, the OP's point was, plastic that "looks" black to humans can, in fact, let IR light through. (It's the stuff they mold onto the ends of remotes to make them look nice -- they've been doing that for over 20 years.) And many digital cameras can pick up that light. THAT is what we are discussing here.
Many -- probably most -- digital cameras do not have IR filtering. All you need is a remote control to test. Turn on your camera, point the remote at the lens, and press a button on the remote. On the iPhone 5S, you can point the remote at the main camera and you won't see its light, but if you point it at the front camera, you will. I've been using digital cameras to test remotes and their batteries for years. Here is a pic I just took with the built-in camera on a 2011 MacBook Pro.
Also, any DV camera (remember those?) with "night mode" depends on that. Put them into night mode and a bright IR LED lights up the scene, letting the camera "see" in perfect (human) darkness.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be hard on this "Taco" guy... I think he's new here.
Good idea, but it won't work for me, because my last name starts with A, so they'd get me early on.
123465 FTW!
My company (about 3,500 employees; ~2,000 Windows PCs, the rest Macs) is over halfway done with our move to Win7! Might have passed 75% at the end of 2013, come to think of it. I'm now in I.T.* and I think they sent out an email with the stats in December. I got my laptop upgraded to 7 in the fall, but I have a Mac for my main machine so maybe they didn't rush on me.
Also, our migration to SharePoint 2010 from eRoom and SP 2007 is coming along nicely, thanks for asking.
* I like to tell people "I moved to I.T... I'm now part of the problem." :-)
Not for everyone, YMMV, etc. You can get an old Intel Mac Mini for around $150. If you're lucky, it'll come with the original little white remote. If not, you can buy the current silver one and it'll work. You want 10.6 (Snow Leopard) because it's the last version of OS X that came with Front Row. (More than that, Front Row won't run AT ALL (grr...) on 10.7 or newer. You can also run 10.4 or 10.5 if that's what it came with and you can't get your hands on a 10.6 disc.)
Intel Minis have a) an IR sensor for the remote, b) integrated graphics (meh) with H264 decoding in hardware (yay), c) and optical digital audio out. (It might not play perfect 1080 if it's old, but all should do 720p fine, and newer ones will handle 1080.) G4 minis have no remote sensor and their 32 MB dedicated video will play back MP4-encoded files OK but it'll gag a bit on H264, even at 720x400. Obviously, avoid the original Core Solo minis (they're rare) and go for a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo. But buy one old enough that it'll run 10.6.
Load your stuff into iTunes, set the properties on the files so they sort into TV/Movies/etc, and it's easy to use. I have one: 1.66 GHz Core Duo; 2 GB RAM; piped to a TV at 720p via DVI->HDMI; uses overscan but I can live with it. My wife can use it, and my son has been able to use it since he was about 5 or 6. I put a 500 GB hard drive into one and it has hundreds of hours of captured video and ripped DVDs. You can also drag entire DVD rips (i.e., with VIDEO_TS folders) into ~/Movies/ and it'll find those too, in case you have any DVDs that you want to use with menus. (As opposed to ripping to an MP4 file.)
It's not perfect -- what is? -- but it's easy to use, stable, and flexible. When not using Front Row, I can use a laptop to VNC in and run shows from network websites, Hulu, etc. And it also serves as a DVD player. Just pop a disc in and it'll appear in Front Row. It uses very little power, is basically silent, and for extra power savings I have it set to sleep every night at 1am. Pressing 'menu' on the remote wakes it. (And you can press and hold 'play' to put it to sleep.) Uptime is measured in months. I'm very sad that Apple quit making Front Row an app (the Apple TV is just way too limited for me) and I'll stockpile these things if I have to and use them for years.
Code name: Ouija
You can build apps with Flash that get CONVERTED to apps that will run on various platforms, but Adobe KILLED Flash Player for ALL mobile platforms two years ago, didn't you hear?
"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook."
November 9, 2011 - http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html
"Apple just doesn't like multiplatformed competition."
Apple had very good technical reasons not to want Flash on iDevices. They told Adobe for YEARS, "give us a good version of Flash for mobile" and Adobe couldn't deliver. Every review of Flash on an Android device talked about how crappy it was. Adobe eventually gave up. No matter how you want to read bullshit like "Over the past two years, weâ(TM)ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices" the fact is they killed it, and people rarely say "this product was too successful and beloved so we stopped making it."
You jest, but I'll be happy when I can know the status of every appliance, door, and window in my house from anywhere in the world, at any time. (Actual things I'm looking forward to: having the dryer ping me when it's done; making sure the front door is locked when I'm already in bed.)
Think of the kind of computer or phone you had 5 or 10 years ago. Do you want a 5-10 year old device hard-wired into your car 5-10 years from now?
And no matter how "open" Google tries to make things, vehicle OEMs are just as bad as handset OEMs and cellular carriers and they WILL make these things suck. I know a guy who has a $100 windshield-mount GPS in his GPS-equipped car because he didn't want to pay the dealer $hundreds to update the maps in his built-in unit. So now he has a device on his windshield with a dangling cord and some dead space in his dash.
"The original IEEE 802 MAC address comes from the original Xerox Ethernet addressing scheme. This 48-bit address space contains potentially 2^48 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
2^48 / 2^24 = 2^24 so OMG NOES they're getting one-sixteen-millionth of the available space!
If 16 million other companies do this we're TOTALLY SCREWED!
(Unless I did my math wrong or there are other things I'm unaware of, which is totally possible. I'm sure someone who actually knows about networking will either correct me, or confirm that this is a total non-story. If they wanted 16M IPv4 addresses this would be a little different.)
Currently at +4 for that; I hope you make it to +5. But next time, don't forget the "Puts On Sunglasses" and the "YEEEEAAAHHH". :-)
> Software running that looks at, and allows unsigned
> executable code to be executed from, a USB storage
> device without explicit authorisation.
They need to start making ATMs with Android or iOS.
The application 'ATPwn' wants access to your:
- Contacts
- Photos
- Money
Allow? Yes/No
Even if you don't want to watch it, I want the company heads to say "Sweet jeebus, that video got 93 quadrillion views!" Let them think they're in for the PR shitstorm of the century and maybe they'll make things right with this guy. (If not, I hope he sues and wins.)
Bonus: Click the "Like" button.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyLReexjEco
PS: The video is actually pretty good.
> copy your last comments into this story.
My comments? Fuck that. I'm stealing some +5s from that thread.
For instructions, go to http://peeron.com/
They have them all (along with catalogs, etc.) and you can browse by genre, eg. Classic Space, Castle, etc. Then, hit http://reddit.com/r/lego and see what fans are doing today. There's some amazing stuff out there. Enjoy!
> They would have to dig it out from above
Or, leave it where it is for a future TBM to run into.
Yup. Chrome 31 on a Mac.
Mac != iOS.
OK, fine. Most have SOME amount of IR filtering because yeah, you need to filter IR to get good pics in natural light, but some have more, some have less. Speaking of things that take 3 minutes to research, I just tested with my iPhone 5S: Shining a remote into the back camera, literally as close to the lens as I could get, I see nothing. With the front camera, the light is visible from over a meter away. (Phone in one hand, remote in the other.)
The OP's point was, plastic that "looks" black to humans can, in fact, let IR light through. (It's the stuff they mold onto the ends of remotes to make them look nice -- they've been doing that for over 20 years.) And many digital cameras can pick up that light. Every point and shoot I've owned, from 1.3 (in 1997) to 8MP, and many cameras on laptops and phones, including BOTH cameras on the iPhone 4, could do that trick of seeing remote lights. So yeah, all cameras might have SOME amount of IR filter, but I don't do astronomy. For me, the distinction is "enough filter to block a remote's light, or not." Or, to work with the IR illumination LED that came with my 10-year-old Sony DV camcorder.
I just tested more with my iPhone 5S. With the back camera, literally as close to the lens as I could get, I see nothing. With the front camera, the lights are visible from over a meter away. (Phone in one hand, remote in the other.)
My first digital camera was a 1.3MP unit in 1997. The last point-and-shoot I got was an 8MP one about 4 years ago. Those, and all in between, showed IR light as I describe. As did all iPhones before the 4S.
So all digital cameras might have *some* IR filtering, but some much more than others. To me, "IR filter" means does it filter out just enough to make pics look good in natural light, or do they also filter out strong IR beams.
Anyway, the OP's point was, plastic that "looks" black to humans can, in fact, let IR light through. (It's the stuff they mold onto the ends of remotes to make them look nice -- they've been doing that for over 20 years.) And many digital cameras can pick up that light. THAT is what we are discussing here.
"'There is always this desire to make a Swiss Army knife"
Like this guy?
Before I realized the significance of the hyphen, my brain briefly parsed that sentence like "An armed UBR-1..."
Many -- probably most -- digital cameras do not have IR filtering. All you need is a remote control to test. Turn on your camera, point the remote at the lens, and press a button on the remote. On the iPhone 5S, you can point the remote at the main camera and you won't see its light, but if you point it at the front camera, you will. I've been using digital cameras to test remotes and their batteries for years. Here is a pic I just took with the built-in camera on a 2011 MacBook Pro.
Also, any DV camera (remember those?) with "night mode" depends on that. Put them into night mode and a bright IR LED lights up the scene, letting the camera "see" in perfect (human) darkness.
Runs perfectly on a Mac. (10.8)
Yeah. Everyone knows (I thought) that the USSR had a good early lead.
Image that sums it up nicely: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43907-Here-s-an-infographic-that-shows-the-space-race-in-it-s-historical-context
> Citation needed
If you need a Citation, you can pick one up for a grand or two.
Let me go back to the last discussion we had here about Apple's lightning connectors and find all the people who said a reversible connector was too difficult to manufacture, expensive, and fragile for anything but overpriced shiny hipster fanboi Apple gear...
Also, olbig. XKCD