Well the first iteration of HDMI was like the first round of Plug & Pray, because either it worked or you were screwed. My TV worked fine with a direct HDMI cable, via my reciever? No go, timing issues in the HDCP handshake. Which I of course only got to know about after I had bought the receiver, which was much later. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
Ah yes, but neither DVI graphics cards nor DVI monitors required HDCP so it would always downgrade but then refuse to play protected content. HDMI has always had HDCP, it is required. So they are getting rid of the last unencrypted connections, of course HDCP is broken but still. Now you will no longer get a picture on an unlicensed device without being a criminal under the DMCA.
Honestly, if you do the things you do you've decided that the perks outweigh the disadvantages. If you decide that gorging at McDonald's is better than eating a salad, that's a choice. If you decide a night out on the down getting seriously drunk or high is worth it, it's a choice. As long as I've paid plenty money in beer taxes and you can probably chop a year or two off my pensions relative to the healthy guys to cover any alcohol related injury or illness, what business is it to anyone else if I choose to poison myself? Because, yeah that's the toxic part of intoxication and in mild forms it's very comfortable. And I still expect good medical treatment because I have paid for that extra risk, least that's the way I feel it works here in Norway with high alcohol tax and universal healthcare. Same with smokers, they surely pay more than the cost as there's a real witch hunt out for them. They don't tax drugs because they're illegal and McDonald's because they haven't found a good way, but I'm sure they want to. Oh yes, and I'm aware that's not entirely true that it's my own business since you have things like a few people getting aggressive and violent when drunk, but the health effects are my business.
People with bad genes though, they can't help it. They never had that choice, they were born with the choice already made for them. Maybe a few things you can help with - like more intense cancer checks if you know you're predisposed for cancer - but I'd say the far more interesting part would be looking for cures, before you even get so far as the disease. Oh you're predisposed to cancer, here's a shot of retrovirus that will change those genes before it even gets so far. Or better yet, if we find people with immunities or other good qualities we can use that almost like a vaccine. Natural selection has practically no effect when you're past the age people get kids, if we want to live longer and healthier we'll probably have to manipulate our bodies to do that ourselves. And don't give me anything about my genes being who I am, if you offer me a gene-altering drug so that'll I never get Alzheimer's and end my life like a mindless zombie I'd take it. Feel free to refuse, I hear there's people that won't even take blood transplants and I respect that, just don't expect me to agree with them.
A tribe does not need privacy because everybody in the tribe depends on each other for survival, you can't depend on those you don't trust, you can't trust those you do not know, you cannot know those who are private. (...) Civilization is a cold bitch, and it is hard to feel like an accepted member, much easier with a clique of friends that you wish to share everything with.
Tribes don't need privacy, people do. Ask people that have moved from a small place where everybody knows everybody and many of them absolutely hated it, anything you did that was at odds with the community they stuck their noses in. It doesn't mean people like it, it means they got no alternatives and for the same reason they weren't going to start a conflict or badmouth it and make everything worse. It's the same reason more people don't break out of sects, it's everything and everyone they know.
Yes, "civilization" as such is cold and everyone feels like belonging somewhere. But having thousands of people within minutes from my house means I got thousands of cliques and communities and clubs and groups and activities to make those friends. If you got ten good friends I doubt it matters if there lives a hundred or a thousand or a million people nearby who are not your friends. Same as the Internet, there's a billion people here I don't know but I only care about the ones I do know or would like to know.
There is no real positive here. This is just like sending naked photos of yourself to your bf/gf. It makes no damn sense to *give* someone blackmail material on you that can be copied easily and posted for the whole world to see if they get pissed at you.
You can't think of a single positive benefit of getting your partner sexually aroused looking at you? You don't think there's any relationship saved, intensified or even started by receiving or having erotic pictures of your partner? Long-distance relationships, temporary absences, love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words? People have done that since the 19th century you know, shortly since they invented photography. Okay be the cynic and say the benefits don't outweigh the risks, particularly now that it can go all over the Internet but you'd be pretty blind to not see how it could help in courting women.
That's true but I've been up in aircraft at night flying over roads where I know the streetlights definitively don't send light directly upwards, yet the road is still very easy to see. Okay some cities are more extreme than others but "normal" cities are going to emit a lot of light unless you do something drastic. And it doesn't really take a lot of lighting before your night vision fades away. I'm a bit more there that if you're going to do it, do it proper and go to some remote area. It's not that hard to find in most countries.
Surely the climate doesn't care about "per capita" output but only the total output.
Of course not. But to put it bluntly, I got just as much right to pollute the planet as you do. If you get to cause 1kg CO2 emissions, so should I. What, you want one quota per country so if the US decided to split the 50 states into 50 countries, they should get 50 times the quota? Or should we impose the same limit on the US with 300 million people as my country with 5 million people? Absurd. One person - be he American, Indian, Chinese or something else - should be just as good as another. Any person who thinks an American should have the right to pollute ten times as much as an Indian simply because he's American and the Indian is Indian is saying there's first and second class humans.
Sure, if all the rest of us don't give a fuck until we hit American levels we'll have deserts all the way to the south pole, so we all try to pitch in. But it's pretty hard to get any buy-in for that when the worst polluter of the lot is using brain dead arguments to argue that 1.3 billion people is polluting more than 300 million people, so the 300 don't have to do anything. The implied logic is that you should pollute early and lots so you get rewarded with a high quota. I more than understand the countries that say fuck it, let's live just like the Americans do and if we all burn we'll all burn together. You do realize that you're asking other countries to cap their lifestyle and preserve the environment so you can continue with your polluting and wasteful one right?
Because unlike Linux where/home doesn't need to be on the same disk as / and so the used and free disk space doesn't add up from the sub-directories, on Windows you have disks like top-level boxes. Everything that starts with C: is on the physical disk C: in a normal setup. If you're running out of space in box C:, you can add another box D: and move stuff over - calling it / would lose any such logic. Of course we could use any form of alias, that's why we have disk labels but we wouldn't want to reference the label or we couldn't change it. This is pretty much the same issue as the/dev/disk/by-{id|uuid|sdX}, are you looking to identify the physical disk, the file system or the connector/boot order. Nothing is perfect, might as well assign them a semi-arbitrary letter. I've certainly not had an issue with it even with upwards of 10 disks in a system.
Well, I doubt the Sony executives would agree it was a mistake. They won the format war against HD DVD and Sony has fingers in plenty pies related to BluRay licensing, production of BluRay players, BluRay discs and various related products. Did it hurt them in the competition against the xbox? Sure. But it brought volume both on the supply side and the customer side, it was crucial to their victory. It's going to be the dominant high def format for decades before most people have the bandwidth to download HD online. They're actually still ahead of the PC market where almost all physical games come on DVDs, even if that requires several discs.
I suspect the next generation of consoles - when it ever arrives and I only count the Wii U as a half-gen compared to what a xbox720/PS4 wll be - will last even much longer than this one and future proofing will matter more in the long run. For those of us that have been watching graphics card reviews they're starting to run out of resolutions and AA settings that really challenge the high end cards, you need ultra quality and enthusiast shaders (that provide 2% better graphics for 20% performance penalty) at 2560x1600 to differentiate them. Driving a single 1920x1080 display as is what 99.9% of consoles will do just isn't that big a challenge anymore, even for the watered down versions we find in consoles.
Of course you can blame the consoles for games not pushing the hardware enough, but I think you're just as much hitting a level of diminishing return and increasing work in actually making it look realistic in HD. For example in Skyrim (on PC) I still experienced the "dead corpse sliding down the road like a glider" effect and it only looks more ridiculous with more detail, not less. Even if they had enough speed for that it should be a roll/tumble effect, not like a person on a luge going down an icy hill. It's just one of a million things you could fix with more developer time but not with more hardware. And I'd say that's true for most every graphical issue I see nowadays.
Somehow I don't see either Apple, Sony nor Microsoft really threatening the core audience of Nintendo, it's still the console I'd buy for a kid where Super Mario Galaxy is an age-appropriate game. Backed themselves into a corner? I'd say the Wii was a huge unnatural success in markets Nintendo would never usually reach, hell it still has a lead of 30 million units sold on both the PS3 and XBox360 (95 vs 60 vs 65). If I'm trying to think age brackets I'd guess 30 vs 60 vs 60 would be more what I'm thinking. I don't think they'll make another monster hit like that, the controller was something extremely unique and innovative in 2006 to get people off their chairs and into action but with Kinect and motion analyzing cameras that market is pretty saturated and you can't expect them to pull off something like that in each generation.
Look at any other agreement and the terms are known up front, even if in legalese.
Trying calling up an airline and ordering a ticket. Are you going to hear the full terms & conditions covering your flight? No. I do remember reading a Supreme Court decision regarding EULAs and they discussed this at length and made quite a few examples that customers were bound to some form of agreement without actually having it presented to them. As long as the terms fell under what was customary for the product in question, they did not fundamentally have a problem with this. And there you don't get to say "I don't agree to your terms and conditions, cancel my ticket and issue me a full refund" later either. Basically, the courts are divided and it can go both ways.
I don't think you'd win anything this way, if it conclusively was decided that EULAs were invalid because they were presented after the fact, then very soon webshops would include a EULA link and enforce that you click "Agree and add to cart" instead of just "Add to cart". Nobody would bother to read tens of pages of legalese anyway but hey, the terms were offered up front. If you really wanted to solve this problem of obnoxious licenses, I think you'd have to make some kind of law that if it acts, talks and walks like a sale it's a sale like with a book where you don't get to write "license-like-a-sale plus strings attached minus consumer rights" licenses.
This is a nice idea, but surely the condition of the device matters too? I'm sure a cracked iPhone 4S wouldn't be worth as much as one in mint condition.
That's what I was thinking too, the glass might be cracked, the display broken but it could still "work" for this machine. Perhaps they will take photos as well and compare against a reference? If you control the camera, lighting, distance and have an exact model reference picture you should be able to see most kinds of visual damage...
That repeal was required in order to sustain the war efforts that the republicans support. Eventually the armed services would have been too tapped out without allowing openly homosexual troops to serve.
Lol what? Around 5% or so is gay/bisexual and that doesn't count those already serving without being open about it. They employ 1.5 million people and never in the last 10 years have they lost even 0,1% of that. Maybe if the US was in the middle of WWII your post could have made slightly more sense, but they're neither running out of bodies nor would abolishing DADT provide more than a few percent increase. But keep on dreaming that it would have happened without "President Lawnchair"...
You're trying to set up one of those hotel style "Welcome to our network give us all your money to see the internet" pages to let only your sunday school students reach the internet?
Most hotels I've been to in the last years in the Nordic countries have had WiFi included in the room charge, but they've all required a login all the same. I assume it's a) so that "everyone else" in nearby buildings can't connect and b) maybe related to some kind of billing between the hotel chain and the wifi provider. It's all a matter of how much management you need, because surely at least one of the patrons is there both for sunday school and for basketball practice and will leak a fixed key to everyone and their dog. Personal accounts means lots of management overhead. I assume he's looking for a simple way to give ad hoc access to the people attending the sunday school, something like a ticketing machine that'll give you a login valid for X hours. Like, you must be in the physical areas for sunday school to get a wifi login or a simple printout the teacher can bring to class that's good for the class(es) that day.
Yes, in theory that is an option. But unless you get the legal system to play along with a rubber stamp IP equals person and three strikes you're out then that's not going to get very far. And there's many countries that won't accept that kind of spray-and-pray lawsuits. The second part is damages, unlike the US that likes to award millions of dollars in awards you can for example see that the TPB leaders were convicted to pay about 1.5 million USD eavch - same as one Thomas Rasset for sharing 24 songs. Neither of those is AFAIK final though, but they're not going to get a statutory $750-150000/song in the rest of the world. In short, it just won't scale because it won't even cover the cost and raising the fines to a level where it would is publicly unacceptable.
It's all but impossible to invoke fear in a guerrilla, because if you could hit on them you would and plain old kill them. The only way you could invoke fear is through the civilian population like your "bomb their cities" suggestion. That is assuming (1) they care about the civilians and (2) that you can keep it up longer and be uglier than they can.
I don't think the first condition is true, they're crazy religious fanatics and anyone that isn't one of them isn't worth much. They've not had any problems going into markets and blowing up their own civilian populations, why should they be intimidated by the US doing the same? In fact, it's likely to aid recruitment as people feel they must pick a side or get blown to bits.
I don't think the second part is true either, the last time the US tried it was soaking Vietnam in napalm and I think we all know how that worked out. You want to be nastier than a terror group that cuts off people's nose and ears for voting? I doubt even the "kill one of our soldiers, we execute ten civilians" threat would be sufficient. You'd have to hit genocide proportions before they'd be discouraged and by then the public opinion both at home and among the allies and all the surrounding countries would have gone to hell.
Finally, what the hell would do after you've blown them to bits? Go in and occupy the country? And don't think any puppet government you put in place is going to have any legitimacy at all. Not after that, any good you do will drown in the evil. Or you can just leave the country a big crater, which is so going to improve everything. You don't need a whole country full of resentment and ready to do terror to deal with.
Yeah, a lot of those worker protection laws are restrictions on your freedom to work in unsanitary, dangerous conditions and on exploitative or slave contracts. And apart from a few libertarian freaks most think it's a good thing.
Any time you get a specified amount of money for an unspecified amount of work you're going to get screwed, because the natural reaction in every company is to abuse that privilege as much as possible. Paying you a fixed salary with no overtime is like the company giving a fixed price bid wth a line item saying "Any changes the client wants". The company would be insane to do that and honestly, so it seems are most US workers. Yes, obviously paying overtime pay means base salary goes down so the total remains about the same. But for one it's much fairer among the workers, those that actually work overtime get paid and those who don't doesn't and secondly it takes away the incentive to abuse you by constantly sending "urgent" mails to squeeze free work out of you. If you work, you get paid. The only people that seem to have a problem with that principle is managers.
Also interesting to note is that the updated document specifically requires that UEFI Secure Boot settings can be modified by the end user, contrary to previous hooh-hah.
What updated document? This is the text:
MANDATORY: Enable/Disable Secure Boot.
On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of Pkpriv. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling Secure MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems.
Nothing else applies to ARM system. It. Must. Not. Be. Possible. Ever. In any way.
There is no BIOS on these devices. UEFI replaces it.
Still the same thing, something you can only change from inside UEFI is the same as something you can only change from inside the BIOS. Stop trolling and go away.
Well, it worked for his first shill post in the other MS story, it was basically first post and still at +4, it was added up pretty instantly so I assume they also have a bunch of shill accounts to mod it up.
precisely because XML is often processed as ASCII text it is not very good at handling UTF32 safely
Any software that does that will choke on anything not in ASCII, it won't even get æøå right like even Slashdot manages to do. Almost everything that wants to be used outside the US uses UTF8 encoding these days, and it'll expand to UTF16/24/32 as needed. The reason why most everything will choke on UTF32 is that almost no system is ready to handle four byte characters. With UTF16 allowing dual-width characters (2x16 bits) and every currently used language fitting in the basic plane of UTF16 with plenty to spare for all historic languages we're likely to find and then some it's unlikely we'll ever need UTF32. Maybe if we start running to aliens and they give us all their languages as well, but not otherwise.
That is definitely happening! Maybe not where you are, but I'm a consultant that gets to see a wide range of corporations, and everywhere I go I see NetWare and UNIX getting replaced with Windows.
Something tells me that your information is quite a bit out of date, because NetWare started losing marketshare already in the 90s, the last NetWare release came in 2003 and the final service pack in 2008. Even the last stragglers I saw migrated to Outlook several years ago. Yes, along with that usually comes an Exchange server but it's hardly a big impact when companies decide what application servers they should run. At least not those where the servers are far more important than the desktops, like all the companies doing a online $anything or operating the back-end of a store chain or things like that. If all you're doing is providing your desktop users with a file server, an intranet and other auxiliary services while all the important stuff happens on the client and the applications require Windows, then yeah I'd probably go for an all-around Microsoft package.
Documentation doesn't really have all that much value unless you can trust it, and in a large organization with a large code base there's likely to be code where the documentation is incomplete, inaccurate or plain old outdated and wrong. Once you cease trusting the comments and realize you must read the code to actually be sure what it does it turns into an evil circle. Nobody bothers to look at the documentation because it's useless and because it's useless nobody bothers to fix the documentation. And you fixing a few snippets here and there isn't going to change that perception and break that circle.
Like with structured code it's a lot easier to trash a code base than it is to keep it clean. You can apply a quick fix to the code and it works, but as you get layers or layers of hacks and quick fixes it grinds to a halt. For a time nobody's going to realize the documentation is deteriorating either, it's only as people lose more and more grip on what's going on - usually after key people left - that you're now spending more and more time locating the problem. And since there's no clear system to things, you keep adding more hacks.
Lack of documentation is just another form of technical debt, and like the entire economy we like to push that debt ahead of us. Maybe next week you'll get another job or get downsized or get outsourced or management will decide to replace it with a different tool or you'll be promoted or reorganized so it's no longer your problem. Meeting deadlines or performance goals now is more important than maintenance later. And your manager, well he's probably got no longer perspective than you, make the executives happy, collect a good paycheck, get a good reference.
Actually it seems a miracle that we produce software that keeps working, because it doesn't seem like much of anyone is in it for the long term. Workers care about their performance and keeping their jobs this quarter, CEOs and stock holders care about the stock price this quarter and that goes for most people in between. Documentation is cost and nobody wants to take the cost in this quarter if they can take it in next quarter. I've seen companies work extremely hard to get income booked in the current quarter or FY, not because of the two days but because of bonuses and such.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the first iteration of HDMI was like the first round of Plug & Pray, because either it worked or you were screwed. My TV worked fine with a direct HDMI cable, via my reciever? No go, timing issues in the HDCP handshake. Which I of course only got to know about after I had bought the receiver, which was much later. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...
They started a joint venture with Ubisoft?
Ah yes, but neither DVI graphics cards nor DVI monitors required HDCP so it would always downgrade but then refuse to play protected content. HDMI has always had HDCP, it is required. So they are getting rid of the last unencrypted connections, of course HDCP is broken but still. Now you will no longer get a picture on an unlicensed device without being a criminal under the DMCA.
Honestly, if you do the things you do you've decided that the perks outweigh the disadvantages. If you decide that gorging at McDonald's is better than eating a salad, that's a choice. If you decide a night out on the down getting seriously drunk or high is worth it, it's a choice. As long as I've paid plenty money in beer taxes and you can probably chop a year or two off my pensions relative to the healthy guys to cover any alcohol related injury or illness, what business is it to anyone else if I choose to poison myself? Because, yeah that's the toxic part of intoxication and in mild forms it's very comfortable. And I still expect good medical treatment because I have paid for that extra risk, least that's the way I feel it works here in Norway with high alcohol tax and universal healthcare. Same with smokers, they surely pay more than the cost as there's a real witch hunt out for them. They don't tax drugs because they're illegal and McDonald's because they haven't found a good way, but I'm sure they want to. Oh yes, and I'm aware that's not entirely true that it's my own business since you have things like a few people getting aggressive and violent when drunk, but the health effects are my business.
People with bad genes though, they can't help it. They never had that choice, they were born with the choice already made for them. Maybe a few things you can help with - like more intense cancer checks if you know you're predisposed for cancer - but I'd say the far more interesting part would be looking for cures, before you even get so far as the disease. Oh you're predisposed to cancer, here's a shot of retrovirus that will change those genes before it even gets so far. Or better yet, if we find people with immunities or other good qualities we can use that almost like a vaccine. Natural selection has practically no effect when you're past the age people get kids, if we want to live longer and healthier we'll probably have to manipulate our bodies to do that ourselves. And don't give me anything about my genes being who I am, if you offer me a gene-altering drug so that'll I never get Alzheimer's and end my life like a mindless zombie I'd take it. Feel free to refuse, I hear there's people that won't even take blood transplants and I respect that, just don't expect me to agree with them.
Free garbage disposal.
For indiscriminate values of garbage.
A tribe does not need privacy because everybody in the tribe depends on each other for survival, you can't depend on those you don't trust, you can't trust those you do not know, you cannot know those who are private. (...) Civilization is a cold bitch, and it is hard to feel like an accepted member, much easier with a clique of friends that you wish to share everything with.
Tribes don't need privacy, people do. Ask people that have moved from a small place where everybody knows everybody and many of them absolutely hated it, anything you did that was at odds with the community they stuck their noses in. It doesn't mean people like it, it means they got no alternatives and for the same reason they weren't going to start a conflict or badmouth it and make everything worse. It's the same reason more people don't break out of sects, it's everything and everyone they know.
Yes, "civilization" as such is cold and everyone feels like belonging somewhere. But having thousands of people within minutes from my house means I got thousands of cliques and communities and clubs and groups and activities to make those friends. If you got ten good friends I doubt it matters if there lives a hundred or a thousand or a million people nearby who are not your friends. Same as the Internet, there's a billion people here I don't know but I only care about the ones I do know or would like to know.
There is no real positive here. This is just like sending naked photos of yourself to your bf/gf. It makes no damn sense to *give* someone blackmail material on you that can be copied easily and posted for the whole world to see if they get pissed at you.
You can't think of a single positive benefit of getting your partner sexually aroused looking at you? You don't think there's any relationship saved, intensified or even started by receiving or having erotic pictures of your partner? Long-distance relationships, temporary absences, love letters with a picture saying more than a thousand words? People have done that since the 19th century you know, shortly since they invented photography. Okay be the cynic and say the benefits don't outweigh the risks, particularly now that it can go all over the Internet but you'd be pretty blind to not see how it could help in courting women.
That's true but I've been up in aircraft at night flying over roads where I know the streetlights definitively don't send light directly upwards, yet the road is still very easy to see. Okay some cities are more extreme than others but "normal" cities are going to emit a lot of light unless you do something drastic. And it doesn't really take a lot of lighting before your night vision fades away. I'm a bit more there that if you're going to do it, do it proper and go to some remote area. It's not that hard to find in most countries.
Surely the climate doesn't care about "per capita" output but only the total output.
Of course not. But to put it bluntly, I got just as much right to pollute the planet as you do. If you get to cause 1kg CO2 emissions, so should I. What, you want one quota per country so if the US decided to split the 50 states into 50 countries, they should get 50 times the quota? Or should we impose the same limit on the US with 300 million people as my country with 5 million people? Absurd. One person - be he American, Indian, Chinese or something else - should be just as good as another. Any person who thinks an American should have the right to pollute ten times as much as an Indian simply because he's American and the Indian is Indian is saying there's first and second class humans.
Sure, if all the rest of us don't give a fuck until we hit American levels we'll have deserts all the way to the south pole, so we all try to pitch in. But it's pretty hard to get any buy-in for that when the worst polluter of the lot is using brain dead arguments to argue that 1.3 billion people is polluting more than 300 million people, so the 300 don't have to do anything. The implied logic is that you should pollute early and lots so you get rewarded with a high quota. I more than understand the countries that say fuck it, let's live just like the Americans do and if we all burn we'll all burn together. You do realize that you're asking other countries to cap their lifestyle and preserve the environment so you can continue with your polluting and wasteful one right?
why is it called "C::. Why not "/"
Because unlike Linux where /home doesn't need to be on the same disk as / and so the used and free disk space doesn't add up from the sub-directories, on Windows you have disks like top-level boxes. Everything that starts with C: is on the physical disk C: in a normal setup. If you're running out of space in box C:, you can add another box D: and move stuff over - calling it / would lose any such logic. Of course we could use any form of alias, that's why we have disk labels but we wouldn't want to reference the label or we couldn't change it. This is pretty much the same issue as the /dev/disk/by-{id|uuid|sdX}, are you looking to identify the physical disk, the file system or the connector/boot order. Nothing is perfect, might as well assign them a semi-arbitrary letter. I've certainly not had an issue with it even with upwards of 10 disks in a system.
Well, I doubt the Sony executives would agree it was a mistake. They won the format war against HD DVD and Sony has fingers in plenty pies related to BluRay licensing, production of BluRay players, BluRay discs and various related products. Did it hurt them in the competition against the xbox? Sure. But it brought volume both on the supply side and the customer side, it was crucial to their victory. It's going to be the dominant high def format for decades before most people have the bandwidth to download HD online. They're actually still ahead of the PC market where almost all physical games come on DVDs, even if that requires several discs.
I suspect the next generation of consoles - when it ever arrives and I only count the Wii U as a half-gen compared to what a xbox720/PS4 wll be - will last even much longer than this one and future proofing will matter more in the long run. For those of us that have been watching graphics card reviews they're starting to run out of resolutions and AA settings that really challenge the high end cards, you need ultra quality and enthusiast shaders (that provide 2% better graphics for 20% performance penalty) at 2560x1600 to differentiate them. Driving a single 1920x1080 display as is what 99.9% of consoles will do just isn't that big a challenge anymore, even for the watered down versions we find in consoles.
Of course you can blame the consoles for games not pushing the hardware enough, but I think you're just as much hitting a level of diminishing return and increasing work in actually making it look realistic in HD. For example in Skyrim (on PC) I still experienced the "dead corpse sliding down the road like a glider" effect and it only looks more ridiculous with more detail, not less. Even if they had enough speed for that it should be a roll/tumble effect, not like a person on a luge going down an icy hill. It's just one of a million things you could fix with more developer time but not with more hardware. And I'd say that's true for most every graphical issue I see nowadays.
Somehow I don't see either Apple, Sony nor Microsoft really threatening the core audience of Nintendo, it's still the console I'd buy for a kid where Super Mario Galaxy is an age-appropriate game. Backed themselves into a corner? I'd say the Wii was a huge unnatural success in markets Nintendo would never usually reach, hell it still has a lead of 30 million units sold on both the PS3 and XBox360 (95 vs 60 vs 65). If I'm trying to think age brackets I'd guess 30 vs 60 vs 60 would be more what I'm thinking. I don't think they'll make another monster hit like that, the controller was something extremely unique and innovative in 2006 to get people off their chairs and into action but with Kinect and motion analyzing cameras that market is pretty saturated and you can't expect them to pull off something like that in each generation.
Look at any other agreement and the terms are known up front, even if in legalese.
Trying calling up an airline and ordering a ticket. Are you going to hear the full terms & conditions covering your flight? No. I do remember reading a Supreme Court decision regarding EULAs and they discussed this at length and made quite a few examples that customers were bound to some form of agreement without actually having it presented to them. As long as the terms fell under what was customary for the product in question, they did not fundamentally have a problem with this. And there you don't get to say "I don't agree to your terms and conditions, cancel my ticket and issue me a full refund" later either. Basically, the courts are divided and it can go both ways.
I don't think you'd win anything this way, if it conclusively was decided that EULAs were invalid because they were presented after the fact, then very soon webshops would include a EULA link and enforce that you click "Agree and add to cart" instead of just "Add to cart". Nobody would bother to read tens of pages of legalese anyway but hey, the terms were offered up front. If you really wanted to solve this problem of obnoxious licenses, I think you'd have to make some kind of law that if it acts, talks and walks like a sale it's a sale like with a book where you don't get to write "license-like-a-sale plus strings attached minus consumer rights" licenses.
This is a nice idea, but surely the condition of the device matters too? I'm sure a cracked iPhone 4S wouldn't be worth as much as one in mint condition.
That's what I was thinking too, the glass might be cracked, the display broken but it could still "work" for this machine. Perhaps they will take photos as well and compare against a reference? If you control the camera, lighting, distance and have an exact model reference picture you should be able to see most kinds of visual damage...
That repeal was required in order to sustain the war efforts that the republicans support. Eventually the armed services would have been too tapped out without allowing openly homosexual troops to serve.
Lol what? Around 5% or so is gay/bisexual and that doesn't count those already serving without being open about it. They employ 1.5 million people and never in the last 10 years have they lost even 0,1% of that. Maybe if the US was in the middle of WWII your post could have made slightly more sense, but they're neither running out of bodies nor would abolishing DADT provide more than a few percent increase. But keep on dreaming that it would have happened without "President Lawnchair"...
You're trying to set up one of those hotel style "Welcome to our network give us all your money to see the internet" pages to let only your sunday school students reach the internet?
Most hotels I've been to in the last years in the Nordic countries have had WiFi included in the room charge, but they've all required a login all the same. I assume it's a) so that "everyone else" in nearby buildings can't connect and b) maybe related to some kind of billing between the hotel chain and the wifi provider. It's all a matter of how much management you need, because surely at least one of the patrons is there both for sunday school and for basketball practice and will leak a fixed key to everyone and their dog. Personal accounts means lots of management overhead. I assume he's looking for a simple way to give ad hoc access to the people attending the sunday school, something like a ticketing machine that'll give you a login valid for X hours. Like, you must be in the physical areas for sunday school to get a wifi login or a simple printout the teacher can bring to class that's good for the class(es) that day.
Yes, in theory that is an option. But unless you get the legal system to play along with a rubber stamp IP equals person and three strikes you're out then that's not going to get very far. And there's many countries that won't accept that kind of spray-and-pray lawsuits. The second part is damages, unlike the US that likes to award millions of dollars in awards you can for example see that the TPB leaders were convicted to pay about 1.5 million USD eavch - same as one Thomas Rasset for sharing 24 songs. Neither of those is AFAIK final though, but they're not going to get a statutory $750-150000/song in the rest of the world. In short, it just won't scale because it won't even cover the cost and raising the fines to a level where it would is publicly unacceptable.
It's all but impossible to invoke fear in a guerrilla, because if you could hit on them you would and plain old kill them. The only way you could invoke fear is through the civilian population like your "bomb their cities" suggestion. That is assuming (1) they care about the civilians and (2) that you can keep it up longer and be uglier than they can.
I don't think the first condition is true, they're crazy religious fanatics and anyone that isn't one of them isn't worth much. They've not had any problems going into markets and blowing up their own civilian populations, why should they be intimidated by the US doing the same? In fact, it's likely to aid recruitment as people feel they must pick a side or get blown to bits.
I don't think the second part is true either, the last time the US tried it was soaking Vietnam in napalm and I think we all know how that worked out. You want to be nastier than a terror group that cuts off people's nose and ears for voting? I doubt even the "kill one of our soldiers, we execute ten civilians" threat would be sufficient. You'd have to hit genocide proportions before they'd be discouraged and by then the public opinion both at home and among the allies and all the surrounding countries would have gone to hell.
Finally, what the hell would do after you've blown them to bits? Go in and occupy the country? And don't think any puppet government you put in place is going to have any legitimacy at all. Not after that, any good you do will drown in the evil. Or you can just leave the country a big crater, which is so going to improve everything. You don't need a whole country full of resentment and ready to do terror to deal with.
Yeah, a lot of those worker protection laws are restrictions on your freedom to work in unsanitary, dangerous conditions and on exploitative or slave contracts. And apart from a few libertarian freaks most think it's a good thing.
Any time you get a specified amount of money for an unspecified amount of work you're going to get screwed, because the natural reaction in every company is to abuse that privilege as much as possible. Paying you a fixed salary with no overtime is like the company giving a fixed price bid wth a line item saying "Any changes the client wants". The company would be insane to do that and honestly, so it seems are most US workers. Yes, obviously paying overtime pay means base salary goes down so the total remains about the same. But for one it's much fairer among the workers, those that actually work overtime get paid and those who don't doesn't and secondly it takes away the incentive to abuse you by constantly sending "urgent" mails to squeeze free work out of you. If you work, you get paid. The only people that seem to have a problem with that principle is managers.
Also interesting to note is that the updated document specifically requires that UEFI Secure Boot settings can be modified by the end user, contrary to previous hooh-hah.
What updated document? This is the text:
MANDATORY: Enable/Disable Secure Boot.
On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of Pkpriv. Programmatic disabling of Secure Boot either during Boot Services or after exiting EFI Boot Services MUST NOT be possible. Disabling Secure MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems.
Nothing else applies to ARM system. It. Must. Not. Be. Possible. Ever. In any way.
There is no BIOS on these devices. UEFI replaces it.
Still the same thing, something you can only change from inside UEFI is the same as something you can only change from inside the BIOS. Stop trolling and go away.
Well, it worked for his first shill post in the other MS story, it was basically first post and still at +4, it was added up pretty instantly so I assume they also have a bunch of shill accounts to mod it up.
precisely because XML is often processed as ASCII text it is not very good at handling UTF32 safely
Any software that does that will choke on anything not in ASCII, it won't even get æøå right like even Slashdot manages to do. Almost everything that wants to be used outside the US uses UTF8 encoding these days, and it'll expand to UTF16/24/32 as needed. The reason why most everything will choke on UTF32 is that almost no system is ready to handle four byte characters. With UTF16 allowing dual-width characters (2x16 bits) and every currently used language fitting in the basic plane of UTF16 with plenty to spare for all historic languages we're likely to find and then some it's unlikely we'll ever need UTF32. Maybe if we start running to aliens and they give us all their languages as well, but not otherwise.
That is definitely happening! Maybe not where you are, but I'm a consultant that gets to see a wide range of corporations, and everywhere I go I see NetWare and UNIX getting replaced with Windows.
Something tells me that your information is quite a bit out of date, because NetWare started losing marketshare already in the 90s, the last NetWare release came in 2003 and the final service pack in 2008. Even the last stragglers I saw migrated to Outlook several years ago. Yes, along with that usually comes an Exchange server but it's hardly a big impact when companies decide what application servers they should run. At least not those where the servers are far more important than the desktops, like all the companies doing a online $anything or operating the back-end of a store chain or things like that. If all you're doing is providing your desktop users with a file server, an intranet and other auxiliary services while all the important stuff happens on the client and the applications require Windows, then yeah I'd probably go for an all-around Microsoft package.
Documentation doesn't really have all that much value unless you can trust it, and in a large organization with a large code base there's likely to be code where the documentation is incomplete, inaccurate or plain old outdated and wrong. Once you cease trusting the comments and realize you must read the code to actually be sure what it does it turns into an evil circle. Nobody bothers to look at the documentation because it's useless and because it's useless nobody bothers to fix the documentation. And you fixing a few snippets here and there isn't going to change that perception and break that circle.
Like with structured code it's a lot easier to trash a code base than it is to keep it clean. You can apply a quick fix to the code and it works, but as you get layers or layers of hacks and quick fixes it grinds to a halt. For a time nobody's going to realize the documentation is deteriorating either, it's only as people lose more and more grip on what's going on - usually after key people left - that you're now spending more and more time locating the problem. And since there's no clear system to things, you keep adding more hacks.
Lack of documentation is just another form of technical debt, and like the entire economy we like to push that debt ahead of us. Maybe next week you'll get another job or get downsized or get outsourced or management will decide to replace it with a different tool or you'll be promoted or reorganized so it's no longer your problem. Meeting deadlines or performance goals now is more important than maintenance later. And your manager, well he's probably got no longer perspective than you, make the executives happy, collect a good paycheck, get a good reference.
Actually it seems a miracle that we produce software that keeps working, because it doesn't seem like much of anyone is in it for the long term. Workers care about their performance and keeping their jobs this quarter, CEOs and stock holders care about the stock price this quarter and that goes for most people in between. Documentation is cost and nobody wants to take the cost in this quarter if they can take it in next quarter. I've seen companies work extremely hard to get income booked in the current quarter or FY, not because of the two days but because of bonuses and such.