Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.
This is as far as you need to read. Geez, Clearly this virus has infected the system and re-written power management subsystems to utilize the CMOS battery to provide enough juice, probably reprogramming an EEPROM on the I2C system to execute code and infect other systems.
Was this article written by a Hollywood screen writer? Who is going to star in this one... Willis? Bullock?
My Samsung TV and blu-ray players work great with a variety of DLNA servers; the iPad, XBMC, WD Media players, Android media players, and LG products also have worked great with a variety of DLNA servers. The problem is entirely Sony's - and I suspect it is more a matter of Sony standing against people who have their own private media servers and the implication of "piracy" rather than anything technical.
My main server runs TVMobili on Kubuntu Linux as a DLNA server, but I've played with some others.
As for the PS4, I'm passing on this generation. I'm putting together a nice gaming HTPC to leverage my family's vast Steam libraries. I'd like to dual boot Windows 7 and SteamOS. I'll have the benefits of a hacked console (emus & other activities) and be able to eat in to my large backlog. If I needed to, I could also use it for accessing the media library, but as I said, the TV handles it fine without any problems.
Except in this case, it is an Islamist who beheaded his wife for "cheating" on him....AND it managed to get 2500 likes on Facebook. Way to go , Facebook, that sure looks like condemnation.
I guess restricting beheading videos would be considered racist.
Meanwhile, posting pictures of a girl's head and elbows while she's in a bath, suggesting (only to the lame Facebook censors who have never seen an actual naked woman) boobies will get you banned.
Most people don't hold their phones properly, this won't help. The optimal for a sub-Phablet is the Index twist method, but with the curve suggested by this new design, your fingers won't be able to form properly or will cramp up, so it's back to the "standard" non-ergonomic way. Perhaps some variant of the pinky-curl/ring twist method used to properly hold a phablet could be modified, but looking at the numbers, I suspect only about 30% of most users will have hands the right size to use that hold.
Obviously,Samsung didn't do proper ergonomics studies of the design before moving forward. That's a real shame.
I have a small city lot and two HUGE maple trees. I wouldn't mind them if they are on a back acre or something... but they make landscaping impossible, force me to roto-rooter my sewer line (that runs under my driveway!!) once a year to clear the roots, and removing the trees is too expensive right now. I'd move, but nobody will buy my house with those trees (unless they are suckers) so close.
I've had several large branches come down, I've had to deal with the trees being stressed with some sort of fungus, crapping white stuff all over my pool deck and cars. They survived tornados that passed within 60ft (strangely enough).
Normally, I love trees. I love the forest. I just don't love it when it has become such a nuisance to living.
Yeah, I need about 40 megatons of highly directed explosive force to get through the massive maple tree root system that infests my yard 2 inches under the surface before I can dig post holes for my back yard shed. We always need bigger weapons.
I wonder how this will affect SteamOS, since the Steam Machines are nvidia based. Maybe Valve will start throwing their weight around to get nvidia to offer better Linux support?
TFS should have had the price that was listed in the article. As I said, all the features in the world don't really matter if it is priced out of range for most consumers.
That said, $2,500 is maybe enthusiast levels, but still not low enough for a casual purchase.
Wake me when I can buy a 3D printer off the shelf for less than $300, because as a consumer, price is far more important in adopting cutting-edge "new" technology than enhanced features.
Advancements in capabilities will come when these things are stocked and selling at WalMart and Target.
Co-op and multiplayer is obviously allowed - provided you aren't trying to play multi-player with the person you are "borrowing" the game from.
Why is this a problem? If the game is that great that you want to play with the person you are borrowing it from, then buy it... or "borrow" it from another friend/relative who isn't playing at that time.
Their website is about useless. How about some way I can peruse Oyster's current content offerings?
I'm a sci-fi fan, and that's what I read... if you aren't offering books in my genre, why would I want to spend money on your service, and if I have no way of knowing that you offer any books in my genre, I'm not gambling just to be disappointed by your selection.
On second thought, their web site actually makes me a bit angry. Probably because of its seemingly hipsterish pretentiousness.
Checking the transcript, it seems Zimmerman identified him as "looks black" - nonetheless, I believe the testimony was that he didn't know Martin's race when he started following him. He only knew for sure when Martin turned to confront him the first time as he was on the phone with the dispatcher.
I might be wrong, but I don't think Zimmerman even knew what race Trayvon Martin was before Martin jumped him.
Whatever might be said of Zimmerman, he didn't follow the kid because he was black. People made poor choices and somebody paid with their life. It's a tragedy, but to turn it into a race issue does a tremendous disservice to all the great people who have worked hard and sacrificed so much to advance civil rights in this country.
Anybody else remember when the Sumitomo epoxy resin plant went up in the early 90s? RAM prices TRIPLED OVER NIGHT and remained high for the next two years, even though chip manufacturers had 6~10 months of the product stockpiled, Sumitomo had 6~8 months worth stockpiled (and in fact, weren't producing for that reason at the time), and several other chemical companies could have been up and running to produce the resin (which sold for $6/lb and THAT price never changed).
In the end, the plant came back up ahead of schedule, and nobody else jumped in because at $6/lb, it simply wasn't worth it to make the stuff, which was use not only in RAM chips, but a lot of other chip packages as well (oddly, none of those other chips went up in price).
In short, the price jump was artificial, had nothing to do with supply and demand, but simply companies taking advantage of news to increase profit margins.....the Thai floods from a couple of years ago are another example, though those floods did at least have a small impact on supplies (though again, the prices for platter drives remain unreasonably high)
I still wonder why people go through all the fuss over media players... Samsung, LG and others have TVs and Blu-Ray players that are capable of playing MKV files and such from local drives or streamed from DLNA, and the players can be had for less than $50 when you catch the right sales. As a bonus, you also can play DVDs, BDs and optical discs full of loose media files.
On the negative side, I don't get a lot of fancy presentation, and I don't have emulators and such running on it, but that's fine. I never really understood the excitement over Roku boxes - I also get plenty of online streaming services through my Blu-ray players and TV (I have one "smart" TV, but the rest in the house have the aforementioned Blu-Ray players).
For anything beyond that, I'll build an HTPC so I can also leverage my Steam library (not too excited about the next gen consoles, either).
Microsoft spent millions every year researching things like user interfaces.
They threw it all away in a short-sighted quest to shove their way into the revenue stream of walled markets.
I think a return to basics - provide value to their best customers (Corporate IT) - through improving productivity and offering stable development environments to encourage those customers to invest in a Microsoft ecosystem.
At this very moment, the only thing tying corporations to the "Microsoft Ecosystem" are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and pretty much everything pre-2012. Admins don't need "Modern UI" interfaces on their server boxes. Developers don't need monochrome toolbar buttons and screaming menus. Desktop users don't need to gestures to do their daily work. All of those mis-steps has IT departments across the country realizing that while they do not WANT to put the effort into leaving that ecosystem, Microsoft has left them with no choice - So now the decision is to move to something slightly less familiar (Linux and OSX), or move to something WILDLY unfamiliar (Windows 8, Server 2012, etc...) - which makes more sense? so It departments are no longer beholden to Microsoft, thanks to Microsoft's own stupid decisions.
Get back to what worked. Mobile and Desktop are separate markets, which is why Apple didn't paste the iOS UI onto OSX, and why Android isn't a desktop operating system. Stop trying so hard for convergence in the UI when we aren't even close, technologically, to making that happen. Stop forcing your customers to face painful training budgets and re-writing legacy apps just to fit into your executive's superfluous decisions to bully them into the Metro UI with the idea that it would somehow magically sell millions of mobile devices with "Windows 8" (more like "Tiles 1"). That effort failed spectacularly, by any measure, so step back, lick your wounds, and give the customers what they want, instead of shoving what YOU want down their throats.
Yes, I can go to Chrome://flags, change a flag and then use the restart button, but why can't I make an extension to do that? I just want to refresh my Chrome browser windows without losing my tabs, cleaning up the lost/wasted memory. My machine reboots rarely... once a week is rare, normally once a month. Chrome is the only beast that becomes ungainly in RAM usage.
Well, Swirl-swipe, triple tap, Windows Key+C+4, followed by shoving a charm bar across the screen diagonally probably wasn't as efficient as clicking the start menu after all.
Xorbit. I ran an Xorbit box for several years, which basically monitored certain cable stations for just such activity, while Xorbit paid me a monthly stipend to do this for them. They in turn got paid by the channels (HGTV, for example) to monitor this on various cable carriers. The money dried up and I ended up sending the box back a few years ago, though.
As for local stations, if they ARE stealing commercial time, then the cable company would have no problem paying. They do this on the "cable" channels because they know the commercial slots, but I imagine on local broadcast stations, this is more difficult. It would be simple enough to demand cable companies do not do this sort of thing in the contract.
Pre-1996: TV Stations: Broadcast all day long... what's that, Cable company? Cable company (10% of TV viewers): We are going to carry your station in our market, bringing you to some new viewers. TV Stations: (SHRUG) OK, go for it. More viewers means more ratings! More ratings means more advertising revenue!
1996: Federal Government: Here you go, Broadcast stations, you can now demand payment for being carried on a cable provider! with The Telecommunications Act of 1996 Cable Companies: WTF? Federal Government: The free ride is over TV Stations: Hmmmm... free money, we like that!
Post-1996: TV Stations: GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME! Cable Companies: It's not worth THAT much for us to caryr you. How about we start whittling down the network affiliates to a single, small local-market station
(time passes)
TV Stations: Our ratings our down, we are losing ratings to cable stations - it's all the cable company's fault! Raise the rates!! Cable Companies (now 95% of the viewers): Geez, not this again, this is ridiculous, we're outta here. Goodbye, CBS.
(Sometime in the next decade): TV Stations: Where did all our viewers go? Doesn't anybody have antennas? Why does the FCC want to narrow the broadcast spectrum to "auction valuable unused frequencies"? Hey Cable Company, want to carry us at a slightly discounted rate? Cable Companies: (Chirp Chirp Chirp)
----------- At least that's the way I see it. Where does CBS think those viewers will come from? Will they magically sprout an ATSC TV antenna out of their collective asses and start receiving OTA signals again? Over 90% of their viewers no longer HAVE antennas and don't care. They can PIRATE your programs and why feel guilty??!? They got the programs for "free" before.
GREED is the ultimate downfall of broadcast networks. Cable providers do OTA broadcasters a SERVICE by providing access to large numbers of viewers, which in turn incereases ratings, which, in turn, increases revenues. There was NEVER a need to double dip by demanding cable companies pay a fee.
Slashdot Mirror
Without Zimbabwe, I'd never have achieved my dream of becoming a Trillionaire.
Suck on that, Bill Gates.
Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.
This is as far as you need to read. Geez, Clearly this virus has infected the system and re-written power management subsystems to utilize the CMOS battery to provide enough juice, probably reprogramming an EEPROM on the I2C system to execute code and infect other systems.
Was this article written by a Hollywood screen writer? Who is going to star in this one... Willis? Bullock?
My Samsung TV and blu-ray players work great with a variety of DLNA servers; the iPad, XBMC, WD Media players, Android media players, and LG products also have worked great with a variety of DLNA servers. The problem is entirely Sony's - and I suspect it is more a matter of Sony standing against people who have their own private media servers and the implication of "piracy" rather than anything technical.
My main server runs TVMobili on Kubuntu Linux as a DLNA server, but I've played with some others.
As for the PS4, I'm passing on this generation. I'm putting together a nice gaming HTPC to leverage my family's vast Steam libraries. I'd like to dual boot Windows 7 and SteamOS. I'll have the benefits of a hacked console (emus & other activities) and be able to eat in to my large backlog. If I needed to, I could also use it for accessing the media library, but as I said, the TV handles it fine without any problems.
Except in this case, it is an Islamist who beheaded his wife for "cheating" on him. ...AND it managed to get 2500 likes on Facebook. Way to go , Facebook, that sure looks like condemnation.
I guess restricting beheading videos would be considered racist.
Meanwhile, posting pictures of a girl's head and elbows while she's in a bath, suggesting (only to the lame Facebook censors who have never seen an actual naked woman) boobies will get you banned.
Most people don't hold their phones properly, this won't help. The optimal for a sub-Phablet is the Index twist method, but with the curve suggested by this new design, your fingers won't be able to form properly or will cramp up, so it's back to the "standard" non-ergonomic way. Perhaps some variant of the pinky-curl/ring twist method used to properly hold a phablet could be modified, but looking at the numbers, I suspect only about 30% of most users will have hands the right size to use that hold.
Obviously,Samsung didn't do proper ergonomics studies of the design before moving forward. That's a real shame.
I have a small city lot and two HUGE maple trees. I wouldn't mind them if they are on a back acre or something... but they make landscaping impossible, force me to roto-rooter my sewer line (that runs under my driveway!!) once a year to clear the roots, and removing the trees is too expensive right now. I'd move, but nobody will buy my house with those trees (unless they are suckers) so close.
I've had several large branches come down, I've had to deal with the trees being stressed with some sort of fungus, crapping white stuff all over my pool deck and cars. They survived tornados that passed within 60ft (strangely enough).
Normally, I love trees. I love the forest. I just don't love it when it has become such a nuisance to living.
Yeah, I need about 40 megatons of highly directed explosive force to get through the massive maple tree root system that infests my yard 2 inches under the surface before I can dig post holes for my back yard shed. We always need bigger weapons.
Seriously. /I hate maple trees
Well, he's got a lot of letters and syllables in his name, so he must be super smart and important, right?
I wonder how this will affect SteamOS, since the Steam Machines are nvidia based. Maybe Valve will start throwing their weight around to get nvidia to offer better Linux support?
TFS should have had the price that was listed in the article. As I said, all the features in the world don't really matter if it is priced out of range for most consumers.
That said, $2,500 is maybe enthusiast levels, but still not low enough for a casual purchase.
No price listed, so I guess it costs $45,000?
Wake me when I can buy a 3D printer off the shelf for less than $300, because as a consumer, price is far more important in adopting cutting-edge "new" technology than enhanced features.
Advancements in capabilities will come when these things are stocked and selling at WalMart and Target.
Co-op and multiplayer is obviously allowed - provided you aren't trying to play multi-player with the person you are "borrowing" the game from.
Why is this a problem? If the game is that great that you want to play with the person you are borrowing it from, then buy it... or "borrow" it from another friend/relative who isn't playing at that time.
Their website is about useless. How about some way I can peruse Oyster's current content offerings?
I'm a sci-fi fan, and that's what I read... if you aren't offering books in my genre, why would I want to spend money on your service, and if I have no way of knowing that you offer any books in my genre, I'm not gambling just to be disappointed by your selection.
On second thought, their web site actually makes me a bit angry. Probably because of its seemingly hipsterish pretentiousness.
Checking the transcript, it seems Zimmerman identified him as "looks black" - nonetheless, I believe the testimony was that he didn't know Martin's race when he started following him. He only knew for sure when Martin turned to confront him the first time as he was on the phone with the dispatcher.
I might be wrong, but I don't think Zimmerman even knew what race Trayvon Martin was before Martin jumped him.
Whatever might be said of Zimmerman, he didn't follow the kid because he was black. People made poor choices and somebody paid with their life. It's a tragedy, but to turn it into a race issue does a tremendous disservice to all the great people who have worked hard and sacrificed so much to advance civil rights in this country.
Obviously "Fabul-Ass Booty"
Anybody else remember when the Sumitomo epoxy resin plant went up in the early 90s? RAM prices TRIPLED OVER NIGHT and remained high for the next two years, even though chip manufacturers had 6~10 months of the product stockpiled, Sumitomo had 6~8 months worth stockpiled (and in fact, weren't producing for that reason at the time), and several other chemical companies could have been up and running to produce the resin (which sold for $6/lb and THAT price never changed).
In the end, the plant came back up ahead of schedule, and nobody else jumped in because at $6/lb, it simply wasn't worth it to make the stuff, which was use not only in RAM chips, but a lot of other chip packages as well (oddly, none of those other chips went up in price).
In short, the price jump was artificial, had nothing to do with supply and demand, but simply companies taking advantage of news to increase profit margins. ....the Thai floods from a couple of years ago are another example, though those floods did at least have a small impact on supplies (though again, the prices for platter drives remain unreasonably high)
I still wonder why people go through all the fuss over media players... Samsung, LG and others have TVs and Blu-Ray players that are capable of playing MKV files and such from local drives or streamed from DLNA, and the players can be had for less than $50 when you catch the right sales. As a bonus, you also can play DVDs, BDs and optical discs full of loose media files.
On the negative side, I don't get a lot of fancy presentation, and I don't have emulators and such running on it, but that's fine. I never really understood the excitement over Roku boxes - I also get plenty of online streaming services through my Blu-ray players and TV (I have one "smart" TV, but the rest in the house have the aforementioned Blu-Ray players).
For anything beyond that, I'll build an HTPC so I can also leverage my Steam library (not too excited about the next gen consoles, either).
Microsoft spent millions every year researching things like user interfaces.
They threw it all away in a short-sighted quest to shove their way into the revenue stream of walled markets.
I think a return to basics - provide value to their best customers (Corporate IT) - through improving productivity and offering stable development environments to encourage those customers to invest in a Microsoft ecosystem.
At this very moment, the only thing tying corporations to the "Microsoft Ecosystem" are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and pretty much everything pre-2012. Admins don't need "Modern UI" interfaces on their server boxes. Developers don't need monochrome toolbar buttons and screaming menus. Desktop users don't need to gestures to do their daily work. All of those mis-steps has IT departments across the country realizing that while they do not WANT to put the effort into leaving that ecosystem, Microsoft has left them with no choice - So now the decision is to move to something slightly less familiar (Linux and OSX), or move to something WILDLY unfamiliar (Windows 8, Server 2012, etc...) - which makes more sense? so It departments are no longer beholden to Microsoft, thanks to Microsoft's own stupid decisions.
Get back to what worked. Mobile and Desktop are separate markets, which is why Apple didn't paste the iOS UI onto OSX, and why Android isn't a desktop operating system. Stop trying so hard for convergence in the UI when we aren't even close, technologically, to making that happen. Stop forcing your customers to face painful training budgets and re-writing legacy apps just to fit into your executive's superfluous decisions to bully them into the Metro UI with the idea that it would somehow magically sell millions of mobile devices with "Windows 8" (more like "Tiles 1"). That effort failed spectacularly, by any measure, so step back, lick your wounds, and give the customers what they want, instead of shoving what YOU want down their throats.
Yes, I can go to Chrome://flags, change a flag and then use the restart button, but why can't I make an extension to do that? I just want to refresh my Chrome browser windows without losing my tabs, cleaning up the lost/wasted memory. My machine reboots rarely... once a week is rare, normally once a month. Chrome is the only beast that becomes ungainly in RAM usage.
Well, Swirl-swipe, triple tap, Windows Key+C+4, followed by shoving a charm bar across the screen diagonally probably wasn't as efficient as clicking the start menu after all.
Xorbit. I ran an Xorbit box for several years, which basically monitored certain cable stations for just such activity, while Xorbit paid me a monthly stipend to do this for them. They in turn got paid by the channels (HGTV, for example) to monitor this on various cable carriers. The money dried up and I ended up sending the box back a few years ago, though.
As for local stations, if they ARE stealing commercial time, then the cable company would have no problem paying. They do this on the "cable" channels because they know the commercial slots, but I imagine on local broadcast stations, this is more difficult. It would be simple enough to demand cable companies do not do this sort of thing in the contract.
Pre-1996:
TV Stations: Broadcast all day long... what's that, Cable company?
Cable company (10% of TV viewers): We are going to carry your station in our market, bringing you to some new viewers.
TV Stations: (SHRUG) OK, go for it. More viewers means more ratings! More ratings means more advertising revenue!
1996:
Federal Government: Here you go, Broadcast stations, you can now demand payment for being carried on a cable provider! with The Telecommunications Act of 1996
Cable Companies: WTF?
Federal Government: The free ride is over
TV Stations: Hmmmm... free money, we like that!
Post-1996:
TV Stations: GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME!
Cable Companies: It's not worth THAT much for us to caryr you. How about we start whittling down the network affiliates to a single, small local-market station
(time passes)
TV Stations: Our ratings our down, we are losing ratings to cable stations - it's all the cable company's fault! Raise the rates!!
Cable Companies (now 95% of the viewers): Geez, not this again, this is ridiculous, we're outta here. Goodbye, CBS.
(Sometime in the next decade):
TV Stations: Where did all our viewers go? Doesn't anybody have antennas? Why does the FCC want to narrow the broadcast spectrum to "auction valuable unused frequencies"? Hey Cable Company, want to carry us at a slightly discounted rate?
Cable Companies: (Chirp Chirp Chirp)
----------- At least that's the way I see it. Where does CBS think those viewers will come from? Will they magically sprout an ATSC TV antenna out of their collective asses and start receiving OTA signals again? Over 90% of their viewers no longer HAVE antennas and don't care. They can PIRATE your programs and why feel guilty??!? They got the programs for "free" before.
GREED is the ultimate downfall of broadcast networks. Cable providers do OTA broadcasters a SERVICE by providing access to large numbers of viewers, which in turn incereases ratings, which, in turn, increases revenues. There was NEVER a need to double dip by demanding cable companies pay a fee.
...John Romero is still waiting to make somebody his bitch.
Suck it down.
Just can't bring myself to go back to Firefox. Not sure why we needed even more mobile OSes anyway.