That's brilliant, instead of actually expecting secure software, let's just use a 40 pound sledge to drive a nail. Virtualization means running a nested kernel, I don't feel like booting a sub-OS everytime I want to check mail or open a browser. It's far more efficient to just write the app properly.
I guess the true question is: Which solution is more likely to get attention ? Whiz-bang virtualization will probably win, since it seems very few people in this world have the patience and discipline to write respectable code anymore.
I think this is another example of creative lies from our favorite telecoms/ISP. While you and I know that sharing files with someone on the same ISP is virtually the same as having them plugged into your switch, the typical meatheat does not. They don't know about networks, they only know about the cable going to their wall socket. They don't know about network topology and routing. They don't know there is a cost related with data transfer. They just know they pay X dollars a month and their brain doesn't push any further.
Limiting P2P traffic to a reasonable speed, or at least relegating it to a low priority class would be nice, but in today's lawyer-friendly world of greedy hatred, the words could be twisted to imply the ISP is enabling rampant piracy by acknowledging and accomodating P2P traffic, rather than blocking or severely castrating it. It's like saying "I know you're selling crack, but instead of detaining you and calling the cops, I'll just set up a small room for you to sell your dope without obstructing my storefront." That's how devious lawyers are, especially when the client is a billion dollar media cartel.
What shocks me is that we actually assume Dvorak knows anything about what he's saying. Dvorak is a media device, no more, no less. He sits up there with Leo Laporte and sells tech to the average joe, with pretty screenshots and colorful superlatives. In my view, Dvorak has ceased to be a computer scientist. Now he's a Vanna White.
The best thing about any restrictive technology is that it opens up the opportunity to break or work around the restrictions. If it's not region-free DVD players or modchips for your Playstation, it'll be HDMI dongle hacks and Philips adbusters.
It doesn't matter what they do, the only people who really gain from restrictive techs are the shady people who sell the hacks and modchips.
eSATA is cute and all, but nothing's ever stopped me from routing regular SATA cables out the back of the case, to a nice external hot-swap drive tower. Many higher-end motherboards even come with a little bracket for external SATA ports. While I understand that eSATA is somewhat improved for signal integrity and ease of use (grippy connectors), it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I haven't seen a single motherboard with eSATA yet, though some "platinum edition" boards do have a true SATA jack on the backplane. If you want both simplicity and speed. For idiot-proof simplicity there's the ubiquitous USB. For speed there's the real SATA. Is there really anything in between that needs eSATA at all ?
Before I even begin, I'll start by declaring that I have no friggin clue what goes on in a graphics device driver. All I know is that at some point, my function calls get turned into pretty screen thingies. With that said, why the hell are graphics drivers so friggin huge ? Is there really 50mb of code in there just to translate my primitive instructions into hardware accesses ? Here's some bitmap data, here are some triangles - go do your thing! What more does it need ? Why are these drivers so complex and buggy ?
I thought device drivers were supposed to act as an abstraction layer, so that one hardware API could be understood by all brands of X. After that comes the actual middleware (DirectX, OpenGL, whatever) that translates idiot user functions into hardware API calls. Polygon optimization, texture filtering etc etc etc should be done in the middleware. The only thing the actual device driver should be doing is taking the ready-to-run data and commands and ship them to the hardware unmodified.
Having a very slim, no-bull device driver would mean you just need to get it right one time and it never changes thereafter. Any compatibility issues are then the responsibility of the middleware. For Linux folks, this means we'd need a tiny tiny piece of code from the hardware vendor, then we as developers would be free to tweak and mod the other layers as we see fit, and everyone with any hardware would benefit from that development.
Actually with a large enough ISP network Bittorrent ain't all that bad, since you're likely to find many peers within the ISP. It's not local bandwidth that's scarce, it's the uplinks that are strangled because Tier-2 carriers have to pay for bandwidth to Tier-1. Here's a simplified example:
Example 1: Let's say you're on X-National-DSL provider, and you're linked to 5 people on your torrent. If 4 of those hosts are behind the same peering point (your ISP), and that last one's stuck in Norway, then your ISP only pays for bits going to the Nordic fellow, everything else stays within their private network.
Example 2: Let's say you have a home network of 5 PC's on a 100mbit switch, and each of those hosts is running Bittorrent. If the data you want is on one of your roommates' PCs, you will download at full speed from the local network, hell you wouldn't even need internet access, you're just using your own bandwidth to its fullest potential. On the other hand if you're getting a file from the outside world, you have to go over the DSL modem which you pay for.
Bittorrent generates lots of traffic yes, but the only difference now is that the traffic is coming from all over the place. I don't think there's that much more file sharing going on, it's just decentralized whereas in the past things came from FTP servers and Usenet, but they used just as much aggregate bandwidth. There's no way around it, if 100 people download a 700mb ISO, there will be 70 gb uploaded and 70gb downloaded in total. The benefit of Bittorrent is that the 70gb is shared more or less equitably among the participants, instead of serving it all from one central host, which allows it to scale to thousands of clients very easily without hosing the file server.
There is one main difference with Bittorrent, which is maximizing the total bandwidth. In my previous example, if 100 people downloaded the same file from an FTP server, the combined speed of all transfers was limited by that FTP's uplink, i.e. 10mbit, and everyone got a small slice of that bandwidth so it took longer to finish the transfer. Bittorrent does the opposite, while the initial seeder might only have 10mbit available, there are 99 other peers with anywhere from 1 to 5 mbit each, yielding an aggregate swarm speed that is several times faster than the FTP host could put out. This means the ISP has to deal with more bursty traffic, which for some puny small guys might be cost-prohibitive. It's more expensive to use up 10% of a 100mbit line, than 100% of a full 10mbit line.
It all points to the flawed model of bandwidth pricing. In my opinion the carriers are artificially restricting the evolution of the network by prioritizing money over progress. A gigabit uplink doesn't cost significantly more than a 10mbit link, you just need a faster router. The only reason we don't have plentiful bandwidth for everyone, is because it's more profitable to artificially limit supply. The flaw in this model is that bandwidth is not a mercantile commodity like oil or produce, so why should it be priced that way ?
Okay, since you don't know about Geil's product I will fill you in (and everyone else):
Geil sells over-specced memory, specially targeted at the overclocking crowd. They cost significantly more than "regular" memory because of that ability to be pushed way beyond normal speeds, so that you can run them in sync with the system bus and get the fullest bandwidth, rather than using a clock divider. It's a very unique market, one that doesn't matter to most people because the real-life performance gains are negligible, but overclocking is almost a sporting event for some people, and they want the absolute best. While Geil may not specifically guarantee overclocked speeds, it is the cornerstone of their reputation as a high-end memory vendor. For them to abuse the media in this fashion is absolutely misleading as the high speed is the main selling point.
If it were a stick of Kingston ValueRam that THG had overclocked, this would be a non-issue, it could be written off as a lucky batch as Kingston is not in the overclocking market. Geil is like a Maserati while Kingston is your everyday Toyota. If you paid the big bucks for a Maserati and found out it's slower than a Corolla you'd be upset too.
The source of this noise is the actual digital communication between your phone and the cell tower. There's nothing wrong with the phone, it's probably your speaker wiring that's picking up this signal as interference, as cheap wires have absolutely no shielding. If you don't know what kind of wiring you have, then you have cheap wiring:)
The cellular signal is rather strong and because of the way it is modulated, it has tons of noise outside its nominal band, almost all the way down to DC. In plain english (well sort of) this means it's feeding square waves into your speakers. Square waves are the "loudest" waves due to their harmonic constituents, which is why the noise can scare you shitless compared to your regular music content. Square waves are that loud annoying "bzzt" family of sounds in techno music, like Benny Benassi:D
Using better wiring will decrease the amount of noise picked up, but I find that even with extremely good wiring you can still hear a tiny bit of phone interference. I kind of like it because I have a rather potent car stereo and I couldn't hear the phone ringing if it weren't for the interference, but it is sufficiently dampened that non-audiophiles won't notice.
D-Link and Netgear are hardware vendors. They're not in the business of running decent network services, no matter how trivial that service may be. Take just about any major hardware vendor and look at their website, how sketchy and aimless it is. Asus, MSI, D-Link.. horrible horrible messes. They have good hardware engineers designing the gear, but the web/ntp/mail and related services are not directly related to their bottom line. They're not going to keep a crack shot sysadmin on staff just to run a small cluster of time servers for their entire customer base.
This is a job for those idiot coders in the geek pen 40 feet away from you, you know.. those funny looking guys with posters of scantily-clad night elves on their cube walls.
Seriously, you've got "Game Engine Middleware" which is just a fancy way of saying "graphics and sound engine". Is it that difficult to just tap the output of your own in-house graphics renderer and send it to a file ? Then all you need to do is encode it to something slimmer like h.264 or WMV HD.
If you're too lazy (or your geeks are too incompetent to do it), you could always contact the people who make Fraps and convin$e them to up the maximum resolution for your purpose.
One thing is certain, this DVI to HDTV conversion is all wrong for you. The only reason a professional recommended this route, is because these "professionals" do many other things beyond capturing some in-house game engine's output, thus the DVI-HDTV capture is more versatile and polyvalent for their needs.
The beautiful flip-side to this is a play on words. They will use open standards unless it's technically impossible to do, which really just means a lot of people will say "It's impossible to do function Y in format Z, I'm sticking with MSWord". It's not so much about impossibility, as it is about ignorance.
Reference counted filesystems are a tricky affair because you have to be damned certain to not wipe the data as long as there's at least one reference to it. Certainly feasible but it doesn't have the appeal of mainstream usage, as it would likely be very expensive in terms of processing and caching. For a file server it would be great, but for everyone else it's overkill.
I always figured security was rather simple, you just have to pretend to be the MPAA/RIAA: treat everything and everyone as criminals. Any data, ANY DATA coming from a browser has to be validated to hell and back. If there's anything sketchy about the request, send back an error message and let the user try again. Any foreign characters ? Escape them if you really want them (e.g. posting code in a forum or CMS), or else loudly complain to the user and tell them to play nice.
When dealing with web sites, I've always found it very handy to log any suspicious activity, at least in the beginning. This will let you see where and what the red flags are, and maybe give you some insight into what kind of sneaky shit the users are trying to pull. Sometimes it will expose usability problems, like breaking the Back button or maybe one of your forms needs to be simplified/explained. In any case, it will give you tools to harden your app.
Biased or not, I remember watching mostly PBS as a child, as it was the only channel that wasn't full of sugary fluff. It actually offered information and education instead of vapid celebrity talk shows and shock-driven babble. I discovered NPR a few years back thanks to the internet and fell in love again.
Every channel has a biased program manager, and every network has extremist supporters, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Often times just from watching a few minutes of any major network you can guess which one it is, they each have their own "feel" as to how content is formatted, edited and scheduled.
A popular thing to do for university students is to compare TV networks, sometimes just the daily news to see how many minutes are devoted to military/economy/schools etc. I've seen one study where they just looked at the movies being played on each channel and looked for various forms of discrimination.. which channel degrades women, or black people, or the french (grrr!). They find so many things that just slip under our noses, it's no surprise these networks have so much power with their brainwashing.
It seems so obvious that patents like this only serve as legal ammunition to attack competitors. To most of us, the concept of patenting "Doing X over the internet" is ridiculous, but why is it so ? Does anyone have an example of a patent that has actually benefitted the world at large ?
From what I've seen, patents serve to "protect" the intellectual property, but really how can you own an idea ? You can invent something and be the first to market, but to use the legal system to keep everyone else out of the game is just plain retarded. If someone's business model is so fragile that they must protect their ideas with patents, then in my book they deserve to suffer everything we throw at them. If they can't stand up to the competition on level ground then they should die and let the stronger entity take their place.
It's easy to do on a quiet street in the suburbs, but let's see what this smart car does in heavy downtown traffic with all the assholes zooming by at full speed, or better yet stopping behind you and blocking to snipe your spot.. In my big city, parallel parking is a precursor to vehicular homicide.
A properly tuned PC with 256mb can run just peachy, just as a beastly gaming rig can be brought to its knees when loaded with useless crap, the kind of crap most unenlightened users love. I have a specially tweaked XP cd that installs in 5 minutes and eats up only 75mb at the desktop, which I use for VMware testing. Someone else can load XP and have it use up 300mb on bootup, with all the garbage software they load, device drivers and their flashy "control panels". It's all a matter of efficiency.
The difference between my former client and yourself, is that you know what you're doing and don't install zillions of apps borrowed from your neighbor/relative. Most PC beginners end up installing anything that's "free" or looks cool. Comet cursor, flashy desktops, animated talking desktop buddies.. Throw in the world's dumbest anti virus (Norton), next thing you know the idle RAM load is at 300mb on a 256mb machine. Just hovering the mouse over various icons makes the thing thrash.
Just look at most consumer hardware.. retail video and sound cards.. and look at all the crappy software that's bundled with it. Newbies will install ALL of it, and end up with 3-4 DVD players, five or six P2P clients running in the background, a bunch of conflicting temperature monitors / overclocking widgets, two running instances of Windows Messenger, and of course GAIN adverts. What's even better is that Asus/MSI/Gigabyte keep making their useless software even weirder and hungrier. I forget which company this was, but there's a taskbar app called DigiCell whose sole purpose is to tell you the CPU and board temperatures, only it eats up 35 mb and spreads across a third of your screen. It doesn't take very many of these "apps" before the luser's PC is saturated with crap.
The problem is that a lot of people (cheap people) have no issues dealing with mediocre performance. I had some "person of inferior upbringing" buy the cheapest computer I had (1.6ghz AMD, 256mb, 40gb), the cheapest burner I had (BenQ - bleh), and then started copying every movie under the sun. He came back a week later complaining that it took very long to burn DVDs, something like 40 minutes on an 8x burner. I told him he has too little system RAM for what he's doing, he agreed and went back home to his shacklet in the country. He didn't buy more RAM, so I guess the extra 30 minutes for each disc wasn't worth a 20$ upgrade.
We have to realize that today's PC's are many times faster than they were in 1998, which was the year everyone and their mother bought a new PC to get on the burgeoning Internet. Even if you trash 3/4 of that performance, they still think the new shitty PC is better than the old one even if it lags 3 seconds when you click anything. They also think it's normal for the screen to freeze for 20 seconds after closing any app or game. I even had people twiddle with my PC and complain it was too snappy, indeed it was "faster than their brain could handle". Mind you I have a bleeding-edge CPU with 4gb RAM and raid stripes all over... hell I could probably host 4-5 virtual servers that run better than the average cheap PC.
Young people don't care about quality because they haven't experienced it in the first place. Twelve years ago when I was ripping MP3's in DOS at 112kbps, I couldn't hear the quality loss because I had lame speakers (with overzealous EQ) and lame headphones on a $99 discman. Everything sounded like shit to me and that's all I had ever known, so it was ok.
Then I started making good money and bought myself a really sick stereo, and I started having aural orgasms at the staggering detail I discovered in my music collection. I also heard the dreaded ringing and swishing artifacts of crappy MP3 encoders, and started flaming anyone on Napster who used Xing Encoder;) Now I have an even sicker car stereo with funky noise shaping and filtering, but I can still tell when a track is poorly encoded.. my ears can tell the sound ran out of breath, but most people who ride with me think I'm just a crazy old music nerd and complain that I should get more bass:P
The fact is simply that different people have different ears. The Ipod has above-average sound quality and seems to put in some amount of effort to reduce compression artifacts, for most people this is as good as it gets. For the rest of us audio freaks, there are alternatives.
Screenshots should clearly demonstrate crucial features of the software, as I often jump to the gallery when I want to quickly find out if a prospective app does what I need (since textual documentation is either inexistent or written by a bullshitting yes-man). If the sole purpose of the screenshot is to demonstrate the developer's funky desktop or some dumb hobag of a model, it's a waste of bandwidth. Screenshots are kind of like an auto showroom.. I don't go to car dealers for "entertainment", I go there to buy a car and see it up close before I make my choice.
It's also quite nice to have a video or slideshow demonstrating the actual behavior of the software. You could look at thousands of Mac OSX screenshots, ok it's pretty but nothing special. Then you look at a full-motion video that shows how everything zooms, stretches and morphs with perfectly fluid movement, and you're wowed.
In any case, nothing compares to actually trying out the software and seeing how easy it is to operate.
Ahh then I whole-heartedly approve the birth of Joomla for that IS a good reason to fork.
And yes well, KDE vs Gnome is the same for me, I have both and don't really care which is which, as long as I can get my work done and have pretty desktops:)
You obviously didn't get the memo.. rootkits are called rootkits because they fool the system into believing there is no rootkit. It's like a jedi mind trick on your PC. Virus scanners can't find rootkits because even the OS doesn't know they're there, they sneak in at a lower level and cover their tracks.
In any event, running two virus scanners doesn't hog THAT many resources (unless one of those scanners is named Norton). The data gets read once by the first scanner, then the second one picks it up in the disk cache. There is a slightly increased CPU load but the trick is to configure the first scanner to be very aggressive, and the second one to be lazier (only scan executables, restrict to the C: drive etc). The main goal is to block rootkits at their entry point, and trap any clever ones that are designed to sneak past one of the main scanners.
First off, you're using the wrong tool for the job. If you're serious about your band, get some real semi-pro recording equipment.. it will probably cost less than the sum of all your iPods (only you don't listen to your ADAT unit on the bus).
Secondly: there are tons of non-Apple solutions out there, they're just not as sexy, right ? Everyone has the choice to buy or not buy DRM-crippled devices. Now don't get me wrong, I love Apple for reasons unknown, they're the cocaine of the electronics industry, but why can't you just buy someone else's less-crippled hard-disk based walkman ?
Me ? I don't have one, but I used to play mp3's on my PDA and it was just fine. I still have a CD-based mp3 player both in the car and in the pocket, and the only upgrade I have in mind is a DVD-Rom based car deck that plays MP3's.. Mmmmm.. 60 albums on one disc.
My only gripe about MP3 is about Fraunhofer picking 128kbps as the "standard", ten years ago. I wish they'd chosen 160 instead. Of the few times I've fired up a P2P client in the last few years, most everyone had nasty 128kbps tracks of even the new stuff. Such a goddamned shame! I rip everything with "lame --extreme", resulting in ~230 kbps VBR that I can't distinguish from the original 99.44% of the time.
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That's brilliant, instead of actually expecting secure software, let's just use a 40 pound sledge to drive a nail. Virtualization means running a nested kernel, I don't feel like booting a sub-OS everytime I want to check mail or open a browser. It's far more efficient to just write the app properly.
I guess the true question is: Which solution is more likely to get attention ? Whiz-bang virtualization will probably win, since it seems very few people in this world have the patience and discipline to write respectable code anymore.
I think this is another example of creative lies from our favorite telecoms/ISP. While you and I know that sharing files with someone on the same ISP is virtually the same as having them plugged into your switch, the typical meatheat does not. They don't know about networks, they only know about the cable going to their wall socket. They don't know about network topology and routing. They don't know there is a cost related with data transfer. They just know they pay X dollars a month and their brain doesn't push any further.
Limiting P2P traffic to a reasonable speed, or at least relegating it to a low priority class would be nice, but in today's lawyer-friendly world of greedy hatred, the words could be twisted to imply the ISP is enabling rampant piracy by acknowledging and accomodating P2P traffic, rather than blocking or severely castrating it. It's like saying "I know you're selling crack, but instead of detaining you and calling the cops, I'll just set up a small room for you to sell your dope without obstructing my storefront." That's how devious lawyers are, especially when the client is a billion dollar media cartel.
What shocks me is that we actually assume Dvorak knows anything about what he's saying. Dvorak is a media device, no more, no less. He sits up there with Leo Laporte and sells tech to the average joe, with pretty screenshots and colorful superlatives. In my view, Dvorak has ceased to be a computer scientist. Now he's a Vanna White.
The best thing about any restrictive technology is that it opens up the opportunity to break or work around the restrictions. If it's not region-free DVD players or modchips for your Playstation, it'll be HDMI dongle hacks and Philips adbusters.
It doesn't matter what they do, the only people who really gain from restrictive techs are the shady people who sell the hacks and modchips.
eSATA is cute and all, but nothing's ever stopped me from routing regular SATA cables out the back of the case, to a nice external hot-swap drive tower. Many higher-end motherboards even come with a little bracket for external SATA ports. While I understand that eSATA is somewhat improved for signal integrity and ease of use (grippy connectors), it doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I haven't seen a single motherboard with eSATA yet, though some "platinum edition" boards do have a true SATA jack on the backplane. If you want both simplicity and speed. For idiot-proof simplicity there's the ubiquitous USB. For speed there's the real SATA. Is there really anything in between that needs eSATA at all ?
Before I even begin, I'll start by declaring that I have no friggin clue what goes on in a graphics device driver. All I know is that at some point, my function calls get turned into pretty screen thingies. With that said, why the hell are graphics drivers so friggin huge ? Is there really 50mb of code in there just to translate my primitive instructions into hardware accesses ? Here's some bitmap data, here are some triangles - go do your thing! What more does it need ? Why are these drivers so complex and buggy ?
I thought device drivers were supposed to act as an abstraction layer, so that one hardware API could be understood by all brands of X. After that comes the actual middleware (DirectX, OpenGL, whatever) that translates idiot user functions into hardware API calls. Polygon optimization, texture filtering etc etc etc should be done in the middleware. The only thing the actual device driver should be doing is taking the ready-to-run data and commands and ship them to the hardware unmodified.
Having a very slim, no-bull device driver would mean you just need to get it right one time and it never changes thereafter. Any compatibility issues are then the responsibility of the middleware. For Linux folks, this means we'd need a tiny tiny piece of code from the hardware vendor, then we as developers would be free to tweak and mod the other layers as we see fit, and everyone with any hardware would benefit from that development.
Actually with a large enough ISP network Bittorrent ain't all that bad, since you're likely to find many peers within the ISP. It's not local bandwidth that's scarce, it's the uplinks that are strangled because Tier-2 carriers have to pay for bandwidth to Tier-1. Here's a simplified example:
Example 1: Let's say you're on X-National-DSL provider, and you're linked to 5 people on your torrent. If 4 of those hosts are behind the same peering point (your ISP), and that last one's stuck in Norway, then your ISP only pays for bits going to the Nordic fellow, everything else stays within their private network.
Example 2: Let's say you have a home network of 5 PC's on a 100mbit switch, and each of those hosts is running Bittorrent. If the data you want is on one of your roommates' PCs, you will download at full speed from the local network, hell you wouldn't even need internet access, you're just using your own bandwidth to its fullest potential. On the other hand if you're getting a file from the outside world, you have to go over the DSL modem which you pay for.
Bittorrent generates lots of traffic yes, but the only difference now is that the traffic is coming from all over the place. I don't think there's that much more file sharing going on, it's just decentralized whereas in the past things came from FTP servers and Usenet, but they used just as much aggregate bandwidth. There's no way around it, if 100 people download a 700mb ISO, there will be 70 gb uploaded and 70gb downloaded in total. The benefit of Bittorrent is that the 70gb is shared more or less equitably among the participants, instead of serving it all from one central host, which allows it to scale to thousands of clients very easily without hosing the file server.
There is one main difference with Bittorrent, which is maximizing the total bandwidth. In my previous example, if 100 people downloaded the same file from an FTP server, the combined speed of all transfers was limited by that FTP's uplink, i.e. 10mbit, and everyone got a small slice of that bandwidth so it took longer to finish the transfer. Bittorrent does the opposite, while the initial seeder might only have 10mbit available, there are 99 other peers with anywhere from 1 to 5 mbit each, yielding an aggregate swarm speed that is several times faster than the FTP host could put out. This means the ISP has to deal with more bursty traffic, which for some puny small guys might be cost-prohibitive. It's more expensive to use up 10% of a 100mbit line, than 100% of a full 10mbit line.
It all points to the flawed model of bandwidth pricing. In my opinion the carriers are artificially restricting the evolution of the network by prioritizing money over progress. A gigabit uplink doesn't cost significantly more than a 10mbit link, you just need a faster router. The only reason we don't have plentiful bandwidth for everyone, is because it's more profitable to artificially limit supply. The flaw in this model is that bandwidth is not a mercantile commodity like oil or produce, so why should it be priced that way ?
Okay, since you don't know about Geil's product I will fill you in (and everyone else):
Geil sells over-specced memory, specially targeted at the overclocking crowd. They cost significantly more than "regular" memory because of that ability to be pushed way beyond normal speeds, so that you can run them in sync with the system bus and get the fullest bandwidth, rather than using a clock divider. It's a very unique market, one that doesn't matter to most people because the real-life performance gains are negligible, but overclocking is almost a sporting event for some people, and they want the absolute best. While Geil may not specifically guarantee overclocked speeds, it is the cornerstone of their reputation as a high-end memory vendor. For them to abuse the media in this fashion is absolutely misleading as the high speed is the main selling point.
If it were a stick of Kingston ValueRam that THG had overclocked, this would be a non-issue, it could be written off as a lucky batch as Kingston is not in the overclocking market. Geil is like a Maserati while Kingston is your everyday Toyota. If you paid the big bucks for a Maserati and found out it's slower than a Corolla you'd be upset too.
The source of this noise is the actual digital communication between your phone and the cell tower. There's nothing wrong with the phone, it's probably your speaker wiring that's picking up this signal as interference, as cheap wires have absolutely no shielding. If you don't know what kind of wiring you have, then you have cheap wiring :)
:D
The cellular signal is rather strong and because of the way it is modulated, it has tons of noise outside its nominal band, almost all the way down to DC. In plain english (well sort of) this means it's feeding square waves into your speakers. Square waves are the "loudest" waves due to their harmonic constituents, which is why the noise can scare you shitless compared to your regular music content. Square waves are that loud annoying "bzzt" family of sounds in techno music, like Benny Benassi
Using better wiring will decrease the amount of noise picked up, but I find that even with extremely good wiring you can still hear a tiny bit of phone interference. I kind of like it because I have a rather potent car stereo and I couldn't hear the phone ringing if it weren't for the interference, but it is sufficiently dampened that non-audiophiles won't notice.
D-Link and Netgear are hardware vendors. They're not in the business of running decent network services, no matter how trivial that service may be. Take just about any major hardware vendor and look at their website, how sketchy and aimless it is. Asus, MSI, D-Link.. horrible horrible messes. They have good hardware engineers designing the gear, but the web/ntp/mail and related services are not directly related to their bottom line. They're not going to keep a crack shot sysadmin on staff just to run a small cluster of time servers for their entire customer base.
This is a job for those idiot coders in the geek pen 40 feet away from you, you know.. those funny looking guys with posters of scantily-clad night elves on their cube walls.
Seriously, you've got "Game Engine Middleware" which is just a fancy way of saying "graphics and sound engine". Is it that difficult to just tap the output of your own in-house graphics renderer and send it to a file ? Then all you need to do is encode it to something slimmer like h.264 or WMV HD.
If you're too lazy (or your geeks are too incompetent to do it), you could always contact the people who make Fraps and convin$e them to up the maximum resolution for your purpose.
One thing is certain, this DVI to HDTV conversion is all wrong for you. The only reason a professional recommended this route, is because these "professionals" do many other things beyond capturing some in-house game engine's output, thus the DVI-HDTV capture is more versatile and polyvalent for their needs.
The beautiful flip-side to this is a play on words. They will use open standards unless it's technically impossible to do, which really just means a lot of people will say "It's impossible to do function Y in format Z, I'm sticking with MSWord". It's not so much about impossibility, as it is about ignorance.
Reference counted filesystems are a tricky affair because you have to be damned certain to not wipe the data as long as there's at least one reference to it. Certainly feasible but it doesn't have the appeal of mainstream usage, as it would likely be very expensive in terms of processing and caching. For a file server it would be great, but for everyone else it's overkill.
I always figured security was rather simple, you just have to pretend to be the MPAA/RIAA: treat everything and everyone as criminals. Any data, ANY DATA coming from a browser has to be validated to hell and back. If there's anything sketchy about the request, send back an error message and let the user try again. Any foreign characters ? Escape them if you really want them (e.g. posting code in a forum or CMS), or else loudly complain to the user and tell them to play nice.
When dealing with web sites, I've always found it very handy to log any suspicious activity, at least in the beginning. This will let you see where and what the red flags are, and maybe give you some insight into what kind of sneaky shit the users are trying to pull. Sometimes it will expose usability problems, like breaking the Back button or maybe one of your forms needs to be simplified/explained. In any case, it will give you tools to harden your app.
Biased or not, I remember watching mostly PBS as a child, as it was the only channel that wasn't full of sugary fluff. It actually offered information and education instead of vapid celebrity talk shows and shock-driven babble. I discovered NPR a few years back thanks to the internet and fell in love again.
Every channel has a biased program manager, and every network has extremist supporters, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. Often times just from watching a few minutes of any major network you can guess which one it is, they each have their own "feel" as to how content is formatted, edited and scheduled.
A popular thing to do for university students is to compare TV networks, sometimes just the daily news to see how many minutes are devoted to military/economy/schools etc. I've seen one study where they just looked at the movies being played on each channel and looked for various forms of discrimination.. which channel degrades women, or black people, or the french (grrr!). They find so many things that just slip under our noses, it's no surprise these networks have so much power with their brainwashing.
It seems so obvious that patents like this only serve as legal ammunition to attack competitors. To most of us, the concept of patenting "Doing X over the internet" is ridiculous, but why is it so ? Does anyone have an example of a patent that has actually benefitted the world at large ?
From what I've seen, patents serve to "protect" the intellectual property, but really how can you own an idea ? You can invent something and be the first to market, but to use the legal system to keep everyone else out of the game is just plain retarded. If someone's business model is so fragile that they must protect their ideas with patents, then in my book they deserve to suffer everything we throw at them. If they can't stand up to the competition on level ground then they should die and let the stronger entity take their place.
It's easy to do on a quiet street in the suburbs, but let's see what this smart car does in heavy downtown traffic with all the assholes zooming by at full speed, or better yet stopping behind you and blocking to snipe your spot.. In my big city, parallel parking is a precursor to vehicular homicide.
A properly tuned PC with 256mb can run just peachy, just as a beastly gaming rig can be brought to its knees when loaded with useless crap, the kind of crap most unenlightened users love. I have a specially tweaked XP cd that installs in 5 minutes and eats up only 75mb at the desktop, which I use for VMware testing. Someone else can load XP and have it use up 300mb on bootup, with all the garbage software they load, device drivers and their flashy "control panels". It's all a matter of efficiency.
The difference between my former client and yourself, is that you know what you're doing and don't install zillions of apps borrowed from your neighbor/relative. Most PC beginners end up installing anything that's "free" or looks cool. Comet cursor, flashy desktops, animated talking desktop buddies.. Throw in the world's dumbest anti virus (Norton), next thing you know the idle RAM load is at 300mb on a 256mb machine. Just hovering the mouse over various icons makes the thing thrash.
Just look at most consumer hardware.. retail video and sound cards.. and look at all the crappy software that's bundled with it. Newbies will install ALL of it, and end up with 3-4 DVD players, five or six P2P clients running in the background, a bunch of conflicting temperature monitors / overclocking widgets, two running instances of Windows Messenger, and of course GAIN adverts. What's even better is that Asus/MSI/Gigabyte keep making their useless software even weirder and hungrier. I forget which company this was, but there's a taskbar app called DigiCell whose sole purpose is to tell you the CPU and board temperatures, only it eats up 35 mb and spreads across a third of your screen. It doesn't take very many of these "apps" before the luser's PC is saturated with crap.
The problem is that a lot of people (cheap people) have no issues dealing with mediocre performance. I had some "person of inferior upbringing" buy the cheapest computer I had (1.6ghz AMD, 256mb, 40gb), the cheapest burner I had (BenQ - bleh), and then started copying every movie under the sun. He came back a week later complaining that it took very long to burn DVDs, something like 40 minutes on an 8x burner. I told him he has too little system RAM for what he's doing, he agreed and went back home to his shacklet in the country. He didn't buy more RAM, so I guess the extra 30 minutes for each disc wasn't worth a 20$ upgrade.
We have to realize that today's PC's are many times faster than they were in 1998, which was the year everyone and their mother bought a new PC to get on the burgeoning Internet. Even if you trash 3/4 of that performance, they still think the new shitty PC is better than the old one even if it lags 3 seconds when you click anything. They also think it's normal for the screen to freeze for 20 seconds after closing any app or game. I even had people twiddle with my PC and complain it was too snappy, indeed it was "faster than their brain could handle". Mind you I have a bleeding-edge CPU with 4gb RAM and raid stripes all over... hell I could probably host 4-5 virtual servers that run better than the average cheap PC.
Young people don't care about quality because they haven't experienced it in the first place. Twelve years ago when I was ripping MP3's in DOS at 112kbps, I couldn't hear the quality loss because I had lame speakers (with overzealous EQ) and lame headphones on a $99 discman. Everything sounded like shit to me and that's all I had ever known, so it was ok.
;) Now I have an even sicker car stereo with funky noise shaping and filtering, but I can still tell when a track is poorly encoded.. my ears can tell the sound ran out of breath, but most people who ride with me think I'm just a crazy old music nerd and complain that I should get more bass :P
Then I started making good money and bought myself a really sick stereo, and I started having aural orgasms at the staggering detail I discovered in my music collection. I also heard the dreaded ringing and swishing artifacts of crappy MP3 encoders, and started flaming anyone on Napster who used Xing Encoder
The fact is simply that different people have different ears. The Ipod has above-average sound quality and seems to put in some amount of effort to reduce compression artifacts, for most people this is as good as it gets. For the rest of us audio freaks, there are alternatives.
Screenshots should clearly demonstrate crucial features of the software, as I often jump to the gallery when I want to quickly find out if a prospective app does what I need (since textual documentation is either inexistent or written by a bullshitting yes-man). If the sole purpose of the screenshot is to demonstrate the developer's funky desktop or some dumb hobag of a model, it's a waste of bandwidth. Screenshots are kind of like an auto showroom.. I don't go to car dealers for "entertainment", I go there to buy a car and see it up close before I make my choice.
It's also quite nice to have a video or slideshow demonstrating the actual behavior of the software. You could look at thousands of Mac OSX screenshots, ok it's pretty but nothing special. Then you look at a full-motion video that shows how everything zooms, stretches and morphs with perfectly fluid movement, and you're wowed.
In any case, nothing compares to actually trying out the software and seeing how easy it is to operate.
Ahh then I whole-heartedly approve the birth of Joomla for that IS a good reason to fork.
:)
And yes well, KDE vs Gnome is the same for me, I have both and don't really care which is which, as long as I can get my work done and have pretty desktops
You obviously didn't get the memo.. rootkits are called rootkits because they fool the system into believing there is no rootkit. It's like a jedi mind trick on your PC. Virus scanners can't find rootkits because even the OS doesn't know they're there, they sneak in at a lower level and cover their tracks.
In any event, running two virus scanners doesn't hog THAT many resources (unless one of those scanners is named Norton). The data gets read once by the first scanner, then the second one picks it up in the disk cache. There is a slightly increased CPU load but the trick is to configure the first scanner to be very aggressive, and the second one to be lazier (only scan executables, restrict to the C: drive etc). The main goal is to block rootkits at their entry point, and trap any clever ones that are designed to sneak past one of the main scanners.
First off, you're using the wrong tool for the job. If you're serious about your band, get some real semi-pro recording equipment.. it will probably cost less than the sum of all your iPods (only you don't listen to your ADAT unit on the bus).
Secondly: there are tons of non-Apple solutions out there, they're just not as sexy, right ? Everyone has the choice to buy or not buy DRM-crippled devices. Now don't get me wrong, I love Apple for reasons unknown, they're the cocaine of the electronics industry, but why can't you just buy someone else's less-crippled hard-disk based walkman ?
Me ? I don't have one, but I used to play mp3's on my PDA and it was just fine. I still have a CD-based mp3 player both in the car and in the pocket, and the only upgrade I have in mind is a DVD-Rom based car deck that plays MP3's.. Mmmmm.. 60 albums on one disc.
My only gripe about MP3 is about Fraunhofer picking 128kbps as the "standard", ten years ago. I wish they'd chosen 160 instead. Of the few times I've fired up a P2P client in the last few years, most everyone had nasty 128kbps tracks of even the new stuff. Such a goddamned shame! I rip everything with "lame --extreme", resulting in ~230 kbps VBR that I can't distinguish from the original 99.44% of the time.