By the way, does anyone know if Dish Network's PVR phones home about my rewinding habits?
All of the DVRs do. It's a chance for an additional revenue stream, and what company can say no to that? Be afraid of the ones that don't say much about it.
Also be nervous about the smarter digital cable boxes, and about cell phones.
The cell phone carriers know a LOT about what you use your phone for. I recently heard a statistic from Sprint that most people play phone games in their own house, and had the chance to ask where the data came from..... The answer was from the tracking stats that Sprint keeps for all Sprint phones. Nobody present seemed bothered by that, I was badly scared.
I was at a game development conference a while back aimed at small/portable game platforms. One of the talks I attended went into the expected growth of the phone gaming market, and what types of games are the most popular (and why).
One of the important facts that came out is that most people who buy a phone that can download and play games will eventually do it, even if they didn't know or care about the ability to do so when they bought the phone.
It was also mentioned that the major carriers are aware of this, and plan to start only selling phones that support downloadable games and ringtones. They all those additional $1 and $2 purchases.
I also found it interesting that one of the best selling (and most consistant) games is hangman. It was strongly pointed out at the conference that most of the phone game market does NOT consist of traditional gamers, and their interests to do lay in the same things.
PS:
I recently bought a new phone with bluetooth. I didn't want the camera, but couldn't get the rest of the stuff I wanted without it.
Since then I've used it quite a bit, and not for the reasons you expect. For example, it's a really great way to entertain a 5 year old at a restaurant.
There are several store bought solutions to play music from your computer via the network, though most of them are expensive. One of them is a TiVo with Home Media Option. However, be careful, since not all models support HMO.
MAME is generally not available store bought for reasons that are unfortunate, but which should be obvous.
I agree with the poster about dual tuner Directv TiVo being amazing, but there is one problem.
The latest wave of cool features for TiVo, such as the home media option, boxes with DVD burning, etc aren't available in Directv versions. It's not a technology problem, but Directv won't allow their release (at least not so far).
On the other hand, the HD Directv TiVo will be out soon, and will only be for Directv (at least for the moment), though it does receive ATSC signals.
I've never heard this stated, but I've always believed that for home broadband (not business), one of the reasons they charge for static IPs is that the people who want them tend to be highest bandwidth consumers.
A way of charging for the extra bandwidth without admitting that bandwidth usage isn't unlimited.
It's still bites, but it makes a limited amount of sense.
It's illegal and all, but I want to have a movie server much like the music servers that people build.
I'll rip all my DVDs (a lot)stick them on the server, and then be able to play them back from any PC, or the TV without getting up or moving.
In addition, I'd like it to be able to easily serve other video such as Red versus Blue, etc easily.
I started on this, and was making progress, but had to loan out the machine for a 'quick' work project that has taken much longer than it should. At the time, the trickie part was not handling the video, it was maintaining ALL DVD features as I ripped and reencoded to something efficient enough to let me hope to fit all my DVDs on a 300 G drive.
That's true, but it's more of an aberation than the norm.
More money was spent redesigning the ISS to meet the continually changing requirements from congress than was in the original budget to complete and launch it.
NASA has wasted stupendous amounts of money over the years by starting projects and expecting congress to deliver the additional money (promised by congress) needed to complete them. Congress changes their minds, cuts and changes the budgets, and generally screws things up. The end results generally mean a lot of money spent, but little accomplished.
Part of the reason that NASA has been more effective over the last few years was that a new director came in (I forget his name), who understood what was happening and starting planning for it.
Amoung other things they are saying that they plan to scrap the shuttle fleet after ISS is finished.
It also says that NASA will be the only department other than homeland security and the military to get a budget increase. Personally, I'm not sure this will really happen, since they are planning through 2013, which is (including the current) four presidential terms away. The US goverment isn't very good at sticking with one plan that long.
I'm convinced that language and writing are the two most important inventions of all time. Nothing else we've done would have been possible without them.
They are more important than fire or argriculture or the scientific method, because all those other ideas would eventually be forgotten and lost without them.
In theory, the person signing your server certificate has gone to the effort to make sure that you really are who you say you are. This is the service that verisign is supposed to be providing.
This is supposed to keep joe cracker from getting a signed certificate for "www.amazon.com", which would allow them to create a server that posed as Amazon.
What you're saying is reasonable and correct. My problem is that my cable company won't tell me what the limits are.
They just say "we'll tell you if it's too much". Give me hard numbers, and I'm okay with that. Tell me that it's just controlled by somebody's whim, and I'm not happy.
My original agreement had no provisions for bandwidth limits, through it did have provisions for acceptable use, mostly meaning no servers of any kind allowed. My only unanswered question at the time was "What exactly is a server, does X Windows or sshd count?". I decided not to push since tech support might be dumb enough to decide they did.
Since then my account has been purchased by ATT Wireless and Comcast. In neither case did I get much useful information about the changes to the AUP were, and my only 'agreement' to the new terms was not not cancelling my account.
One the other hand, I've never gotten one of the letters despite standard heavy geek use (VNC, Gaming, ISO downloads, etc), plus rsyncing a very large collection of volital files from the office to the house every night at 3 AM.
An unbalanced workload is bad? That doesn't seem right to me.
With nothing but a quick impression, it seems that HT might be better at an unbalanced workload than an SMP machine. This is because with SMP, everything on the underutilized processor sits idle.
It would seem that HT would end up dedicating all functional units (outdated terminology?) to the thread the has the heavy load. Thus you can get better use of the functional units by moving them back and forth between threads as needed, at least until you have a cache miss in the busy thread.
I'm quite certain that people will correct me (at length) if I'm wrong, but here goes.
The GPL says that you can use source and code anyway that you want, but if you release modified versions, you must release the modified source under GPL.
The LGPL is intended for libraries that are released until the GPL. It says that commercial and other non-GPL projects can use this library without becoming GPL, but that changes to the library itself must be released under the LGPL.
LGPL is generally considered a lighter weight version of the GPL, and it normally used for things like system libraries. Without the LGPL, it wouldn't be possible to (legally) write closed source software for Linux, since the license for glibc (the standard system library) would require all apps linked against it be GPL.
It's also bad in the US. You pay for data totally seperate from voice. The largest data plan available from most carriors is $12 per month for 8 Mbs. After that, you pay per k.
There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do flat rate for data any more than for voice. I don't know if the networks aren't really setup for data, or if they just don't want to sell it for some reason.
1. Do you ever use your email like an instant messenger? Meaning, do you and another person sit there writing messages to each other in almost real-time? You sit there pathetically pressing refresh or check email, waiting for the next reply? I have.
Yes, but not normally when instant messaging is available. I the long ago, bad old days (before ICQ existed) I was emailing back and forth with a friend that had moved to Boston university. He never replied to a message I was expecting, and SIX MONTHs later it just showed up.
It had hung in one of the several email relays between us and just stayed there until the server was next rebooted. When he stopped emailing, I was vaguly pissed that he didn't send a quick 'gotta go' or some such. 6 months later I talked to him, and found that he'd felt the same way.
The extra to charge the battery is partly my point. How efficient is the charging process for the battery? How much more does it take to charge the battery, versus the amount the battery actually holds.
Also, when the laptop is running on an external source, does it run from the battery (which is charged continually), or directly from the external source?
If it runs from the battery which just charges continually, there will be some power loss. It depends on how efficient the charging process is. This is the setup used by some UPS's, so it could be how laptops work. I have no idea.
It might be that there is very little energy lost when charging a battery. However, since laptops normally live a feast or famine lifestyle, there is no reason to think that designers will have worried about how efficient the recharge process is.
1) A very small form factor that is easily portable, and easily stored out of the way. My experiences with cabins say that this is good.
2) The built in battery is a very effective UPS which is good when you are dealing with unreliable power sources (solar, etc).
Laptop Cons:
However, laptops are designed to be power efficient when running on battery, not when plugged into the wall. Depending on exactly how the battery charging works, they could be very inefficient when running on external power (like some UPS's are).
For example, I know the external power supplies draw some power whenever they are plugged in, not just when they are connected to a laptop.
A few years ago, I looked around and found that there weren't very many good lint like tools for C++ code. What would people recommend now?
In particular, I'm thinking about a very large source base (the Linux kernel is usually built along with the rest of the system), written in C++, but with a lot of source files in XML or custom formats that are processed via various build time programs in a variety of languages (TCL, Perl, Java, Python).
Multiple executables are produced, and some very tricky custom systems are used for memory and thread management.
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By the way, does anyone know if Dish Network's PVR phones home about my rewinding habits?
All of the DVRs do. It's a chance for an additional revenue stream, and what company can say no to that? Be afraid of the ones that don't say much about it.
Also be nervous about the smarter digital cable boxes, and about cell phones.
The cell phone carriers know a LOT about what you use your phone for. I recently heard a statistic from Sprint that most people play phone games in their own house, and had the chance to ask where the data came from..... The answer was from the tracking stats that Sprint keeps for all Sprint phones. Nobody present seemed bothered by that, I was badly scared.
I was at a game development conference a while back aimed at small/portable game platforms. One of the talks I attended went into the expected growth of the phone gaming market, and what types of games are the most popular (and why).
One of the important facts that came out is that most people who buy a phone that can download and play games will eventually do it, even if they didn't know or care about the ability to do so when they bought the phone.
It was also mentioned that the major carriers are aware of this, and plan to start only selling phones that support downloadable games and ringtones. They all those additional $1 and $2 purchases.
I also found it interesting that one of the best selling (and most consistant) games is hangman. It was strongly pointed out at the conference that most of the phone game market does NOT consist of traditional gamers, and their interests to do lay in the same things.
PS:
I recently bought a new phone with bluetooth. I didn't want the camera, but couldn't get the rest of the stuff I wanted without it.
Since then I've used it quite a bit, and not for the reasons you expect. For example, it's a really great way to entertain a 5 year old at a restaurant.
There are several store bought solutions to play music from your computer via the network, though most of them are expensive. One of them is a TiVo with Home Media Option. However, be careful, since not all models support HMO.
MAME is generally not available store bought for reasons that are unfortunate, but which should be obvous.
I agree with the poster about dual tuner Directv TiVo being amazing, but there is one problem.
The latest wave of cool features for TiVo, such as the home media option, boxes with DVD burning, etc aren't available in Directv versions. It's not a technology problem, but Directv won't allow their release (at least not so far).
On the other hand, the HD Directv TiVo will be out soon, and will only be for Directv (at least for the moment), though it does receive ATSC signals.
How do you know they weren't?
I've never heard this stated, but I've always believed that for home broadband (not business), one of the reasons they charge for static IPs is that the people who want them tend to be highest bandwidth consumers.
A way of charging for the extra bandwidth without admitting that bandwidth usage isn't unlimited.
It's still bites, but it makes a limited amount of sense.
It's illegal and all, but I want to have a movie server much like the music servers that people build.
I'll rip all my DVDs (a lot)stick them on the server, and then be able to play them back from any PC, or the TV without getting up or moving.
In addition, I'd like it to be able to easily serve other video such as Red versus Blue, etc easily.
I started on this, and was making progress, but had to loan out the machine for a 'quick' work project that has taken much longer than it should. At the time, the trickie part was not handling the video, it was maintaining ALL DVD features as I ripped and reencoded to something efficient enough to let me hope to fit all my DVDs on a 300 G drive.
Yeah, but they are planning to be back on the moon on 2013. Including the current, that spans 4 presidential terms.
Can the will to do this last that long? I certainly hope so, but....
I meant the guy prior to O'Keefe. Last name started with a Z or something?
That's true, but it's more of an aberation than the norm.
More money was spent redesigning the ISS to meet the continually changing requirements from congress than was in the original budget to complete and launch it.
NASA has wasted stupendous amounts of money over the years by starting projects and expecting congress to deliver the additional money (promised by congress) needed to complete them. Congress changes their minds, cuts and changes the budgets, and generally screws things up. The end results generally mean a lot of money spent, but little accomplished.
Part of the reason that NASA has been more effective over the last few years was that a new director came in (I forget his name), who understood what was happening and starting planning for it.
Amoung other things they are saying that they plan to scrap the shuttle fleet after ISS is finished.
It also says that NASA will be the only department other than homeland security and the military to get a budget increase. Personally, I'm not sure this will really happen, since they are planning through 2013, which is (including the current) four presidential terms away. The US goverment isn't very good at sticking with one plan that long.
I'm convinced that language and writing are the two most important inventions of all time. Nothing else we've done would have been possible without them.
They are more important than fire or argriculture or the scientific method, because all those other ideas would eventually be forgotten and lost without them.
To do them properly, does cost money.
In theory, the person signing your server certificate has gone to the effort to make sure that you really are who you say you are. This is the service that verisign is supposed to be providing.
This is supposed to keep joe cracker from getting a signed certificate for "www.amazon.com", which would allow them to create a server that posed as Amazon.
What you're saying is reasonable and correct. My problem is that my cable company won't tell me what the limits are.
They just say "we'll tell you if it's too much". Give me hard numbers, and I'm okay with that. Tell me that it's just controlled by somebody's whim, and I'm not happy.
My original agreement had no provisions for bandwidth limits, through it did have provisions for acceptable use, mostly meaning no servers of any kind allowed. My only unanswered question at the time was "What exactly is a server, does X Windows or sshd count?". I decided not to push since tech support might be dumb enough to decide they did.
Since then my account has been purchased by ATT Wireless and Comcast. In neither case did I get much useful information about the changes to the AUP were, and my only 'agreement' to the new terms was not not cancelling my account.
One the other hand, I've never gotten one of the letters despite standard heavy geek use (VNC, Gaming, ISO downloads, etc), plus rsyncing a very large collection of volital files from the office to the house every night at 3 AM.
An unbalanced workload is bad? That doesn't seem right to me.
With nothing but a quick impression, it seems that HT might be better at an unbalanced workload than an SMP machine. This is because with SMP, everything on the underutilized processor sits idle.
It would seem that HT would end up dedicating all functional units (outdated terminology?) to the thread the has the heavy load. Thus you can get better use of the functional units by moving them back and forth between threads as needed, at least until you have a cache miss in the busy thread.
I'm quite certain that people will correct me (at length) if I'm wrong, but here goes.
The GPL says that you can use source and code anyway that you want, but if you release modified versions, you must release the modified source under GPL.
The LGPL is intended for libraries that are released until the GPL. It says that commercial and other non-GPL projects can use this library without becoming GPL, but that changes to the library itself must be released under the LGPL.
LGPL is generally considered a lighter weight version of the GPL, and it normally used for things like system libraries. Without the LGPL, it wouldn't be possible to (legally) write closed source software for Linux, since the license for glibc (the standard system library) would require all apps linked against it be GPL.
It's also bad in the US. You pay for data totally seperate from voice. The largest data plan available from most carriors is $12 per month for 8 Mbs. After that, you pay per k.
There simply doesn't seem to be a way to do flat rate for data any more than for voice. I don't know if the networks aren't really setup for data, or if they just don't want to sell it for some reason.
In other words they are making a modification to the work which is authorized by the copyright holder. Which is, of course, perfectly legal.
Oh! They do better than I thought!
If I ever get one it'll have to be Sirius.
I don't think any of the Sat radios carry NPR or BBC. Which in my mind means that they don't carry news.
Yes, but not normally when instant messaging is available. I the long ago, bad old days (before ICQ existed) I was emailing back and forth with a friend that had moved to Boston university. He never replied to a message I was expecting, and SIX MONTHs later it just showed up.
It had hung in one of the several email relays between us and just stayed there until the server was next rebooted. When he stopped emailing, I was vaguly pissed that he didn't send a quick 'gotta go' or some such. 6 months later I talked to him, and found that he'd felt the same way.
The extra to charge the battery is partly my point. How efficient is the charging process for the battery? How much more does it take to charge the battery, versus the amount the battery actually holds.
Also, when the laptop is running on an external source, does it run from the battery (which is charged continually), or directly from the external source?
If it runs from the battery which just charges continually, there will be some power loss. It depends on how efficient the charging process is. This is the setup used by some UPS's, so it could be how laptops work. I have no idea.
It might be that there is very little energy lost when charging a battery. However, since laptops normally live a feast or famine lifestyle, there is no reason to think that designers will have worried about how efficient the recharge process is.
Laptop Pros:
1) A very small form factor that is easily portable, and easily stored out of the way. My experiences with cabins say that this is good.
2) The built in battery is a very effective UPS which is good when you are dealing with unreliable power sources (solar, etc).
Laptop Cons:
However, laptops are designed to be power efficient when running on battery, not when plugged into the wall. Depending on exactly how the battery charging works, they could be very inefficient when running on external power (like some UPS's are).
For example, I know the external power supplies draw some power whenever they are plugged in, not just when they are connected to a laptop.
Actually, I thought that projected movies where choppy and jittery long before I knew the frame rate was only 24 fps.
I've complained many, many times to management that their projectors were out of alignment.
A few years ago, I looked around and found that there weren't very many good lint like tools for C++ code. What would people recommend now?
In particular, I'm thinking about a very large source base (the Linux kernel is usually built along with the rest of the system), written in C++, but with a lot of source files in XML or custom formats that are processed via various build time programs in a variety of languages (TCL, Perl, Java, Python).
Multiple executables are produced, and some very tricky custom systems are used for memory and thread management.