1. Yes, it is compiled ahead-of-time so there is no violation of the iPhone Developer SDK ToS rules; this also means a lot of the powerful Reflection stuff doesn't work because you can't do runtime inquiry on a type and create an instance dynamically. It also means the DLR is unlikely to ever run on the iPhone.
2. Much of the types map to Objective-C types, UI Kit, etc, and so does the only GUI library. (Note that types like System.String map to NSString, etc as well.) You actually still do your GUI in Interface Builder, but MonoDevelop picks up changes to the XIB and auto-generates partial classes to represent the XIB actions and outlets. This step alone eliminates a lot of the boilerplate crap you have to do with Xcode that we Visual Studio developers are used to having the computer take care of automatically. Events can be handled via the C# obj.Event += handler syntax, MonoTouch takes care of hooking it up behind the scenes.
3. You can import Apple frameworks with DllImport and call any of the Foundation functions. There are also helpers that take handles (pointers) from those functions to Objective-C objects.
4. Most of the glue is automatic by decorating your classes/methods with the proper attributes (eg: make a class implement a protocol, then mark the methods as to what message in the protocol it handles). It really is a very slick package and a joy to use.
5. Garbage Collection! This rocks, it was very disappointing to see Apple fail to bring their GC over to the iPhone.
6. Most of your libraries aren't going to work because they require reflection, framework classes, etc that don't exist or aren't statically linkable into your executable. Besides, that isn't the point. For me, the point is to use a language I am used to (avoiding the @synthesize, -/+, and [[[[[[[ crap that makes Objective-C annoying to use). It is impossible to overstate how much the automatic hookup with XIB files makes developing a GUI so much easier to do. I only wish IB would automatically make all controls Outlets, then I'd be set. I find that you spend way too much time spitting out boilerplate code and doing repetitive boilerplate actions in IB when the computer could just as easily figure all that out for me (like Visual Studio does with a WinForms app).
Actually with DLP it isn't that hard to do the wavelength filtering that some modern cinema 3D systems are using, where the RGB components are projected twice, each with a slightly different wavelength of red, green, and blue light. Filters on either side of the glasses only let the "correct" wavelengths through. Supposedly it is a very natural-looking process, since you don't get the flickering or odd polarization effects. Oddly enough this would be easier to do with a single-chip DLP system than a three-chip system because you can split the color wheel up using the correct filters.
Indeed, on Windows NT based kernels page 0 is always mapped as inaccessible for this very reason and any attempt to access it terminates the offending program (or BSODs if you are in kernel land).
A crash isn't good, but it is certainly better than a root exploit.
We used TuneCore to distribute the album that I engineered and produced, it worked out really well. I'm just waiting for TuneCore to get their widget back up and running and their service will be perfect. Amazon previously used a different on-demand CD manufacturing service which would have left us with almost nothing in the way of royalties and looked like questionable quality, plus we wanted to press Vinyl so we handled all the physical stuff ourselves. I can confirm that both TuneCore and Amazon's CD services (at least as of two months ago) were doing burned CDRs with dye-sub printed surfaces. For about $1,000 you can actually press CDs instead of burn them, so if you can sell any kind of quantity it is totally worth it.
Still, the Amazon Advantage (advantage.amazon.com) program let us get our vinyl onto their site without any issues. We only did a limited run of promo CDs (mixonic) and have pretty much skipped the CD - digital satisfies most people and Vinyl is great for collectors who want the physical item, artwork, etc. Vinyl was pressed locally, which was extremely price-competitive even compared to eastern-european pressing plants.
I suspect there is something else at work here, because in my suburban neighborhood Verizon ran fiber to every home. Did I mention that all my utilities are underground, even electricity?
Running conduit, installing weatherproof ground boxes, pulling fiber through them, then burying fiber going to the houses is a *lot* more expensive than stringing it on poles. Especially when you have to avoid deadly things like electric lines in the same vicinity.
I give credit to Verizon - they are the only ILEC that is actually delivering on the promise of running fiber to the home. They've taken a lot of flak from the "Wall St" crowd over it because those analysts only want to see next quarter's numbers pumped and laying fiber is a long-term move, but I'm glad they have done it. I have 50/20 service and am very happy with it. I expect competition with next-gen DOCSIS rollouts to bring me increased speeds within the next year or two.
While that may be true, you must also understand that in a consumer-driven economy you must have *large* numbers of consumers with disposable income to drive the economy. Any long-term concentration of wealth can act like a money sink, preventing the "trickle-down" from taking effect.
In other words there are only so many yachts and mansions Bill Gates can possibly own and at some point more money is just the billionaire equivalent of any other form of pensu waving. If the government takes more of his money and gives it to consumers to spend, they will spend it on consumer goods, thus increasing sales, and stimulating the economy. But like any strategy, the negatives can overtake the positives if you go too far... take too much money and the rich man can't make investments that provide capital for business to function. But even then too much investment in infrastructure and capital projects without enough consumers creating demand for those products and you are back in trouble.
I think the case can certainly be made that we have moved too far into the concentration of wealth category and a little government taking and spending can help rebalance the economy. Then when that goes too far, the next Regan can come in and cut taxes, starting the cycle over again.
While this is a good idea in the sense that no one likes being electrocuted, the risk of DC shock is more about burns than anything else, since there isn't any alternating current to cause fibrillation of the heart.
The idea of GFCI is to detect the current imbalance (magnetically) within a short enough time frame that the AC jolt doesn't cause a disruption of your heart rhythms.
DC power lost the "current wars" because we didn't have solid state transformers capable of doing voltage step up/down like we did with AC back in the day (simple wound transformers).
These days even the cost of really high power DC transformers (>500,000 volts) is offset by more efficient transmission and a number of notable long-distance power lines are actually DC for that reason (lower losses offset cost of transformers).
By stepping up the voltage, such as to 48v, you can significantly lower the losses, shrink required conductor sizes, make the circuit breakers cheaper, and still derive the same benefits (48v->12v->5v->3.3v DC transformers are actually fairly cheap, unlike their high-power cousins).
Why do you think some car makers are switching to 48v DC on-board power and 48v batteries? You can greatly increase efficiency and lower weight since so many devices are electrical on modern cars.
Because there is only one 48VDC power supply for a room, it has to be held up to a lot more rigorous standards than average mains current. It has to not just provide 48VDC, but provide it under extremely heavy load without the voltage dropping by much.
No, you can have multiple DC supplies dumping power onto a common supply rail with just a few extra electronics and protection devices. You don't have sync issues like with AC power where everything needs to be exactly in-phase.
Furthermore these devices can be placed in the basement, on the roof, etc in locations that aren't necessarily required to be held at some constant cool temperature, as they can function in a much wider range without noticeable loss of service life.
Because the power delivered is roughly voltage * current (amps), by bumping the voltage you can lower the current and carry the same effective power across smaller wires, which is a huge cost savings given the cost of copper, circuit breakers, etc.
*Yes, I know this is a very rough description and I haven't posted the proper mathematical formulas.
First of all, Windows uses virtual memory to map things like executable pages and DLLs into memory, so they only get loaded if a particular function gets executed... parts of an EXE or DLL that aren't used are always considered "paged to disk", even though they don't take up any space in the page file and were never loaded into RAM. If you access these pages, Windows will dutifully read them from the original file into memory.
This is related to the prefetch system that attempts to say "ah, i always end up loading these other pages over the next 20 seconds of program start anyway, might as well just let the HDD keep churning while the user is moving the mouse to the open button that normally triggers the page faults and save some time". If you didn't do it this way you'd have to stare at the hourglass waiting for the entire EXE to load into memory (and other stuff to get paged out if necessary, or even dumping some read cache which may in turn make performance even worse). If you don't prefetch, then every new function invocation can potentially cause a page fault. So sure, after you see Word up and running the HDD is churning for 20 seconds. That's fine with me - Windows is just pre-caching the parts of winword.exe it knows I usually end up needing anyway.
Windows will also immediately dump bits of read cache as well as memory that is already stored on disk (such as DLLs) if there is a sudden demand for more RAM, thus allowing that memory allocation to succeed immediately instead of waiting five minutes for everything to get paged to the swap file first. Windows will also scan memory looking for bits that aren't already on disk and write them there during idle times, just so it has the option of dumping that RAM if needed. You aren't using the hard disk anyway, why not?
The caching system also plays into this, and Windows may determine that the system will be faster overall if these bits of data are cached while those bits of data are written to the page file. (See the server vs workstation defaults in My Computer properties about prioritize applications or cache).
Are these algorithms perfect? Certainly not, but they do help, and none of it is arbitrary.
The real purpose of DRM, especially the EA "limited installs" kind, is to shut down the resale market. The publishers look at that market and think "they're selling my games for free! those bastards...".
Like the telcos who talk tough words about "using my pipes for free", they fail to acknowledge that We the People own the land, and our government has graciously granted them access to right-of-way on our behalf, to run their lines and deliver their services. Like a renter, the furniture (pipes) may be yours, but the building (right-of-way) belongs to us. We can easily terminate their access if we decide it is in society's best interests.
Copyright is (was) a balance between encouraging creativity and our natural right to share, duplicate, and/or dispose of our own personal property however we see fit, regardless of its content or the desire of the creator. Blatant attempts to alter the balance in your own favor cannot be tolerated. We've seen what happens when the financial sector is allowed to have the very ropes with which to hang themselves, we can't let the rest of our society go down the same path.
First, the obvious as everyone has already pointed out: lots of firewalls and routers drop ICMP or don't respond to pings, so this survey is useless.
Second, so what? Even if it were a valid survey, a few million more addresses aren't going to help the situation. Every proposed stopgap just extends the exhaustion date a year or less into the future.
To me, the failure of IPv6 is that it is really an entirely different protocol sharing a similar name. If IPv6 had simply extended the 32-bit address space it would be a much more straightforward upgrade from IPv4.
If you know the blur algorithm, you can run each character through it to produce the blurred output, then compare that result to the image you are trying to unscramble and pick the closest match.
This assumes the blurring doesn't cause pixels to overlap their neighbors too much, that the algorithm produces deterministic output (isn't random), and that there are few possible inputs resulting in the same blurred output.
If the letters overlap because the blur blends with its neighbors then it just becomes a computational complexity problem where you have to try words instead of letters. A lot harder, but not totally impossible.
A blurring algorithm that used some large mosaic effect prior to bluring or used randomized input would produce a similar looking blur effect, but without disclosing much about the input.
Personally, I'd prefer examining the blur area for the predominant background color and create a gradient/mosaic around that color to fill the area. Then there is absolutely no chance of recovering information, but the effect on video wouldn't be too horribly jarring (as a black box might be).
1. Look at DNS requests or do a IP-domain reverse lookup to know what websites the target is visiting over HTTPS. Automated tool can do this over time.
2. On next regular HTTP request by your target, be a man-in-the-middle and inject an image pointing to desired HTTPS site, except don't use HTTPS - just HTTP.
3. Browser will dutifully send the cookie along with the image request over plain HTTP (after all, the domain names match), even though the cookie was created and managed only via HTTPS by the original website.
4. Now your automated sniffer just picked up the supposedly "secure" cookie for the HTTPS site, even though you never even attempted to hack the HTTPS conversation. If the site stores your username/password, a session id, etc this could expose sensitive information.
5. Protect your applications by setting the encrypted session only flag on the cookie so the browser won't send it with plain HTTP requests. If you have HTTP and HTTPS areas of the site, keep separate cookies for both areas and make sure sensitive info is only stored in the HTTPS-only cookie.
You can own fully-automatic rifles, silencers, and the like in over half of US states.
First you purchase the weapon in question, and you'll pay anywhere from $10,000 and up (that alone makes it merely a rich-boys toy and not something likely to be used in a crime). You fill out the "trasnfer" paperwork and pay the $200 "transfer tax" to the ATF. It will include background checks, running fingerprints, etc. From what I hear, it typically takes six months for all the paperwork to go through. Once it does, you can pickup your weapon.
Individuals must also get signoff from the Sheriff in their county, but in areas with anti-gun sheriffs you can register an LLP or S-corp and buy the weapon through that to avoid the Sheriff requirement.
Why don't criminals, specifically gang members and drug dealers, bother using these kinds of weapons? It might be because they can much more easily and cheaply modify a non-auto weapon to fire in full auto and any dumbass with a lathe can make a silencer. But the reality is that criminals most often want something they can conceal easily and automatic weapons are anything but concealable. I believe the FBI data bears this out... no ATF registered properly transferred automatic weapon has been used in a crime, save one - issued to a police officer by his department I believe.
... and I forgot to add that it takes *time* for things like this to work their way through the legal system. It will probably be 10 years after the SCOTUS decision before most judges are aware and everyone is more properly applying the standard SCOTUS set down. In that time period you can expect patent trolls to continue attempting to operate and companies continue attempting to enforce bogus patents.
As more and more of these cases are dismissed in summary judgement and the patent office reviews more and more patents, these kinds of things will die down somewhat (at least I really hope so).
You've also go to understand that a patent examiner, under the rules prior to this decision, had to articulate very specific reasons arrived at under a very specific standard, to deny the patent. Otherwise they'd get sued and the courts would often overturn the examiner. The new SCOTUS decision also affects the examiners - by letting them deny patent claims without having to meet an impossibly high standard.
IIRC, the recent KSR v Teleflex decision by SCOTUS has nullified these kinds of patents (cell + email = we can sue the pants off RIM!)
In a unanimous decision (a rarity these days), SCOTUS said that if an ordinary person skilled in the area set out to solve the same problem and would immediately come up with the same solution, then that is not patentable. In other words if the combination results from nothing more than "ordinary innovation" and "does no more than yield predictable results" then the idea is not worthy of patent protection.
So in your case, applying that old idea to a new technology would need to produce more than just the predictable results. In the RIM case, it would have to yield something more than just transporting email over the cellular network, which is easily predictable.
Certainly the blunders of their competitors were a huge help; Bill Gates is correct and if you look, Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes but they've never stopped improving the products. Very rarely is a Microsoft product discontinued at 1.0 or 2.0; granted, it might not exceed the competition until version 6.0, but it always improves.
Another has been simplicity, and one that Microsoft is getting away from. NT domains were fairly simple to understand and setup. Exchange 2000 was easy to get running (Exchange 2007 is a beast by comparison, much much harder to use).
Another is their developer tools, and this one still applies. You can install Windows, SQL Server, and Visual Studio and have an easy to use complete development environment. They always provide a lot of information and samples for integrating with other products like Exchange, Sharepoint, IIS, etc. This becomes a self-sustaining user community. If I want to know how to hook up to some random USB sensor device from company XYZ, I know the fastest and easiest way is to search for "deviceXYZ USB C#". On the first google page someone will have posted example code detailing how to do it.
I don't have to pick from 13 different IDEs, 5 different app servers, 18 different packages/JARs, or whatever else. I don't have to spend time thinking about "the platform" if I go with Microsoft. I don't have to figure out exactly what JVM version is installed or what version of what kernel/.SO needs to be installed. All those decisions have been made for me and I can get on with the business of writing code that I can actually hang sales on - that will actually pay my mortgage. No time spent on any of that other crap will ever make me a single dollar, and everyone already has Windows boxes anyway so requiring Windows isn't a barrier to entry anywhere except maybe at Sun.
Manufacturers aren't blind to this (part of the self-sustaining community/critical mass. Why do all other auction sites fail? Because buyers want a lot of sellers and sellers want a lot of buyers, hence eBay is the monopoly. The same thing applies here). They write drivers for windows, provide code samples for VB or C#, etc.
Is the Microsoft platform the best way to accomplish things? Maybe, maybe not. Can I get it to perform well and be reliable without having to spend a lot of time messing with it? Absolutely. Do I have to worry about supporting the platform itself? Nope. I just spec Windows 2003 SP1, SQL 2005, CLR 3.5 and that's it. That is all that I and the client need to know to be absolutely certain that the app is going to work on their system. I know where events will be logged. I know where files will be installed. I know what libraries are present and I know there probably won't be any bugs due to incompatible versions.
I work with pro audio as a side-gig, mixing local events, etc. I've worked on systems as small as $10,000 and as large as $1 million, just on the audio gear.
It always amazes me that people will spend $1000/ft on worthless junk cables but don't demand that manufacturers add balanced connections to their gear.
Typically you pipe analog audio around on a balanced line - three wires, +, -, and ground. Interference affects both + and - the same, so when you get to the other end of the connection you invert the - signal, add it together and boom - you just canceled out the majority of the interference and noise. This is a simplified description of what happens, but still... it would make a hell of a bigger difference than using de-oxygenated gold cables.
What is even *more* amazing is that people believe that such things can have any effect on digital signals. If a cable is marginal it might cause occasional corruption of bits, which would manifest itself as highly distorted audio... or even random screetching. Otherwise if the cable meets some minimum standard it can't possibly affect the signal. Either the bits make it across the wire or they don't. With input buffers you don't even have to worry about jitter anymore.
If only the rest of us got that luxury! Maybe barbers would like to be paid based on the number of people who compliment you on your haircut. The barber doesn't need to pay for all the haircuts he gave that no one complimented. Let that sink in for a minute.
I know it is trendy to blame publishers for giving all these flop-projects money, but I know people in the publishing business and they have developers come to them with great ideas, good concept art, etc, who then after a year or two and a lot of money produce a game that just isn't very much fun. The "hit" games need to cover not only their production cost and some profit, but they also need to cover the creative ventures that didn't go anywhere.
You can't reduce the creative process to some formula; anyone who thinks they can always predict whether something will be a success or not is someone who isn't doing anything interesting (read: taking risks). I've looked over some examples of this myself from my publisher friends and if I were in their shoes, I would have green-lit the game too... but the end product was a piece of junk.
Granted, you can go way too far down that road like the big record companies, where you try to manufacture hits and shove artists down the public's throat, but even the best-managed record/movie/game/etc company will bet on the wrong horse some of the time. Game publishers don't even have the benefit of being able to go observe the developers in action at small local clubs like musicians or see them in a local theater company like you could with an actor. You have to take a lot on faith.
Except OOXML already is the standard, or at least the spiritual successor to it. Microsoft Word is how 90% of the world creates their documents.
Here we have the company responsible for that 90% (if not more!) wanting to open up their file format and make it an ISO standard, giving the wider global community some sort of say in the process, for the first time ever. There is absolutely no reason to oppose OOXML's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand.
Let me repeat that: the vast majority of human beings on this planet that need to create a document in a word processor do it with some version of Microsoft Word. Period. This is *FACT*. Any move toward putting that file format into an open standard is a good move.
Complaining that the first version has technical flaws is just as useless. The ISO can address that with revisions. Some of those "flaws" are directly related to preserving the ability of a word processor to open older documents and render them properly (think un-translatable languages. will archaeologists be able to open a 100-yr old Word document in the future? 500 year old? I hope so, because that will be a regular part of the job...). If you've ever read Joel's article about the file formats, you'd understand that there are some behaviors that simply can't be described other than to say "here is the piece of code that produces that output". Microsoft didn't care back then - I doubt you would have given a rat's ass in the 80s either under the same circumstances and with the same disk and memory limits. We know a lot more about software development now.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who opposes the adoption of OOXML can go piss up a rope. As a developer I'm more than happy to have, for the first time ever, some readily available documentation on the file format and a standards body that will at least try to take care of the standard, whether they ever succeed or not.
1) Run as root, administrator, or some other super-trusted user account and completely disregard security 2) Open anything they receive in email. I've even had some users do a Save-As giving the file the correct extension to be runnable!
These are a result of fundamental flaws in the design of Windows, Unix, et al. Most operating systems assume that all programs should have the ability to do whatever the user can do. In other words, programs are as trusted as the user account they run under.
Given people's experiences with OS X's admin dialogs or Vista's UAC, I'm not sure changing this assumption will lead to more security either. Most users, when presented with a dialog box, will immediately press whatever button is required to dismiss the dialog without reading it.
Even if the default is cancel, the first time they hit "naked ladies.jpg.exe", get a warning, and dismiss it they'll just figure they did something wrong and open it again, choosing the other option this time.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
A joke or not and all other things aside
on
Rambus Wins Patent Case
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When you see the memos and emails circulated amongst the big RAM players on the JDEC saying stuff like "in the future all memory will be made this way, but we won't pay royalties to RAMBUS" (or along similar lines) you realize RAMBUS isn't the evil patent troll they get made out to be.
The fact is that modern DDR/DDR2 DRAM uses much of RAMBUS' original design elements. Hynix, Micron, Samsung... they all colluded together in an illegal fashion to keep RAMBUS scarce (and thus more expensive) and to steal the technology to implement the next DRAM standard. They were all convicted on criminal charges related to this and DRAM price fixing and most of the companies not only pled guilty, but paid huge fines for it. I think most of the ill-will for RAMBUS comes from the Intel agreement, which was rightfully maligned as a bad thing but has nothing to do with the patent infringement case.
Let's say you are a small inventor who has come up with a new RAM technology. Now let's say you join the standards committee and offer up your new technology for the next standard under RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing) terms. Instead of accepting your tech for the standard, the big players all rip it off and tell you to go get a lawyer if you don't like it. What would you do? Sit back and take it? You don't have the resources to open up a fab and make it yourself. You did all the research and hard work, you own the patents, but the big boys don't care - they're using your tech anyway. Not a good situation to be in and I don't blame RAMBUS one bit for doing what they can to get some justice.
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Let me clarify how this works:
1. Yes, it is compiled ahead-of-time so there is no violation of the iPhone Developer SDK ToS rules; this also means a lot of the powerful Reflection stuff doesn't work because you can't do runtime inquiry on a type and create an instance dynamically. It also means the DLR is unlikely to ever run on the iPhone.
2. Much of the types map to Objective-C types, UI Kit, etc, and so does the only GUI library. (Note that types like System.String map to NSString, etc as well.)
You actually still do your GUI in Interface Builder, but MonoDevelop picks up changes to the XIB and auto-generates partial classes to represent the XIB actions and outlets. This step alone eliminates a lot of the boilerplate crap you have to do with Xcode that we Visual Studio developers are used to having the computer take care of automatically. Events can be handled via the C# obj.Event += handler syntax, MonoTouch takes care of hooking it up behind the scenes.
3. You can import Apple frameworks with DllImport and call any of the Foundation functions. There are also helpers that take handles (pointers) from those functions to Objective-C objects.
4. Most of the glue is automatic by decorating your classes/methods with the proper attributes (eg: make a class implement a protocol, then mark the methods as to what message in the protocol it handles). It really is a very slick package and a joy to use.
5. Garbage Collection! This rocks, it was very disappointing to see Apple fail to bring their GC over to the iPhone.
6. Most of your libraries aren't going to work because they require reflection, framework classes, etc that don't exist or aren't statically linkable into your executable. Besides, that isn't the point. For me, the point is to use a language I am used to (avoiding the @synthesize, -/+, and [[[[[[[ crap that makes Objective-C annoying to use). It is impossible to overstate how much the automatic hookup with XIB files makes developing a GUI so much easier to do. I only wish IB would automatically make all controls Outlets, then I'd be set. I find that you spend way too much time spitting out boilerplate code and doing repetitive boilerplate actions in IB when the computer could just as easily figure all that out for me (like Visual Studio does with a WinForms app).
Actually with DLP it isn't that hard to do the wavelength filtering that some modern cinema 3D systems are using, where the RGB components are projected twice, each with a slightly different wavelength of red, green, and blue light. Filters on either side of the glasses only let the "correct" wavelengths through. Supposedly it is a very natural-looking process, since you don't get the flickering or odd polarization effects. Oddly enough this would be easier to do with a single-chip DLP system than a three-chip system because you can split the color wheel up using the correct filters.
Indeed, on Windows NT based kernels page 0 is always mapped as inaccessible for this very reason and any attempt to access it terminates the offending program (or BSODs if you are in kernel land).
A crash isn't good, but it is certainly better than a root exploit.
We used TuneCore to distribute the album that I engineered and produced, it worked out really well. I'm just waiting for TuneCore to get their widget back up and running and their service will be perfect. Amazon previously used a different on-demand CD manufacturing service which would have left us with almost nothing in the way of royalties and looked like questionable quality, plus we wanted to press Vinyl so we handled all the physical stuff ourselves. I can confirm that both TuneCore and Amazon's CD services (at least as of two months ago) were doing burned CDRs with dye-sub printed surfaces. For about $1,000 you can actually press CDs instead of burn them, so if you can sell any kind of quantity it is totally worth it.
Still, the Amazon Advantage (advantage.amazon.com) program let us get our vinyl onto their site without any issues. We only did a limited run of promo CDs (mixonic) and have pretty much skipped the CD - digital satisfies most people and Vinyl is great for collectors who want the physical item, artwork, etc. Vinyl was pressed locally, which was extremely price-competitive even compared to eastern-european pressing plants.
Full disclosure and shameless plug: http://www.jackwithoneeye.com/ and Vinyl link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001PQN7VM
I suspect there is something else at work here, because in my suburban neighborhood Verizon ran fiber to every home. Did I mention that all my utilities are underground, even electricity?
Running conduit, installing weatherproof ground boxes, pulling fiber through them, then burying fiber going to the houses is a *lot* more expensive than stringing it on poles. Especially when you have to avoid deadly things like electric lines in the same vicinity.
I give credit to Verizon - they are the only ILEC that is actually delivering on the promise of running fiber to the home. They've taken a lot of flak from the "Wall St" crowd over it because those analysts only want to see next quarter's numbers pumped and laying fiber is a long-term move, but I'm glad they have done it. I have 50/20 service and am very happy with it. I expect competition with next-gen DOCSIS rollouts to bring me increased speeds within the next year or two.
While that may be true, you must also understand that in a consumer-driven economy you must have *large* numbers of consumers with disposable income to drive the economy. Any long-term concentration of wealth can act like a money sink, preventing the "trickle-down" from taking effect.
In other words there are only so many yachts and mansions Bill Gates can possibly own and at some point more money is just the billionaire equivalent of any other form of pensu waving. If the government takes more of his money and gives it to consumers to spend, they will spend it on consumer goods, thus increasing sales, and stimulating the economy. But like any strategy, the negatives can overtake the positives if you go too far... take too much money and the rich man can't make investments that provide capital for business to function. But even then too much investment in infrastructure and capital projects without enough consumers creating demand for those products and you are back in trouble.
I think the case can certainly be made that we have moved too far into the concentration of wealth category and a little government taking and spending can help rebalance the economy. Then when that goes too far, the next Regan can come in and cut taxes, starting the cycle over again.
While this is a good idea in the sense that no one likes being electrocuted, the risk of DC shock is more about burns than anything else, since there isn't any alternating current to cause fibrillation of the heart.
The idea of GFCI is to detect the current imbalance (magnetically) within a short enough time frame that the AC jolt doesn't cause a disruption of your heart rhythms.
DC power lost the "current wars" because we didn't have solid state transformers capable of doing voltage step up/down like we did with AC back in the day (simple wound transformers).
These days even the cost of really high power DC transformers (>500,000 volts) is offset by more efficient transmission and a number of notable long-distance power lines are actually DC for that reason (lower losses offset cost of transformers).
By stepping up the voltage, such as to 48v, you can significantly lower the losses, shrink required conductor sizes, make the circuit breakers cheaper, and still derive the same benefits (48v->12v->5v->3.3v DC transformers are actually fairly cheap, unlike their high-power cousins).
Why do you think some car makers are switching to 48v DC on-board power and 48v batteries? You can greatly increase efficiency and lower weight since so many devices are electrical on modern cars.
Because there is only one 48VDC power supply for a room, it has to be held up to a lot more rigorous standards than average mains current. It has to not just provide 48VDC, but provide it under extremely heavy load without the voltage dropping by much.
No, you can have multiple DC supplies dumping power onto a common supply rail with just a few extra electronics and protection devices. You don't have sync issues like with AC power where everything needs to be exactly in-phase.
Furthermore these devices can be placed in the basement, on the roof, etc in locations that aren't necessarily required to be held at some constant cool temperature, as they can function in a much wider range without noticeable loss of service life.
Because the power delivered is roughly voltage * current (amps), by bumping the voltage you can lower the current and carry the same effective power across smaller wires, which is a huge cost savings given the cost of copper, circuit breakers, etc.
*Yes, I know this is a very rough description and I haven't posted the proper mathematical formulas.
First of all, Windows uses virtual memory to map things like executable pages and DLLs into memory, so they only get loaded if a particular function gets executed... parts of an EXE or DLL that aren't used are always considered "paged to disk", even though they don't take up any space in the page file and were never loaded into RAM. If you access these pages, Windows will dutifully read them from the original file into memory.
This is related to the prefetch system that attempts to say "ah, i always end up loading these other pages over the next 20 seconds of program start anyway, might as well just let the HDD keep churning while the user is moving the mouse to the open button that normally triggers the page faults and save some time". If you didn't do it this way you'd have to stare at the hourglass waiting for the entire EXE to load into memory (and other stuff to get paged out if necessary, or even dumping some read cache which may in turn make performance even worse). If you don't prefetch, then every new function invocation can potentially cause a page fault. So sure, after you see Word up and running the HDD is churning for 20 seconds. That's fine with me - Windows is just pre-caching the parts of winword.exe it knows I usually end up needing anyway.
Windows will also immediately dump bits of read cache as well as memory that is already stored on disk (such as DLLs) if there is a sudden demand for more RAM, thus allowing that memory allocation to succeed immediately instead of waiting five minutes for everything to get paged to the swap file first. Windows will also scan memory looking for bits that aren't already on disk and write them there during idle times, just so it has the option of dumping that RAM if needed. You aren't using the hard disk anyway, why not?
The caching system also plays into this, and Windows may determine that the system will be faster overall if these bits of data are cached while those bits of data are written to the page file. (See the server vs workstation defaults in My Computer properties about prioritize applications or cache).
Are these algorithms perfect? Certainly not, but they do help, and none of it is arbitrary.
The real purpose of DRM, especially the EA "limited installs" kind, is to shut down the resale market. The publishers look at that market and think "they're selling my games for free! those bastards...".
Like the telcos who talk tough words about "using my pipes for free", they fail to acknowledge that We the People own the land, and our government has graciously granted them access to right-of-way on our behalf, to run their lines and deliver their services. Like a renter, the furniture (pipes) may be yours, but the building (right-of-way) belongs to us. We can easily terminate their access if we decide it is in society's best interests.
Copyright is (was) a balance between encouraging creativity and our natural right to share, duplicate, and/or dispose of our own personal property however we see fit, regardless of its content or the desire of the creator. Blatant attempts to alter the balance in your own favor cannot be tolerated. We've seen what happens when the financial sector is allowed to have the very ropes with which to hang themselves, we can't let the rest of our society go down the same path.
First, the obvious as everyone has already pointed out: lots of firewalls and routers drop ICMP or don't respond to pings, so this survey is useless.
Second, so what? Even if it were a valid survey, a few million more addresses aren't going to help the situation. Every proposed stopgap just extends the exhaustion date a year or less into the future.
To me, the failure of IPv6 is that it is really an entirely different protocol sharing a similar name. If IPv6 had simply extended the 32-bit address space it would be a much more straightforward upgrade from IPv4.
If you know the blur algorithm, you can run each character through it to produce the blurred output, then compare that result to the image you are trying to unscramble and pick the closest match.
This assumes the blurring doesn't cause pixels to overlap their neighbors too much, that the algorithm produces deterministic output (isn't random), and that there are few possible inputs resulting in the same blurred output.
If the letters overlap because the blur blends with its neighbors then it just becomes a computational complexity problem where you have to try words instead of letters. A lot harder, but not totally impossible.
A blurring algorithm that used some large mosaic effect prior to bluring or used randomized input would produce a similar looking blur effect, but without disclosing much about the input.
Personally, I'd prefer examining the blur area for the predominant background color and create a gradient/mosaic around that color to fill the area. Then there is absolutely no chance of recovering information, but the effect on video wouldn't be too horribly jarring (as a black box might be).
1. Look at DNS requests or do a IP-domain reverse lookup to know what websites the target is visiting over HTTPS. Automated tool can do this over time.
2. On next regular HTTP request by your target, be a man-in-the-middle and inject an image pointing to desired HTTPS site, except don't use HTTPS - just HTTP.
3. Browser will dutifully send the cookie along with the image request over plain HTTP (after all, the domain names match), even though the cookie was created and managed only via HTTPS by the original website.
4. Now your automated sniffer just picked up the supposedly "secure" cookie for the HTTPS site, even though you never even attempted to hack the HTTPS conversation. If the site stores your username/password, a session id, etc this could expose sensitive information.
5. Protect your applications by setting the encrypted session only flag on the cookie so the browser won't send it with plain HTTP requests. If you have HTTP and HTTPS areas of the site, keep separate cookies for both areas and make sure sensitive info is only stored in the HTTPS-only cookie.
Wow, $29.95 for unlimited text messages? My sprint plan only charges me $5/mo for unlimited texting.
You can own fully-automatic rifles, silencers, and the like in over half of US states.
First you purchase the weapon in question, and you'll pay anywhere from $10,000 and up (that alone makes it merely a rich-boys toy and not something likely to be used in a crime). You fill out the "trasnfer" paperwork and pay the $200 "transfer tax" to the ATF. It will include background checks, running fingerprints, etc. From what I hear, it typically takes six months for all the paperwork to go through. Once it does, you can pickup your weapon.
Individuals must also get signoff from the Sheriff in their county, but in areas with anti-gun sheriffs you can register an LLP or S-corp and buy the weapon through that to avoid the Sheriff requirement.
Why don't criminals, specifically gang members and drug dealers, bother using these kinds of weapons? It might be because they can much more easily and cheaply modify a non-auto weapon to fire in full auto and any dumbass with a lathe can make a silencer. But the reality is that criminals most often want something they can conceal easily and automatic weapons are anything but concealable. I believe the FBI data bears this out... no ATF registered properly transferred automatic weapon has been used in a crime, save one - issued to a police officer by his department I believe.
... and I forgot to add that it takes *time* for things like this to work their way through the legal system. It will probably be 10 years after the SCOTUS decision before most judges are aware and everyone is more properly applying the standard SCOTUS set down. In that time period you can expect patent trolls to continue attempting to operate and companies continue attempting to enforce bogus patents.
As more and more of these cases are dismissed in summary judgement and the patent office reviews more and more patents, these kinds of things will die down somewhat (at least I really hope so).
You've also go to understand that a patent examiner, under the rules prior to this decision, had to articulate very specific reasons arrived at under a very specific standard, to deny the patent. Otherwise they'd get sued and the courts would often overturn the examiner. The new SCOTUS decision also affects the examiners - by letting them deny patent claims without having to meet an impossibly high standard.
IIRC, the recent KSR v Teleflex decision by SCOTUS has nullified these kinds of patents (cell + email = we can sue the pants off RIM!)
In a unanimous decision (a rarity these days), SCOTUS said that if an ordinary person skilled in the area set out to solve the same problem and would immediately come up with the same solution, then that is not patentable. In other words if the combination results from nothing more than "ordinary innovation" and "does no more than yield predictable results" then the idea is not worthy of patent protection.
So in your case, applying that old idea to a new technology would need to produce more than just the predictable results. In the RIM case, it would have to yield something more than just transporting email over the cellular network, which is easily predictable.
Certainly the blunders of their competitors were a huge help; Bill Gates is correct and if you look, Microsoft has made a lot of mistakes but they've never stopped improving the products. Very rarely is a Microsoft product discontinued at 1.0 or 2.0; granted, it might not exceed the competition until version 6.0, but it always improves.
Another has been simplicity, and one that Microsoft is getting away from. NT domains were fairly simple to understand and setup. Exchange 2000 was easy to get running (Exchange 2007 is a beast by comparison, much much harder to use).
Another is their developer tools, and this one still applies. You can install Windows, SQL Server, and Visual Studio and have an easy to use complete development environment. They always provide a lot of information and samples for integrating with other products like Exchange, Sharepoint, IIS, etc. This becomes a self-sustaining user community. If I want to know how to hook up to some random USB sensor device from company XYZ, I know the fastest and easiest way is to search for "deviceXYZ USB C#". On the first google page someone will have posted example code detailing how to do it.
I don't have to pick from 13 different IDEs, 5 different app servers, 18 different packages/JARs, or whatever else. I don't have to spend time thinking about "the platform" if I go with Microsoft. I don't have to figure out exactly what JVM version is installed or what version of what kernel/.SO needs to be installed. All those decisions have been made for me and I can get on with the business of writing code that I can actually hang sales on - that will actually pay my mortgage. No time spent on any of that other crap will ever make me a single dollar, and everyone already has Windows boxes anyway so requiring Windows isn't a barrier to entry anywhere except maybe at Sun.
Manufacturers aren't blind to this (part of the self-sustaining community/critical mass. Why do all other auction sites fail? Because buyers want a lot of sellers and sellers want a lot of buyers, hence eBay is the monopoly. The same thing applies here). They write drivers for windows, provide code samples for VB or C#, etc.
Is the Microsoft platform the best way to accomplish things? Maybe, maybe not. Can I get it to perform well and be reliable without having to spend a lot of time messing with it? Absolutely. Do I have to worry about supporting the platform itself? Nope. I just spec Windows 2003 SP1, SQL 2005, CLR 3.5 and that's it. That is all that I and the client need to know to be absolutely certain that the app is going to work on their system. I know where events will be logged. I know where files will be installed. I know what libraries are present and I know there probably won't be any bugs due to incompatible versions.
I work with pro audio as a side-gig, mixing local events, etc. I've worked on systems as small as $10,000 and as large as $1 million, just on the audio gear.
It always amazes me that people will spend $1000/ft on worthless junk cables but don't demand that manufacturers add balanced connections to their gear.
Typically you pipe analog audio around on a balanced line - three wires, +, -, and ground. Interference affects both + and - the same, so when you get to the other end of the connection you invert the - signal, add it together and boom - you just canceled out the majority of the interference and noise. This is a simplified description of what happens, but still... it would make a hell of a bigger difference than using de-oxygenated gold cables.
What is even *more* amazing is that people believe that such things can have any effect on digital signals. If a cable is marginal it might cause occasional corruption of bits, which would manifest itself as highly distorted audio... or even random screetching. Otherwise if the cable meets some minimum standard it can't possibly affect the signal. Either the bits make it across the wire or they don't. With input buffers you don't even have to worry about jitter anymore.
I know it is trendy to blame publishers for giving all these flop-projects money, but I know people in the publishing business and they have developers come to them with great ideas, good concept art, etc, who then after a year or two and a lot of money produce a game that just isn't very much fun. The "hit" games need to cover not only their production cost and some profit, but they also need to cover the creative ventures that didn't go anywhere.
You can't reduce the creative process to some formula; anyone who thinks they can always predict whether something will be a success or not is someone who isn't doing anything interesting (read: taking risks). I've looked over some examples of this myself from my publisher friends and if I were in their shoes, I would have green-lit the game too... but the end product was a piece of junk.
Granted, you can go way too far down that road like the big record companies, where you try to manufacture hits and shove artists down the public's throat, but even the best-managed record/movie/game/etc company will bet on the wrong horse some of the time. Game publishers don't even have the benefit of being able to go observe the developers in action at small local clubs like musicians or see them in a local theater company like you could with an actor. You have to take a lot on faith.
Except OOXML already is the standard, or at least the spiritual successor to it. Microsoft Word is how 90% of the world creates their documents.
Here we have the company responsible for that 90% (if not more!) wanting to open up their file format and make it an ISO standard, giving the wider global community some sort of say in the process, for the first time ever. There is absolutely no reason to oppose OOXML's adoption as a standard. It already *IS* the standard and any attempts to block it are just idiots sticking their head in the sand.
Let me repeat that: the vast majority of human beings on this planet that need to create a document in a word processor do it with some version of Microsoft Word. Period. This is *FACT*. Any move toward putting that file format into an open standard is a good move.
Complaining that the first version has technical flaws is just as useless. The ISO can address that with revisions. Some of those "flaws" are directly related to preserving the ability of a word processor to open older documents and render them properly (think un-translatable languages. will archaeologists be able to open a 100-yr old Word document in the future? 500 year old? I hope so, because that will be a regular part of the job...). If you've ever read Joel's article about the file formats, you'd understand that there are some behaviors that simply can't be described other than to say "here is the piece of code that produces that output". Microsoft didn't care back then - I doubt you would have given a rat's ass in the 80s either under the same circumstances and with the same disk and memory limits. We know a lot more about software development now.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone who opposes the adoption of OOXML can go piss up a rope. As a developer I'm more than happy to have, for the first time ever, some readily available documentation on the file format and a standards body that will at least try to take care of the standard, whether they ever succeed or not.
Regardless of platform, most users
1) Run as root, administrator, or some other super-trusted user account and completely disregard security
2) Open anything they receive in email. I've even had some users do a Save-As giving the file the correct extension to be runnable!
These are a result of fundamental flaws in the design of Windows, Unix, et al. Most operating systems assume that all programs should have the ability to do whatever the user can do. In other words, programs are as trusted as the user account they run under.
Given people's experiences with OS X's admin dialogs or Vista's UAC, I'm not sure changing this assumption will lead to more security either. Most users, when presented with a dialog box, will immediately press whatever button is required to dismiss the dialog without reading it.
Even if the default is cancel, the first time they hit "naked ladies.jpg.exe", get a warning, and dismiss it they'll just figure they did something wrong and open it again, choosing the other option this time.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
When you see the memos and emails circulated amongst the big RAM players on the JDEC saying stuff like "in the future all memory will be made this way, but we won't pay royalties to RAMBUS" (or along similar lines) you realize RAMBUS isn't the evil patent troll they get made out to be.
The fact is that modern DDR/DDR2 DRAM uses much of RAMBUS' original design elements. Hynix, Micron, Samsung... they all colluded together in an illegal fashion to keep RAMBUS scarce (and thus more expensive) and to steal the technology to implement the next DRAM standard. They were all convicted on criminal charges related to this and DRAM price fixing and most of the companies not only pled guilty, but paid huge fines for it. I think most of the ill-will for RAMBUS comes from the Intel agreement, which was rightfully maligned as a bad thing but has nothing to do with the patent infringement case.
Let's say you are a small inventor who has come up with a new RAM technology. Now let's say you join the standards committee and offer up your new technology for the next standard under RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing) terms. Instead of accepting your tech for the standard, the big players all rip it off and tell you to go get a lawyer if you don't like it. What would you do? Sit back and take it? You don't have the resources to open up a fab and make it yourself. You did all the research and hard work, you own the patents, but the big boys don't care - they're using your tech anyway. Not a good situation to be in and I don't blame RAMBUS one bit for doing what they can to get some justice.