It boggles my mind why everyone on a geek website buys products like this rather than just get an old PC, a TV tuner card and install Linux+mythTV on it.
Linux+MythTV won't be a viable PVR option for many users until CableCard is cracked (or unless the FCC actually forces the cable companies to be platform agnostic, which seems very unlikely). OTA TV isn't good enough unless you want to be very limited in the shows you can watch.
I've tried Sumatra. Overall I like it, but I wish there was some way to get rid of the horrid yellow background. (Admittedly, you only see this if you don't have a document open.) Also, I do prefer Adobe Reader's choice of hand, text selector, and marquee zoom to Sumatra's method of only letting you use the hand if you're off the main page. And text rendering isn't quite as good in Sumatra, though that's due to the fact that it doesn't use the hacks that regular Windows text rendering does to look good on low-DPI LCDs, and it should go away once we finally get high-DPI desktop monitors in the mainstream.
But I learnt that some of the security holes are actually in the pdf spec itself, and whatever $reader you are using, if it is faithful to the specs, the vulnerability will exist.
I'd be interested to see more details on this. What part of the spec is broken? It also seems to contradict common experience: the overwhelming majority of exploits are Adobe Reader-only, and don't affect other PDF readers at all. Do these other readers just not follow the spec? Is there something in there ordering that Flash/Javascript/whatever must be executed without asking the user? Unless they did something that crazy, I'm not sure how a document display spec could have inherent security holes.
The fruity firm was on the hook for as much as $900m, but a jury awarded a lower payout during a Texas court hearing yesterday evening, according to VirnetX's lawyers McKool Smith.
So once again this is the yahoos in the Eastern District of Texas imposing their draconian views on the whole country. Is Apple based in Texas? Is VirnetX? No. (They're based in Nevada, according to their website.) So why the hell was this trial held in Texas? Because the bastards know that by forum-shopping they can find juries full of ignorant hicks who always vote for the plaintiff.
I'm curious, Apple's got enough cash and not paying dividends to buy up Sharp now, and probably on the cheap when they fold, so why wouldn't they let that happen? I'm sure they would like to get their panels at cost and liquidate the rest of Sharp.
Japan tends to be a fairly nationalist country, and they believe in lifetime employment. I don't think the Japanese government would be very happy with a US company buying a large Japanese conglomerate and laying off most of its employees just to get the one part it wants to keep.
All we see here on Slashdot and the rest of the media are large corporations and law firms abusing the system. We don't see any stories about the lone inventor working in his garage, patenting his invention, starting a company, and creating lots of jobs while getting rich. Dean Kamen comes to mind as an example of the patent system and the American Inventor dream working - as far as I can tell.
But that's not what the patent system is supposed to be about. The purpose of the patent system is not to reward inventors. It's to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Patents are just a means to an end, not some kind of inalienable right. And recent events indicate that patents are probably a net negative and we'd be better off overall if we just abolished the damn things altogether.
Five million bucks won't keep you for life unless your very prudent.
Nonsense. Invest in a carefully selected array of blue-chip stocks and you can get a 3%-5% annual dividend with very little risk. That means you'd be raking in $150,000 to $250,000 a year in dividends without touching your principal. Most people don't make anywhere near that much money (the median family income in the US is around $50,000/year). And those dividends will be considered capital gains rather than income, so you'll pay a fairly low tax rate – something around 15% maximum, if I'm not mistaken.
Five million bucks will keep you for life unless you're a damn fool (or unless the entire world economy blows up, in which case you're screwed anyway).
We already had this "civics lesson" back in 2000. Most Americans weren't too thrilled.
If it happens again, this time with President Obama winning the electoral college and losing the popular vote, then maybe it will make national popular vote a bipartisan initiative, now that both sides will have got bitten.
Everyone I know who voted for him is dissapointed in him. He should be relatively easy to throw out of office.
After the 1972 election, film critic Pauline Kael allegedly said that she couldn't believe that Nixon had won, since no one she knew voted for him. Though that quote is apparently apocryphal, it does accurately depict the hazard of judging a presidential contest on the basis of personal anecdotes rather than polls.
Even before reading the article, I knew what the answer was. This is because at my workplace (a public library), we deal with a very similar thing on a regular basis. We have several self-checkout units at each branch, which are basically all-in-one Windows PCs running special software. They have RFID pads for scanning the books, and they take input via a touchscreen. The capacitive touchscreens on tablets and smartphones are generally of good quality, but these are different. They are crappy resistive touchscreens, designed to keep costs down. Accuracy is poor, and a calibration utility must be run regularly or the screens will start to drift. Calibration entails running a program designed for that purpose, then touching targets displayed in each corner of the screen in sequence.
If calibration on a low-quality resistive touchscreen is off, then the mouse click may register at a location as much as 1 full inch away from where the user pressed. I have personally seen this happen many times on our self-checkout units. So if you hear a story that someone on a voting machine pressed the box for the Democratic candidate and it checked the Republican, or vice versa, I'd be willing to bet money that this is what happened. If they were deliberately tampering with the votes, why would they show that to the user?
There are indeed serious concerns with the lack of source availability for voting machines, and the ownership of voting machine companies by individuals with partisan ties. But calibration is not some kind of conspiracy – it's the inevitable result of using cheap touchscreen hardware.
As is their right. They have no obligation to cross licence, merely to pay what everyone else paid as a dollar amount, or in chickens or barrels of grain to the same value, or anything else you can barter with.
Says who? FRAND means everyone is entitled to the same terms. If the terms include cross-licensing, why shouldn't Apple be held to the same rules as everyone else?
And Apple is asking for even more of a break than that. Not only do they want to get a free pass on all past devices (and only have to pay going forward), but they want to pay a very low cash rate AND no cross-licensing. Even if we accept your premise that Motorola should have to accept a cash equivalent for cross-licensing, that's going to come to something much closer to Motorola's proposed 2.25% than to Apple's $1 per device. Bottom line is that Apple thinks they're special and that the rules shouldn't apply to them.
The fact that I dont understand the play they're making makes me worry we're not being told something, whatever that is Apple feels its in their favor. That, or they're just a bunch of idiots, which can never be ruled out, for either side.
Given the stunt they just pulled in the UK (and got slapped down hard), I'll go with "they're just a bunch of idiots". At least their legal department is. Probably infected with True Believeritis. Rule #1 of business (and much else besides): Never, ever buy into your own hype.
No, in that case, they'd probably make it an option, and pay royalties only on the cost of adding that option. Or just have the hotspot manufactured by a third party and that third party pay royalties on the wholesale cost.
Apple really seems to have been going out of its way to piss off courts recently. First the event in Britain where they basically thumbed their nose at the Appeals Court and defied their order about posting the apology. Now they're pre-emptively threatening the court in Wisconsin, saying that if they don't get what they want, they are going to go all-out with appeals. While judges know their decisions are subject to appeal, they very much do not like being publicly threatened in such a manner by litigants, especially while the trial is still going on. I think they may have bought themselves a world of pain with this verdict when it finally comes. And appeals courts will be all the more likely to look at Apple's filings with a skeptical eye now that they've already told all the world they are doing it as part of a hardball business strategy.
My understanding is that most other companies who use these patents opted to do some sort of cross-licensing agreement rather than paying cash on the barrelhead. Since Apple refuses to do that, it could make it tricky to figure out exactly what they should owe, even if the patents are found to be covered by FRAND principles.
What tablets currently support this? I might be willing to give it a shot on the Nexus 10 if it works, and if it's possible to back up the configuration beforehand and restore to factory if I don't like it. Linux is generally terrible at font rendering, but a high-DPI display like on the Nexus 10 might help circumvent this.
Do web browsers under Plasma Active support the same kind of pinch-to-zoom features that are standard on portable devices?
I wouldnt worry about that, Im sure theyre trying to make sure it runs as well as possible on OSX while remaining as buggy as possible on Windows.
That makes little sense from a business strategy perspective. They make most of their profits from portable devices; desktop and laptop hardware, despite its visibility, is secondary in financial terms. When they had the only decent smartphones and tablets, they could get away with having iTunes work crappy on Windows and hope to maybe guide a few users onto OSX with promises of better support. But now that Apple faces serious competition from the new generation of Android devices, this roadblock risks losing market share in portables for no good reason. I think they're serious about fixing iTunes on Windows this time.
I've gotten those. After the foghorn someone says "This is your Captain speaking" so I assume it probably is indeed a cruise ship package of some sort. I didn't get any further than the first voice clip before hanging up.
It works much better on Windows 7 than it did on XP. Basically, on Windows 7, if an application doesn't specifically say in its manifest that it supports high-DPI scenarios, then the OS will fool it into thinking it's running at the standard DPI, render into an off-screen buffer, and scale the results. This may not be razor-sharp, but it prevents the scenarios seen under XP where some poorly-designed applications would have parts of the UI cut off when you increased the DPI setting. If your application tells the OS that it knows how to deal with DPI changes, the OS will trust it to do that right. Unfortunately, a few applications lie to the OS about this and still give corrupted results.
Apple doesnt have retina displays. Samsung, LG, and Sharp do.
But these companies don't sell high-DPI standalone displays (or laptops) under their own brand names. They produce these parts for the Apple market only (and in Samsung's case, for the new Nexus 10).
As long as everyone and their dog have high resolution screens now, we're doomed to see screen real estate dwindle back to the 80'ties level as designers keep inflating fonts, icons and white space to keep Joe Public with something that looks like the 800x600 he's used to. I miss the day when only enthusiasts had high resolution monitors and we actually got more space.
That's what the DPI setting is for. The handful of enthusiasts with 20/10 vision can keep all their precious screen space, and everyone else can get the sharper fonts, icons, and images at readable sizes like they want.
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It boggles my mind why everyone on a geek website buys products like this rather than just get an old PC, a TV tuner card and install Linux+mythTV on it.
Linux+MythTV won't be a viable PVR option for many users until CableCard is cracked (or unless the FCC actually forces the cable companies to be platform agnostic, which seems very unlikely). OTA TV isn't good enough unless you want to be very limited in the shows you can watch.
I've tried Sumatra. Overall I like it, but I wish there was some way to get rid of the horrid yellow background. (Admittedly, you only see this if you don't have a document open.) Also, I do prefer Adobe Reader's choice of hand, text selector, and marquee zoom to Sumatra's method of only letting you use the hand if you're off the main page. And text rendering isn't quite as good in Sumatra, though that's due to the fact that it doesn't use the hacks that regular Windows text rendering does to look good on low-DPI LCDs, and it should go away once we finally get high-DPI desktop monitors in the mainstream.
But I learnt that some of the security holes are actually in the pdf spec itself, and whatever $reader you are using, if it is faithful to the specs, the vulnerability will exist.
I'd be interested to see more details on this. What part of the spec is broken? It also seems to contradict common experience: the overwhelming majority of exploits are Adobe Reader-only, and don't affect other PDF readers at all. Do these other readers just not follow the spec? Is there something in there ordering that Flash/Javascript/whatever must be executed without asking the user? Unless they did something that crazy, I'm not sure how a document display spec could have inherent security holes.
From the article:
So once again this is the yahoos in the Eastern District of Texas imposing their draconian views on the whole country. Is Apple based in Texas? Is VirnetX? No. (They're based in Nevada, according to their website.) So why the hell was this trial held in Texas? Because the bastards know that by forum-shopping they can find juries full of ignorant hicks who always vote for the plaintiff.
I'm curious, Apple's got enough cash and not paying dividends to buy up Sharp now, and probably on the cheap when they fold, so why wouldn't they let that happen? I'm sure they would like to get their panels at cost and liquidate the rest of Sharp.
Japan tends to be a fairly nationalist country, and they believe in lifetime employment. I don't think the Japanese government would be very happy with a US company buying a large Japanese conglomerate and laying off most of its employees just to get the one part it wants to keep.
All we see here on Slashdot and the rest of the media are large corporations and law firms abusing the system. We don't see any stories about the lone inventor working in his garage, patenting his invention, starting a company, and creating lots of jobs while getting rich. Dean Kamen comes to mind as an example of the patent system and the American Inventor dream working - as far as I can tell.
But that's not what the patent system is supposed to be about. The purpose of the patent system is not to reward inventors. It's to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts." Patents are just a means to an end, not some kind of inalienable right. And recent events indicate that patents are probably a net negative and we'd be better off overall if we just abolished the damn things altogether.
That would work fine if I only had one comment to post every two years.
Five million bucks won't keep you for life unless your very prudent.
Nonsense. Invest in a carefully selected array of blue-chip stocks and you can get a 3%-5% annual dividend with very little risk. That means you'd be raking in $150,000 to $250,000 a year in dividends without touching your principal. Most people don't make anywhere near that much money (the median family income in the US is around $50,000/year). And those dividends will be considered capital gains rather than income, so you'll pay a fairly low tax rate – something around 15% maximum, if I'm not mistaken.
Five million bucks will keep you for life unless you're a damn fool (or unless the entire world economy blows up, in which case you're screwed anyway).
What are context and indirection tables?
There are some details in this Anandtech article about the tables and the controller's use of DRAM.
We already had this "civics lesson" back in 2000. Most Americans weren't too thrilled.
If it happens again, this time with President Obama winning the electoral college and losing the popular vote, then maybe it will make national popular vote a bipartisan initiative, now that both sides will have got bitten.
Everyone I know who voted for him is dissapointed in him. He should be relatively easy to throw out of office.
After the 1972 election, film critic Pauline Kael allegedly said that she couldn't believe that Nixon had won, since no one she knew voted for him. Though that quote is apparently apocryphal, it does accurately depict the hazard of judging a presidential contest on the basis of personal anecdotes rather than polls.
Samsung is supplying LCD panels to Apple now, but not for much longer. This is going to hurt the quality of Apple's products, because LG can't make Retina displays worth a damn; apparently only Samsung can.
Even before reading the article, I knew what the answer was. This is because at my workplace (a public library), we deal with a very similar thing on a regular basis. We have several self-checkout units at each branch, which are basically all-in-one Windows PCs running special software. They have RFID pads for scanning the books, and they take input via a touchscreen. The capacitive touchscreens on tablets and smartphones are generally of good quality, but these are different. They are crappy resistive touchscreens, designed to keep costs down. Accuracy is poor, and a calibration utility must be run regularly or the screens will start to drift. Calibration entails running a program designed for that purpose, then touching targets displayed in each corner of the screen in sequence.
If calibration on a low-quality resistive touchscreen is off, then the mouse click may register at a location as much as 1 full inch away from where the user pressed. I have personally seen this happen many times on our self-checkout units. So if you hear a story that someone on a voting machine pressed the box for the Democratic candidate and it checked the Republican, or vice versa, I'd be willing to bet money that this is what happened. If they were deliberately tampering with the votes, why would they show that to the user?
There are indeed serious concerns with the lack of source availability for voting machines, and the ownership of voting machine companies by individuals with partisan ties. But calibration is not some kind of conspiracy – it's the inevitable result of using cheap touchscreen hardware.
As is their right. They have no obligation to cross licence, merely to pay what everyone else paid as a dollar amount, or in chickens or barrels of grain to the same value, or anything else you can barter with.
Says who? FRAND means everyone is entitled to the same terms. If the terms include cross-licensing, why shouldn't Apple be held to the same rules as everyone else?
And Apple is asking for even more of a break than that. Not only do they want to get a free pass on all past devices (and only have to pay going forward), but they want to pay a very low cash rate AND no cross-licensing. Even if we accept your premise that Motorola should have to accept a cash equivalent for cross-licensing, that's going to come to something much closer to Motorola's proposed 2.25% than to Apple's $1 per device. Bottom line is that Apple thinks they're special and that the rules shouldn't apply to them.
The fact that I dont understand the play they're making makes me worry we're not being told something, whatever that is Apple feels its in their favor. That, or they're just a bunch of idiots, which can never be ruled out, for either side.
Given the stunt they just pulled in the UK (and got slapped down hard), I'll go with "they're just a bunch of idiots". At least their legal department is. Probably infected with True Believeritis. Rule #1 of business (and much else besides): Never, ever buy into your own hype.
No, in that case, they'd probably make it an option, and pay royalties only on the cost of adding that option. Or just have the hotspot manufactured by a third party and that third party pay royalties on the wholesale cost.
Let's see a reliable source. Everyone knows Florian Mueller is a laughable shill.
Apple really seems to have been going out of its way to piss off courts recently. First the event in Britain where they basically thumbed their nose at the Appeals Court and defied their order about posting the apology. Now they're pre-emptively threatening the court in Wisconsin, saying that if they don't get what they want, they are going to go all-out with appeals. While judges know their decisions are subject to appeal, they very much do not like being publicly threatened in such a manner by litigants, especially while the trial is still going on. I think they may have bought themselves a world of pain with this verdict when it finally comes. And appeals courts will be all the more likely to look at Apple's filings with a skeptical eye now that they've already told all the world they are doing it as part of a hardball business strategy.
My understanding is that most other companies who use these patents opted to do some sort of cross-licensing agreement rather than paying cash on the barrelhead. Since Apple refuses to do that, it could make it tricky to figure out exactly what they should owe, even if the patents are found to be covered by FRAND principles.
What tablets currently support this? I might be willing to give it a shot on the Nexus 10 if it works, and if it's possible to back up the configuration beforehand and restore to factory if I don't like it. Linux is generally terrible at font rendering, but a high-DPI display like on the Nexus 10 might help circumvent this.
Do web browsers under Plasma Active support the same kind of pinch-to-zoom features that are standard on portable devices?
I wouldnt worry about that, Im sure theyre trying to make sure it runs as well as possible on OSX while remaining as buggy as possible on Windows.
That makes little sense from a business strategy perspective. They make most of their profits from portable devices; desktop and laptop hardware, despite its visibility, is secondary in financial terms. When they had the only decent smartphones and tablets, they could get away with having iTunes work crappy on Windows and hope to maybe guide a few users onto OSX with promises of better support. But now that Apple faces serious competition from the new generation of Android devices, this roadblock risks losing market share in portables for no good reason. I think they're serious about fixing iTunes on Windows this time.
I've gotten those. After the foghorn someone says "This is your Captain speaking" so I assume it probably is indeed a cruise ship package of some sort. I didn't get any further than the first voice clip before hanging up.
It works much better on Windows 7 than it did on XP. Basically, on Windows 7, if an application doesn't specifically say in its manifest that it supports high-DPI scenarios, then the OS will fool it into thinking it's running at the standard DPI, render into an off-screen buffer, and scale the results. This may not be razor-sharp, but it prevents the scenarios seen under XP where some poorly-designed applications would have parts of the UI cut off when you increased the DPI setting. If your application tells the OS that it knows how to deal with DPI changes, the OS will trust it to do that right. Unfortunately, a few applications lie to the OS about this and still give corrupted results.
Apple doesnt have retina displays. Samsung, LG, and Sharp do.
But these companies don't sell high-DPI standalone displays (or laptops) under their own brand names. They produce these parts for the Apple market only (and in Samsung's case, for the new Nexus 10).
As long as everyone and their dog have high resolution screens now, we're doomed to see screen real estate dwindle back to the 80'ties level as designers keep inflating fonts, icons and white space to keep Joe Public with something that looks like the 800x600 he's used to. I miss the day when only enthusiasts had high resolution monitors and we actually got more space.
That's what the DPI setting is for. The handful of enthusiasts with 20/10 vision can keep all their precious screen space, and everyone else can get the sharper fonts, icons, and images at readable sizes like they want.