You're missing my point a bit, I think. I'm not not saying it's a cost of the item vs. status symbol issue, but it's to do with the profit margin on the item vs. the intended usage of the item. You very seldom see a feature added to a device these days if it's not something that is going to help sell units or aid developers somehow. When was the last time you saw an advert or even a spec. list that put "battery calibration" up there with things like OS, screen/sensor resolution, processor speed/type, storage/memory capacity, etc.?
All of the items I cited have a reason why an accurate battery life indication is desirable, if not essential [*], and the additional cost of adding in calibration is worth while. If there is no specific requirement for a feature, then you don't generally add in the extra circuitry for negligable benefit at extra cost to be passed onto the end user. I'd be interested to hear of any major exceptions though, whether to do with battery calibration (especially if done behind the scenes) or otherwise.
[*] The GPS & SatComm unit both have S&R applications, if you've ever been running low on a camera battery in the closing minutes of a game, you'll know whay that matters to pros, and the laptop, well, let's just say it's "ruggedised" and leave it at that.
Not quite, it seems to be purely cost based to me as I've only ever seen the recalibrate process on more expensive, so called "luxury" or "premium" devices. That's not to say that cheaper ones (or more expensive ones that lack an overt process) are not doing something behind the scenes as well, but I think that is actually quite unlikely in most cases.
It's simple economics; when you are building an expensive device with a reasonable profit margin, then including recalibration circuitry isn't a big deal. When you are designing something on the pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap ethos then margins are much lower and the few bucks extra for the recalibration might make your product more expensive than the competition and result in lost sales.
Then again, it would be perfectly possible to do it behind the scenes; all it would take is to detect when the calibration is required and then quietly let the battery go completely flat before starting the next recharge. That sounds like a recipe for a poor user experience to me though; imagine your laptop's battery is running low and due a calibration recharge, you put it on charge for an for an hour expecting it to be topped up only to find it's still running low when you power it on...
I too keep hearing conflicting advice on this, but as far as I can tell the underlying truth is what is indicated in the parent's post.
I'm looking at a Canon LP-E4 battery (from a 1 series EOS camera) and it definitely says "Li-ion" on it, and I also have the manual for the camera with me. These are quite intelligent batteries, with very accurate charge remaining indictors, etc. Every now and then they indicate the need for a "calibration charge" to ensure accurate battery life indication, and to quote the manual on the process "After the calibration is completed and the battery is totally drained, it will take a further two hours to recharge the battery fully." At a guess, I get this maybe warning once per year, per battery - and perhaps even less frequently than that.
I've come across this kind of thing on other "high-end" Li-Ion batteries too, including on laptops, a high-end GPS unit and a satellite comms system. I've never seen this kind of thing on cheaper clones, in lower-end devices like phones, or in any other gadgets where the battery might be regarded as disposable once it deteriorates. Unless the battery in question has a means of asking for a calibration charge, or some such, and a charger that has a dedicated mode for doing so, then you should always try and recharge the battery before it fully drains.
Exactly my sentiment. Perhaps a few hundred million people might own iThings, but just about everyone on the planet either directly interacts with, or is at least affected by, applications written in C and/or running on UNIX every single day of their lives, even if they might not realise it. Steve Jobs' passing went straight onto the breaking news tickers of the mainstream media, but so far dmr does not even appear to have a single byline - there's something telling about what's wrong with this world, right there.
I guess he just made the ultimate entry in the Obfuscated C content. So long, dmr, and thanks for everything.:(
Because, seriously, why the fuck would we want to get to Mars?!! Would you start training today for a race that might not have to be run in your lifetime?
Because you have to learn to walk before you try and run. What hope would our distant descendants have of surviving on an extrasolar planet lightyears from Earth if we (or more likely our grandchildren/great-grandchildren) don't see what the problems are and try and solve them? One things for sure, if we don't move beyond Earth soon we are going to have serious problems with feeding, and houseing our ever growing population. Problem is, that may not be as "simple" as building ships and packing off a billion or so people to Mars or wherever. Far from it.
Bill Bryson made a point I hadn't come across before I read it in "A brief History of Everything"; our bodies are incredibly fine-tuned to life here on Earth at this particular point in time. As little as a few fractions of a percentage point change in the composition of trace elements in our environment - atmosphere, water, food chain, everything - could easily turn out to be fatal. That's potentially going to be a huge hurdle before even a tentative colony can be established off world. If we can't even grow food locally and have to ship everything from Earth, let alone having to live in a bubble. Short of viable terraforming, I don't see any easy solution to that, but the sooner we get started the sooner we might figure it out.
Who cares? I'm guessing you don't have much experience of server clusters but generally, long before you get to the kind of scale we are talking about here, you start treating servers in the same way you might treat HDDs in a RAID array. When one fails, other servers in the cluster pick up the slack until you can either repair the broken unit or you simply remote install the appropriate image onto a standby server and bring that up until an engineer physically goes to site. Handling of the data is somewhat critical though; should a server die you ideally need to be able to resume what it was working on seemlessly and without causing any data corruption; think transaction based DB queries and timeout/retry.
If you have enough spare servers and you can easily get by with engineers only needing to go on site once a month or so, assuming you get your MTBF calculations right that is. There's a good white paper by Google on how 200,000 hr MTBF hard drive failure rates equate to drive failures every few hours when you have a few 100k HDs.
Far, far, FAR longer than that. Almost since the dawn of photography in fact, let alone the advent of the war correspondent as a profession. The NY Times (no registration required, for once) has a rather interesting tale of what might be the first instance of this in three parts, part one here, about whether or not Roger Fenton manipulated a post-battle scene for a more interesting image. The image in question was taken during the Crimean war, in 1855 - over a century and a half ago.
True, 650,000 is about 1% of the population. However that's not 650,000 people that have recieved HADOPI warning letters, it's 650,000 households. Figure an average of two adults plus a good chance of a late teenager about to get the right to vote and you could be looking at 1.5 million people on the first step towards disconnection. Then there's student digs and bedsits where you could potentially be looking at five or more people on a shared connection - France has a large population of immigrants from across the EU and Northern Africa so I'd imagine the actual number of individuals might be much higher.
I'll believe it's all over when SCO's articles of incorporation have been burnt, the ashes salted, placed in a silver box, surrounded by garlic and placed outside the courthouse of the eastern district of Texas as an example to other patent trolls. I'd also like a waiver on public indeceny laws to permit pissing on the box, but you have to draw the line somewhere...
Scratch that. You need to go to the original blog post to get the facts, but John's post claims Hamstersoft hasn't posted all the code, as required by GPL3. I guess that means it's torches and pitchforks after all.
Hamstersoft doesn't appear in the Wayback Machine, but Google's cached version is dated August 6th and includes the download link. Both the linked accusations are from the last couple of days, so it looks very much like while John Schember may have correctly accused Hamstersoft over a month ago he forgot to check the download page before publicly spouting off on his blog.
It does depend on your definition of "boot time" though. Getting to the login prompt is completely different from getting to the desktop and having all of the various AV and other corporate IT management software and other sundry login scripts and apps stop thrashing the disk to the point where you can actually do something useful. The standard default for corporate login scripts seems to be to check if the corporate LAN is reachable and if so:
Push down the current IT policies, even if they haven't changed since the last login.
Download the latest version of any AV signatures, even if they haven't changed since the last login. (The AV is, of course, configured to do a full scan of the PC when new AV signatures are downloaded.)
Start an audit of the installed software on the machine.
Push down and install any outstanding software updates/upgrades.
The best way I have found to speed up the corporate boot process is to disconnect the LAN cable until you are at the desktop, and then restore any drive mappings etc. manually. Even then, it can take several times longer than at home...:(
It didn't last for very long though. The process was halted back in June after multiple earthquakes, and the UK is pretty stable geologically - earthquakes strong enough to be felt usually make the national news - so a connection seems highly likely. Coverage at the BBC, FT and Independent.
Still, it is good for a chuckle every now and again if you are a Galactica fan since journos keep using headlines starting with "Fracking Protesters..." until someone gets it changed.:)
Don't spoil it now! I'm fully expecting a significant drop in IE6 users in the next round of the various stats put out each month because of this. Anything that gets users off that nightmare and onto something newer, even just a more recent version of IE, is a good thing in my book!
You've obviously never been stuck around a terminal caffeine or nicotine addict who has been denied a fix. Bonus points if it's a female and they are also PMSing.
Far more likely you wouldn't actually slow down so much as skim close enough to the star to scoop up some hydrogen from the corona without actually burning up. Kind of like the old Bussard ramjet proposal, only with a little more substance to the collection than the much slimmer pickings of interstellar space.
Actually, it's not so much the employees that interest me; it's the paperwork. Specifically, what is going to happen to all of the News of The World's emails, accounts and all of those other records that might be of use to, say, a public inquiry or police investigation? I can't help but wonder whether this knee jerk reaction on behalf of Rupert Murdoch is a desperate attempt at damage limitation because knowledge of what was going on goes a lot higher up the ladder than just former News of The World staff.
As an aside, The Guardian has a rather interesting piece on the use of private investigators by UK media from back in 2007 when things first kicked off. The NoTW only came in fifth behind those other stalwarts of quality UK journalism; The People, The Daily Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and, the run-away leader, The Daily Mail.
I wonder if there is any correlation between those execs that were fired and those that didn't think that a buyout by MS was the way to go. Now that there are likely to be large sums of cash heading their way I can just imagine some creative headcount reduction going on to try and increase the slices of the pie for the rest; "You didn't support the MS buyout, so you're not getting a share of the payouts either..."
APNIC is NOT out of IPv4 addresses. They are down to their last/8 - the one they got as one of the final five/8s being allocated to each of the RIRs. This puts them in the third and final stage of their IPv4 exhaustion plan, whereby they will only allocate a maximum of a single/22 to each network operator which is supposed to be used primarily to enable a transistion to IPv6 by supporting IPv4 to IPv6 gateways and hosts that just have to be on a native IPv4 address.
SPDY is (according to Google) going to be released as open source, so I'm hopeful that it's development will be more akin to Mozilla's tack with its "Do Not Track" header - add support to your own browser, then throw it out there and see if the market is interested. IE9 already supports the "Do Not Track" header and there is also signs of some interest from websites too, so that's looking good.
What would be even better though, especially given that SPDY is really an extension to HTTP akin to using GZ compressed data, is if Google were also to write up and submit an RFC or whatever mechanism it is that W3 uses to get HTTP extensions added to the standard, such as it is. SPDY seems very much like a win for both content providers and content consumers to me, so once the details are out there I'd like to think that we'd see fairly rapid adoption by the browsers over the next several months, followed by backend support from Apache, IIS et al with their next major releases.
The identity of the original author is somewhat buried in the text, to wit:
Below I reproduce a summary on the situation prepared by Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, in Boston. He is a PhD Scientist, whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. This was first posted by Jason Morgan earlier this evening, and he has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. I think it is very important that this information be widely understood.
So, probably not someone with a vested interest in down-playing the gravity of the situation, and something that tallies quite well with what the Japanese are saying, as far as I can tell, and not at all like what some of the more histrionic media outlets (mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch) are spinning it as. Personally, I'd say that the Japanese government and media are doing an amazing job of keeping the world at large informed of what is going on during what must obviously be a very stressful and deeply emotional time for them all.
OK, here's a counter example that I use BCC for all of the time:
I frequently email a list of people some data such as links to a photo gallery from a recent trip, friends & family events, that kind of thing. The recipient list will typically vary slightly every time and, since it is most likely a one shot deal, there's not much point setting up a mailing list. Out of common courtesy, since not everyone on the list is going to know everyone else, I use BCC so that just in case one or more of them has been pwned, the entire list of email addresses won't get harvested and everyone will get spammed even more than usual.
The scary thing is that you are probably right. Just about every form of media has been banned censored at some point; from the Catholic Church's removal of genitalia from countless statues, destruction of paintings depicting nudity, through the censorship of books, comics, music, films and more recently video games for being too graphic/suggestive violent. There have already been (mostly voluntary) attempts to get websites to rate their content for target audience ages, so I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before it becomes a legal requirement somewhere in the world. Right now, I think it's going to be a toss-up between Australia and the USA who gets there first.
This post rated PG for use of sexually orientated wording.
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You're missing my point a bit, I think. I'm not not saying it's a cost of the item vs. status symbol issue, but it's to do with the profit margin on the item vs. the intended usage of the item. You very seldom see a feature added to a device these days if it's not something that is going to help sell units or aid developers somehow. When was the last time you saw an advert or even a spec. list that put "battery calibration" up there with things like OS, screen/sensor resolution, processor speed/type, storage/memory capacity, etc.?
All of the items I cited have a reason why an accurate battery life indication is desirable, if not essential [*], and the additional cost of adding in calibration is worth while. If there is no specific requirement for a feature, then you don't generally add in the extra circuitry for negligable benefit at extra cost to be passed onto the end user. I'd be interested to hear of any major exceptions though, whether to do with battery calibration (especially if done behind the scenes) or otherwise.
[*] The GPS & SatComm unit both have S&R applications, if you've ever been running low on a camera battery in the closing minutes of a game, you'll know whay that matters to pros, and the laptop, well, let's just say it's "ruggedised" and leave it at that.
Not quite, it seems to be purely cost based to me as I've only ever seen the recalibrate process on more expensive, so called "luxury" or "premium" devices. That's not to say that cheaper ones (or more expensive ones that lack an overt process) are not doing something behind the scenes as well, but I think that is actually quite unlikely in most cases.
It's simple economics; when you are building an expensive device with a reasonable profit margin, then including recalibration circuitry isn't a big deal. When you are designing something on the pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap ethos then margins are much lower and the few bucks extra for the recalibration might make your product more expensive than the competition and result in lost sales.
Then again, it would be perfectly possible to do it behind the scenes; all it would take is to detect when the calibration is required and then quietly let the battery go completely flat before starting the next recharge. That sounds like a recipe for a poor user experience to me though; imagine your laptop's battery is running low and due a calibration recharge, you put it on charge for an for an hour expecting it to be topped up only to find it's still running low when you power it on...
I too keep hearing conflicting advice on this, but as far as I can tell the underlying truth is what is indicated in the parent's post.
I'm looking at a Canon LP-E4 battery (from a 1 series EOS camera) and it definitely says "Li-ion" on it, and I also have the manual for the camera with me. These are quite intelligent batteries, with very accurate charge remaining indictors, etc. Every now and then they indicate the need for a "calibration charge" to ensure accurate battery life indication, and to quote the manual on the process "After the calibration is completed and the battery is totally drained, it will take a further two hours to recharge the battery fully." At a guess, I get this maybe warning once per year, per battery - and perhaps even less frequently than that.
I've come across this kind of thing on other "high-end" Li-Ion batteries too, including on laptops, a high-end GPS unit and a satellite comms system. I've never seen this kind of thing on cheaper clones, in lower-end devices like phones, or in any other gadgets where the battery might be regarded as disposable once it deteriorates. Unless the battery in question has a means of asking for a calibration charge, or some such, and a charger that has a dedicated mode for doing so, then you should always try and recharge the battery before it fully drains.
Exactly my sentiment. Perhaps a few hundred million people might own iThings, but just about everyone on the planet either directly interacts with, or is at least affected by, applications written in C and/or running on UNIX every single day of their lives, even if they might not realise it. Steve Jobs' passing went straight onto the breaking news tickers of the mainstream media, but so far dmr does not even appear to have a single byline - there's something telling about what's wrong with this world, right there.
:(
I guess he just made the ultimate entry in the Obfuscated C content. So long, dmr, and thanks for everything.
Because you have to learn to walk before you try and run. What hope would our distant descendants have of surviving on an extrasolar planet lightyears from Earth if we (or more likely our grandchildren/great-grandchildren) don't see what the problems are and try and solve them? One things for sure, if we don't move beyond Earth soon we are going to have serious problems with feeding, and houseing our ever growing population. Problem is, that may not be as "simple" as building ships and packing off a billion or so people to Mars or wherever. Far from it.
Bill Bryson made a point I hadn't come across before I read it in "A brief History of Everything"; our bodies are incredibly fine-tuned to life here on Earth at this particular point in time. As little as a few fractions of a percentage point change in the composition of trace elements in our environment - atmosphere, water, food chain, everything - could easily turn out to be fatal. That's potentially going to be a huge hurdle before even a tentative colony can be established off world. If we can't even grow food locally and have to ship everything from Earth, let alone having to live in a bubble. Short of viable terraforming, I don't see any easy solution to that, but the sooner we get started the sooner we might figure it out.
Who cares? I'm guessing you don't have much experience of server clusters but generally, long before you get to the kind of scale we are talking about here, you start treating servers in the same way you might treat HDDs in a RAID array. When one fails, other servers in the cluster pick up the slack until you can either repair the broken unit or you simply remote install the appropriate image onto a standby server and bring that up until an engineer physically goes to site. Handling of the data is somewhat critical though; should a server die you ideally need to be able to resume what it was working on seemlessly and without causing any data corruption; think transaction based DB queries and timeout/retry.
If you have enough spare servers and you can easily get by with engineers only needing to go on site once a month or so, assuming you get your MTBF calculations right that is. There's a good white paper by Google on how 200,000 hr MTBF hard drive failure rates equate to drive failures every few hours when you have a few 100k HDs.
Far, far, FAR longer than that. Almost since the dawn of photography in fact, let alone the advent of the war correspondent as a profession. The NY Times (no registration required, for once) has a rather interesting tale of what might be the first instance of this in three parts, part one here, about whether or not Roger Fenton manipulated a post-battle scene for a more interesting image. The image in question was taken during the Crimean war, in 1855 - over a century and a half ago.
True, 650,000 is about 1% of the population. However that's not 650,000 people that have recieved HADOPI warning letters, it's 650,000 households. Figure an average of two adults plus a good chance of a late teenager about to get the right to vote and you could be looking at 1.5 million people on the first step towards disconnection. Then there's student digs and bedsits where you could potentially be looking at five or more people on a shared connection - France has a large population of immigrants from across the EU and Northern Africa so I'd imagine the actual number of individuals might be much higher.
Too damn many.
I'll believe it's all over when SCO's articles of incorporation have been burnt, the ashes salted, placed in a silver box, surrounded by garlic and placed outside the courthouse of the eastern district of Texas as an example to other patent trolls. I'd also like a waiver on public indeceny laws to permit pissing on the box, but you have to draw the line somewhere...
Scratch that. You need to go to the original blog post to get the facts, but John's post claims Hamstersoft hasn't posted all the code, as required by GPL3. I guess that means it's torches and pitchforks after all.
Hamstersoft doesn't appear in the Wayback Machine, but Google's cached version is dated August 6th and includes the download link. Both the linked accusations are from the last couple of days, so it looks very much like while John Schember may have correctly accused Hamstersoft over a month ago he forgot to check the download page before publicly spouting off on his blog.
The best way I have found to speed up the corporate boot process is to disconnect the LAN cable until you are at the desktop, and then restore any drive mappings etc. manually. Even then, it can take several times longer than at home... :(
It didn't last for very long though. The process was halted back in June after multiple earthquakes, and the UK is pretty stable geologically - earthquakes strong enough to be felt usually make the national news - so a connection seems highly likely. Coverage at the BBC, FT and Independent.
:)
Still, it is good for a chuckle every now and again if you are a Galactica fan since journos keep using headlines starting with "Fracking Protesters..." until someone gets it changed.
Don't spoil it now! I'm fully expecting a significant drop in IE6 users in the next round of the various stats put out each month because of this. Anything that gets users off that nightmare and onto something newer, even just a more recent version of IE, is a good thing in my book!
Yeah, the next thing you know something like this is going to happen. It's just a matter of time, I tell you!
You've obviously never been stuck around a terminal caffeine or nicotine addict who has been denied a fix. Bonus points if it's a female and they are also PMSing.
Far more likely you wouldn't actually slow down so much as skim close enough to the star to scoop up some hydrogen from the corona without actually burning up. Kind of like the old Bussard ramjet proposal, only with a little more substance to the collection than the much slimmer pickings of interstellar space.
Actually, it's not so much the employees that interest me; it's the paperwork. Specifically, what is going to happen to all of the News of The World's emails, accounts and all of those other records that might be of use to, say, a public inquiry or police investigation? I can't help but wonder whether this knee jerk reaction on behalf of Rupert Murdoch is a desperate attempt at damage limitation because knowledge of what was going on goes a lot higher up the ladder than just former News of The World staff.
As an aside, The Guardian has a rather interesting piece on the use of private investigators by UK media from back in 2007 when things first kicked off. The NoTW only came in fifth behind those other stalwarts of quality UK journalism; The People, The Daily Mirror, The Mail on Sunday and, the run-away leader, The Daily Mail.
Um... This is a Real Doll. It's right there in the second paragraph of the article.
Consider yourself lucky! I'm going to need to get some new luggage...
I wonder if there is any correlation between those execs that were fired and those that didn't think that a buyout by MS was the way to go. Now that there are likely to be large sums of cash heading their way I can just imagine some creative headcount reduction going on to try and increase the slices of the pie for the rest; "You didn't support the MS buyout, so you're not getting a share of the payouts either..."
APNIC is NOT out of IPv4 addresses. They are down to their last /8 - the one they got as one of the final five /8s being allocated to each of the RIRs. This puts them in the third and final stage of their IPv4 exhaustion plan, whereby they will only allocate a maximum of a single /22 to each network operator which is supposed to be used primarily to enable a transistion to IPv6 by supporting IPv4 to IPv6 gateways and hosts that just have to be on a native IPv4 address.
More information directly from APNIC here.
SPDY is (according to Google) going to be released as open source, so I'm hopeful that it's development will be more akin to Mozilla's tack with its "Do Not Track" header - add support to your own browser, then throw it out there and see if the market is interested. IE9 already supports the "Do Not Track" header and there is also signs of some interest from websites too, so that's looking good.
What would be even better though, especially given that SPDY is really an extension to HTTP akin to using GZ compressed data, is if Google were also to write up and submit an RFC or whatever mechanism it is that W3 uses to get HTTP extensions added to the standard, such as it is. SPDY seems very much like a win for both content providers and content consumers to me, so once the details are out there I'd like to think that we'd see fairly rapid adoption by the browsers over the next several months, followed by backend support from Apache, IIS et al with their next major releases.
So, probably not someone with a vested interest in down-playing the gravity of the situation, and something that tallies quite well with what the Japanese are saying, as far as I can tell, and not at all like what some of the more histrionic media outlets (mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch) are spinning it as. Personally, I'd say that the Japanese government and media are doing an amazing job of keeping the world at large informed of what is going on during what must obviously be a very stressful and deeply emotional time for them all.
OK, here's a counter example that I use BCC for all of the time:
I frequently email a list of people some data such as links to a photo gallery from a recent trip, friends & family events, that kind of thing. The recipient list will typically vary slightly every time and, since it is most likely a one shot deal, there's not much point setting up a mailing list. Out of common courtesy, since not everyone on the list is going to know everyone else, I use BCC so that just in case one or more of them has been pwned, the entire list of email addresses won't get harvested and everyone will get spammed even more than usual.
The scary thing is that you are probably right. Just about every form of media has been banned censored at some point; from the Catholic Church's removal of genitalia from countless statues, destruction of paintings depicting nudity, through the censorship of books, comics, music, films and more recently video games for being too graphic/suggestive violent. There have already been (mostly voluntary) attempts to get websites to rate their content for target audience ages, so I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before it becomes a legal requirement somewhere in the world. Right now, I think it's going to be a toss-up between Australia and the USA who gets there first.
This post rated PG for use of sexually orientated wording.