If you still doubt this technology, go have a look at the technological advances in hard drives, versus the technological advances of flash in the last 5 years. Hard drive vendors have very little to innovate while flash/rram are at the lower end of a hockey stick figure when it comes to innovation and price reduction. Within the next 5 years, flash/rram will replace disk, both in the enterprise as well as the consumer market.
I'd love to see your all-disk array do 2M IOPS, something that all flash arrays are capable of today. Again, at the price that (with dedupe and compression) comes darn close to your disks. Even legacy storage vendors are increasingly investing in solid state technology. Investing in disk is equal to investing in Greek government bonds.
SSDs follow Moore's law - double the transistors, double the size. You can cheat with TLC and more, but the smaller cells aren't helping. Hard drives aren't restricted to Moore's law which is why their prices can tumble.
As for 2M IOPS, if you're doing that, you need SSD, no question. But if you're doing movie editing where raw speed and basically long stripes of writes take place, you may be better off going with hard drives because you value storage over IOPS. When a CGI scene can start to require several TBs of assets to be loaded for rendering (seriously, the modern movie is already pushing 200+TB of assets just for CGI), 2M IOPS isn't so critical.
And if your business needs 2M IOPS and 8TB of storage at 2M IOPS, there are companies willing to accommodate you, and sure you're going to be paying tens of thousands, but if you're pushing that sort of workload, that's probably well worth the investment.
Anyhow, I can see SMR drives serving as yet another tier in the storage hierarchy - you have the SSD for the hot files, the cooler files get put on a huge regular storage array, and the SMR drives serve as cold files long term near-availability storage, and then you have tape for offline storage. The SSD gets used for the files where they're busy so it's fast, the hard drives serve up older files that are referenced only once in a while, and the SMR serves as a archive pool for files accessed rarely or not at all, just before being dumped to tape.
Or, perhaps SMR drives can be used in high capacity applications where it's mostly read only. Think like a digital download store (music, movies), or Netflix. Updating a single file on an SMR is painful, but if you're going to write a big movie to the disk and everyone's going to be reading from it, a large cheap SMR drive fits the bill because it's going to be read from far more than written to.
Honestly, I'm still baffled so many people were upset about getting a few album from a popular, well respected, rock band, simply because it found its way directly onto people's devices. It's not as if it woke you up at 3am and started playing it!
Well, you're looking at several phenomenon combined into one.
First, it's Apple. Apple is newsworthy. If you need ad clicks, mention Apple. Did I mention Apple generates traffic? It's at the point where I'm sure we'll see headlines like "Apple CEO Tim Cook Scratches Butt During Keynote" soon enough.
Second, law of big numbers. Let's say only 0.1% of people hate U2 to complain. Out of half a billion iTunes users, that's half a million people. It doesn't take much to think one of those people has a blog that's worth anything. And combined with the first, well, boom, all over the news.
Third, well, people only really complain when they have a complaint. If 99.9% of the people liked free music, they probably won't all post "cool, free stuff!" online. No, those people who have an issue with it "oh noes, free stuff, don't want!" will post all sorts of messages about it. Combine it with the first and second, and it explodes.
Hell, I'd expect if an error in a factory production line caused a fingerprint to be left on the screen it would be a massive national disaster. Even though one could easily just wipe the offending fingerprint off.
But remembering interviews with Occulus developers there is more to VR than a good resolution and tracking. Things like ridiculous low latency needed to prevent motion sickness and screen artifacts caused by rapid panning. Has Valve solved these things in record time in secret or will this be a better specs on paper but worse in practice product ?
Or you're looking at the fact that VR is being super hyped up, and it's only a matter of time before some company comes up with a consumer product on the market. I mean, Occulus has been around for how many years now releasing devkits but no consumer hardware.
So it's leaving a huge gap in the market - which two scenarios are going to play out. Either VR is going to fizzle out because the public is so tired of seeing Occulus this, Occulus that and nothing is available to actually buy (other than what Samsung releases) that they get tired of the hype and it dies as vaporware. Or someone sees that they can make a quick buck and releases crap, and the public buys into it because Occulus has been hyping it up as the next big thing, but someone else releases a product to get first-mover advantage and satisfy pent up demand. Doesn't matter if it's crap or it makes people sick, people will see it as a Occulus competitor and assume that it'll be representative of the state of VR.
And if it makes people sick, guess what? People will think Occulus isn't all that based on what people experienced with what they could buy.
Remember, the public is going to latch onto what they can get first
It's really interesting how quality feel and real quality mismatch. Bendy plastic absorbs drops way better then solid stainless steel. Steel mostly transfers the energy to the screen, which cracks. Or it deforms permanently. Properly designed plastic pops off and can then be popped back.
And that's the thing. Plastic is cheap - it's why the vast majority of cheap crap is made from plastic. Nice stuff is made from metal, which isn't as easy to work with (you can't really injection-mold metal very well - you could with liquidmetal but that's Apple-exclusive), so building out of metal already costs a lot more to build. When you're spending $600, you sort of want to feel like you're getting your money's worth.
Going from metal to plastic is considered the #1 cost cutting measure in industry - consumers generally view going from metal to plastic as a move that cheapens stuff because plastic is tackier.
Building a good device out of plastic is quite hard - you need to pick the right surface finishes otherwise your plastic can lead to interesting long term issues. You need to assemble it correctly - there's nothing more disconcerting than buying something for $600 and it creaks at the slightest bend (usually a sign of poorly-fitted parts).
With both the BD+ vm and the BD-J stuff, there is a lot of attention paid to 'ooh, the an unauthorized player attempting to do unauthorized things with the content on the disk?!'; but the contents of the disk are largely treated as trusted and the playback device is treated almost entirely as a potential adversary, not as a potential target, either from the disk side or the network side.
This is an unfortunate part of the Blu-Ray standard - the only people who are supposed to be able to author a Blu-Ray disc using BDMV profile are... studios. Initially, back during the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray war (who I found out that they did actually want to unify the two into one rather than go to battle it out - they just couldn't agree on BD-Java vs. JavaScript (HD Interactive) and dug their heels in), HD-DVD was AACS-optional, allowing for home authored HD-DVD discs which played everywhere.
But Blu-Ray was designed to be an exclusively Hollywood format with content dictated by the Blu-ray association (Sony proudly declared they were never going to make porn Blu-Rays, for example back then). AACS was mandatory, which meant you couldn't make a BDMV profile disc at home - you were given the BDAV profile instead which allowed for non-AACS content. In fact, it was so bad that if you mastered a BDMV disc, it would play in some Blu-Ray players but not others.
These days, either through lax enforcement or explicit standards, AACS is optional on Blu-Rays and you can author basic BDMVs. But early players did not allow BD-R's to be BDMV, not by physical limitations, but software.
Battery cases are like having a broken leg but instead of going to get a cast you get a pair of crutches and call it a day. Never mind that your battery is too weak or that you have a broken leg, crutches FTW!
Having used both removable batteries and external battery bricks, the external battery brick is FAR more useful.
First of all - how do you charge a removable battery? Very, very, very few phones come with an external battery charger, so if you want to charge your batteries, you have to charge the battery, then turn it off, remove the charged battery, stick in the low battery, then put it on charge again. That's annoying and requires discipline.
An external battery I just plug its adapter into the wall, then plug the output of the external battery into my phone, or my phone into its won charger. Boom, two fully charged batteries and zero intervention other than plugging them in when I get home. None of this having to check it, if it's done then swap, nonsense that gets dull the second day.
The phone I had previous to the very first iPhone I had 3 external batteries for. Keeping all three charged was a royal PITA. (I had to have extras because a bug meant using the camera killed battery life unless you remembered to reboot it). Having used external packs for the iPhone, it was way easier and more convenient.
Plus, I didn't have to worry about my external packs shorting out and creating a fire. Something extra batteries have the danger of since the contacts are exposed and easily bridged.
So when they talk about high temp semiconductors, it is still around -211F
What does this mean in practical terms? Is this an easy temperature to maintain? What techniques or materials could we use to keep that temp? How does power generation and pulling off waste heat factor into it?
A "low temp" superconductor relies on liquid helium to keep it cool (approx 4K). A 'high temp" superconductor relies on liquid nitrogen to keep it cool (77K).
Liquid nitrogen is stupidly cheap - tons of places use liquid nitrogen for a lot of non-superconducting purposes including packaged food preparation, cooling, experimentation (a lot of "cryo" experiments use liquid nitrogen, including the ever popular frozen rose, frozen banana and other science demonstrations).
In fact, to get rid of a small dewar of liquid nitrogen, it's usually just dumped on the table after the demo is done creating a nice effect. A more controlled evaporation is simply leaving the lid off and letting it boil off naturally.
No one keeps stuff cool by liquifying nitrogen onsite. Instead, they just have Air Liquide and similar companies come by every week or so and top off the cryo tank. The cryo tank provides the supply of liquid nitrogen that's needed for the equipment (MRI machines use it in superconducting magnets). Most labs have it available freely as well.
Liquid helium is much more expensive. Liquid nitrogen is so cheap that having it transported and even any wastage is considered "meh". Hell, schools probably buy way more than they need simply because to make it worthwhile you end up with a huge dewar of it.
At the beginning of last week, I saw a number of fake emails "returned" to my ISP email account. A day or two later, I received a phishing email requesting me to change my password for that email account.
Today, someone tried the same thing for my Microsoft account.
It's more creative than usual, but it is still just a phishing attack, and you can easily spot it by the fake URLs in the phishing emails.
Actually, the first is a standard joe-job where they fake the From address. Obviously your ISP isn't using SPF to whitelist the servers that could send the email allowing spammers to use your email as the From address and you're seeing the bounces. Just be lucky most servers don't actually obey the RFC anymore and don't send bounces or other error failed messages because a joe-job like that could easily net you 1000+ bounce replies.
The second I get a lot around the new years and september - basically when school gets back in session so it appears spammers phish the freshmen into giving up their email information. I know they're spam because they're sent to a few email addresses I've never used other than as a honeypot. Oddly, my legit email address gets far less spam than the honeypots
Sorry but what the fuck are you planning to do with 50,000 driver's license numbers?
Well, two people are very interested in that, one can find out, and the fourth can exert some leverage and get at information.
The first two are your DMV (or other agency) and insurance company. The DMV is interested if there's any commercial operations going on by unlicensed drivers. Penalties for such generally are minor, usually just suspension of the commercial activity to suspension of the license and a small fine.
The second would be insurance companies, who now have a list of people who operated in a commercial capacity. Knowing how they like to weasel out of any insurance payout, they can simply use this to note you did commercial activities on a personal insurance policy and use that as justification to cancel your policy. Of course, they won't do this until you get into an accident, at which point you do get a payout... of all the premiums you paid from when they cancelled to the accident. Yes, it's a very nasty surprise waiting for people who expect insurance to cover them only to find out they're now stuck with a massive personal liability bill.
Third group would be tax agencies who are very interested to know about your income-generating activities and did you report it on your income tax form. This takes a bit of work since they generally don't have access to the driver license database to look up people. Maybe you find out when you try to renew that someone wants to have a nice talk first.
Fourth, well, taxi companies who exert a little pressure on someone to take the driver license number and put them to names and addresses... and I'll leave that one at that.
The link between person and drivers license isn't only held by the DMV or similar agencies - if you've ever used a driver's license as an ID card, well...
We all win with at least a single computer maker stopping the insane practice of selling their customers instead of selling TO their customers.
Or Lenovo realizes a couple of things.
1) People who buy Lenovo aren't the price-sensitive type, or 2) People who buy Lenovo are corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
Basically, Lenovo's not really catering to the price-sensitive consumer - someone who will spend no more than $500 for a new computer (laptop or desktop). Plenty of companies to fulfill that market segment.
Instead, Lenovo realizes that people buy it for the legacy and thus will pay more for it. So even if the lack of shovelware causes Lenovo PCs to cost $100 more, their customers are such that they will pay for that benefit.
Either that, or they're corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
You want cheap PCs? You're gonna get shovelware. You willing to pay for quality? Less to none.
I think the real reason is that rhythm games are last gen right now - and there is a small core group of players that really do like them, so it's time to move them to current gen hardware.
Otherwise it'll die out in short order as the PS3 and Xbox360 fade out, and there's nowhere those players will be able to progress to.
And these group of people are worth a lot of money - because DLC for those games was still being released despite the last release being over 5 years ago.
BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?
Are you playing a DVD rip or a DVD?
If it's a DVD, what you're seeing is DVD copy protection - since you're using Windows, you need to get AnyDVD to remove the copy protection.
Yes, besides the CSS protection, there are other copy protections on DVDs too.
Without a DVD decryptor or AACS decryptor, playing DVD or Blu-Ray from disc on VLC is impossible because of the protections. AnyDVD is what I use because it's updated practically daily.
Ok, I'd heard about BETA but never had seen it before. So, is this beta or just something worse till beta comes?
No, it's not beta. Beta's a lot worse (think full of AJAX). This is really a bunch of minor tweaks that kinda-sorta broke whitepacing and other things. Which is probably why it isn't as objectionable - there are still plenty of issues (missing Post buttons and the reply link often overlaps the comments), but it works and is really a bunch of minor changes than the crap that was beta.
I do not like unpaid sick leave in some industries - particularly nurses, healthcare workers and the like. It means people are more likely to work when they are ill, forced to by financial concerns. Not good when they are dealing with people who are vulnerable. Same is true, to some extent, for bus drivers. Driving a bunch of people around while suffering from fever, etc., is going to effect their ability to drive. There's probably a compromise, such that drivers get 50% pay when ill. But would still prefer to see someone not drive me around while suffering from poor health. So what is good for workers and unions can also be good for customers as well.
The proper name is "Presenteeism" as in the opposite of absenteeism.
And no, it turns out stupid corporate policies often encourage people to come into work sick as well as unpaid sick leave.
Some policies such as requiring a doctor's note to take sick leave - which often incurs a charge as well as hours spent at the doctor's waiting room. Sure $30 might not be a lot, but that and the wait is sufficient discouragement from taking sick leave that even if you're clearly in no position to work, coughing up your lungs every couple of minutes and imitating Niagara falls with your sputum and whatnot, it's still easier to come into work and make the entire office miserable.
And no, doctor's don't want clearly sick patients in their waiting rooms either - they hate these policies too because it means they get exposed to the cold or flu and they don't appreciate having you spread it around their office, either. Some actually have gone so far that instead of billing the employee, they're billing the employer for it..
Hell, during the ebola epidemic, we basically had a joke that went around in the office - if anyone got it, the company would fold because everyone would have it by the end of the day.
Get a ide controller and whatever adapter you may need and just plug the hd into your current workstation. Perhaps one of those usb -> ide deals would also be a easy answer. Why make it more complex then that?
That doesn't work, usually.
Modern USB-IDE adapters use LBA mode to access data but that mode is usually implemented on drives larger than 8.4GB or so.
Smaller drives don't usually implement LBA mode and you have to talk to them in CHS mode, and very very very few USB-IDE adapters can talk this way.
It'll look like it works, but nothing really happens.
The best way (the way I did it) was find a PC with an IDE interface - but modern enough to have network adapters (or USB) or even run Linux or Windows. Then just slurp the data off the disk - even modern OSes still have the ability to talk CHS through the controller.
You are confusing market share with profit share. It's been shown in many studies that the vast majority of android users do not buy any apps and are mostly on low end devices that wouldn't be able to play the better games anyway. That's the real reason why devs have an iOS first approach.
it's worse than that.
The business models for developers is different. On iOS, sell your app - everywhere Apple officially sells their products, they have at least an app store and will take money to pay for the app. And Apple's customer base generally pays for stuff, so as an app developer selling apps is potentially viable.
On Android, most Android users don't pay for apps. Either because they can't (Google Wallet isn't universal), or other reasons. And if Google Wallet doesn't support the country, Google only shows free apps. So selling an app for 99 cents can easily put your visibility down from worldwide to 20% of that.
So the Android business model is to sell ads and give the app away - because free apps are available everywhere. And you'll get tons of personal data you can use too.
Of course, most of the time, iOS sells more so you're more likely to recoup the money by iOS sales first...
It's not great. It's only good for staunch advocates who refuse to run any other operating system. Linux still isn't good enough for joe sixpack to run it as a daily driver. Until they get joe sixpack on board, it'll forever be a niche product without enough inroads to support a gaming ecosystem.
Developers have had decades to get Linux right on the desktop, and they've failed at every turn. Even distros which did a lot more right than the others still aren't as polished and usable as the alternatives. It's time to get your head out of the sand on this, and start examining the reality. OS X has more of a chance at becoming a capable gaming OS than Linux does, and that's really saying something.
And that's where something like SteamOS can help by being "the definitive Linux". It eliminates all the political power plays, backstabbing and other nastiness that happens over Linux.
Yes, Linux is great - its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness - the diversity.
Developers don't care about fights over systemd or PulseAudio or whatever else stuff powers the modern Linux system. They don't. But with all sorts of distributions doing all sorts of different things, well, it doesn't help in the porting.
But Valve can easily dictate the game environment and say games must work on SteamOS. And SteamOS will (or will not - up to Valve) have services like systemd or PulseAudio or NetworkManager or whatever. So by basically dictatorial dictate, Valve creates a Linux-based OS for games without all the political Linux BS that goes with it. Sure the Linux admins will whine and complain that it's not "their one true Unix" or whatever, but everyone else is happy to have something to code for and work on.
And if it happens to work outside of SteamOS, bonus.
Except that a lot of people really like the flat look. That's why Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all adopted it. They're not ignoring customer feedback, they're chasing after it.
No, I think people are wanting "something different" more so than "flat look".
Because you know what the biggest complaint about iOS 6 was? The UI was "dated" and "looked the same".
It never was about usability - it's people thinking that something that looks different is a good thing - that every year things must look different and things must be better because of it.
If you don't change your look, people think you're dated and "not innovating".
Basically it's change for the sake of change. Because otherwise people don't think anything's changed.
While the NUCs are overkill for HTPC duty, the PIs are also not sufficiently there either. A PI just has problems keeping up with the user interface (XBMC).
That's not a Pi problem.
Because the Pi's CPU is designed as a set top box processor - the ARM for the UI and networking, while the VideoCore IV does the heavy lifting.
In fact, the Pi's CPU is used in set top boxes right now - I believe if you go to your favorite electronics retailer (online or off), pick up a Roku 2. The same CPU powering the Pi powers that. (Same amount of RAM, too I believe, and Ethernet.).
Do you have any proof that China systematically back-doors hardware before it leaves the country? I have not seen any, just lots of innuendo from US companies trying to make out that China is as bad as they are and you are screwed either way.
The US is exceptionally bad. It spends more money spying on people than anyone else. It has more extensive programmes than anyone else we know of, except perhaps the UK who they are close partners with. Let's not pretend that everyone is as bad, because they are not. There is zero evidence that China installs backdoors in routers or hard drive firmware before they go through customs, for example, while we have photos of the US doing it.
China is bad, but all the evidence suggests that the US is worse. Most of us prefer an evidence based approach to our paranoia.
So you're saying because the Chinese Edward Snowden hasn't come forward, the Chinese aren't doing it?
That's a very dangerous attitude. Fact is, EVERYONE is doing it. At the very least, for industrial espionage. That's the truth.
In fact, if you're waiting for the Chinese Edward Snowden to appear, realize that he's probably been "disappeared" by the Chinese government before he even had a chance to open his mouth.
You may think the US isn't a free country, but it is. A country like China is not going to allow anyone to air the dirty laundry without consequences. Sure Snowden may be exiled outside the US, but leaking state secrets in China means your disappearance and likely that of your family.
In fact, Snowden really didn't reveal anything noteworthy - you cannot do anything online without leaving a footprint, and anyone can see those footprints. So the fact that the government is tracking you should come as no surprise.
I cannot even begin to count the number of commenters here who pushed HTML5 as the best way to end, once and for all, those incredibly invasive and annoying Flash ads.
You got exactly what you were asking for.
So long as business is on the web, there will never, ever, ever be a technological "solution" to online advertising. There's simply too much money at stake for that to happen.
Except things are different now.
With HTML5, you have a LOT more control over everything. With Flash, it was all or nothing. An HTML5 ad is still an ad, and it still can be blocked in the same way other ads are blocked.
But your browser can do a lot of things you can't do if it was flash - e.g., your browser can easily block popups (something a lot harder to do on a flash ad). If a flash ad takes too many CPU cycles, you're SOL, but the browser can easily go and limit the CPU cycles an HTML5 ad uses.
- Stay curious. Do not accept things as they are said - ask why. If they do not give an answer, that usually means the answer either is beyond our means of knowing (e.g., Why did the Big Bang happen?), or someone is hiding something (Why is climate change not happening?).
- Along the same lines, be inquisitive. Lifelong learning. Always attempt to learn something new - a new skill, new knowledge, new language, whatever. There should be no time where you think "I know all I need to know" - there is always something new to learn. And no, the something new doesn't have to be useful to anyone - if you want to learn to speak Latin, do it. Do it for the fun and enjoyment of learning. Always be learning.
- Enjoy the world - explore the beauty of nature. Examine the complexity of modern day life. Just sit back - do not spend all your time on practicalities, but learn to just step back, put away your daily distractions, and just... enjoy. Take in the bigger picture. Do not let the minutiae of everyday life bog you down. Appreciate simple joys like how a dog might spend hours with a rope or ball.
- Realize there is much evil in the world, and strive to not contribute to it. Realize there are those who are not as fortunate, who may have lost much more than you, and to not judge them for you may find yourself in the same spot.
- If something does not feel right, act on that feeling. There are very few things in life that require immediate action. If your life is not in danger, take your time. Make it feel right. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it.
Unless the big fish start feeling the pain of the current patent regime. If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.
Not likely. Patent trolling has been going on for CENTURIES. It's NOT a new thing. in fact, abusing the patent system has been worse in the past than it is right now. Sure it seems like a lot, but remember, you're on a tech website and tech is where a lot of patent fights are right now in the past 30 years. But since the 19th century, there have been tons of patents and patent wars and patent trolls.
Way back when, it was sewing machines. There were so many patents filed related to sewing machines that it ended up in a stalemate as no one could actually make a sewing machine without violating someone's patent somewhere.
And yes, many patents overlapped then as well.
To counter this, a conglomerate went out and bought up many of the patents (eventually becoming Singer) so people could go to one place to buy licenses for a set of patents and make sewing machines. Probably one of the first patent pools around, and this was an era where FRAND didn't exist. So you ended up with a huge corporate entity that basically holds everything sewing machine related to which you paid license fees for.
Then there were vehicles... the internal combustion engine was highly patented and the current Otto cycle engines we use today was patented, avoided, etc. Then other aspects of the car were patented, avoided, sued over, etc.
Then there was the case of intermittent windshield wipers (invented about a half dozen times), but the modern version would be by Robert Kearns who did a fully solid-state version, and offered it to the Ford Motor Company who copied the ideas and made their own, resulting in a massive patent litigation that spanned 26 separate car manufacturers and lasted until the mid 90s through appeals and the Supreme Court.
Yes, you can imagine that in the 90s when intermittent wipers were basically almost standard, patent litigation was STILL going on about it.
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SSDs follow Moore's law - double the transistors, double the size. You can cheat with TLC and more, but the smaller cells aren't helping. Hard drives aren't restricted to Moore's law which is why their prices can tumble.
As for 2M IOPS, if you're doing that, you need SSD, no question. But if you're doing movie editing where raw speed and basically long stripes of writes take place, you may be better off going with hard drives because you value storage over IOPS. When a CGI scene can start to require several TBs of assets to be loaded for rendering (seriously, the modern movie is already pushing 200+TB of assets just for CGI), 2M IOPS isn't so critical.
And if your business needs 2M IOPS and 8TB of storage at 2M IOPS, there are companies willing to accommodate you, and sure you're going to be paying tens of thousands, but if you're pushing that sort of workload, that's probably well worth the investment.
Anyhow, I can see SMR drives serving as yet another tier in the storage hierarchy - you have the SSD for the hot files, the cooler files get put on a huge regular storage array, and the SMR drives serve as cold files long term near-availability storage, and then you have tape for offline storage. The SSD gets used for the files where they're busy so it's fast, the hard drives serve up older files that are referenced only once in a while, and the SMR serves as a archive pool for files accessed rarely or not at all, just before being dumped to tape.
Or, perhaps SMR drives can be used in high capacity applications where it's mostly read only. Think like a digital download store (music, movies), or Netflix. Updating a single file on an SMR is painful, but if you're going to write a big movie to the disk and everyone's going to be reading from it, a large cheap SMR drive fits the bill because it's going to be read from far more than written to.
Well, you're looking at several phenomenon combined into one.
First, it's Apple. Apple is newsworthy. If you need ad clicks, mention Apple. Did I mention Apple generates traffic? It's at the point where I'm sure we'll see headlines like "Apple CEO Tim Cook Scratches Butt During Keynote" soon enough.
Second, law of big numbers. Let's say only 0.1% of people hate U2 to complain. Out of half a billion iTunes users, that's half a million people. It doesn't take much to think one of those people has a blog that's worth anything. And combined with the first, well, boom, all over the news.
Third, well, people only really complain when they have a complaint. If 99.9% of the people liked free music, they probably won't all post "cool, free stuff!" online. No, those people who have an issue with it "oh noes, free stuff, don't want!" will post all sorts of messages about it. Combine it with the first and second, and it explodes.
Hell, I'd expect if an error in a factory production line caused a fingerprint to be left on the screen it would be a massive national disaster. Even though one could easily just wipe the offending fingerprint off.
Or you're looking at the fact that VR is being super hyped up, and it's only a matter of time before some company comes up with a consumer product on the market. I mean, Occulus has been around for how many years now releasing devkits but no consumer hardware.
So it's leaving a huge gap in the market - which two scenarios are going to play out. Either VR is going to fizzle out because the public is so tired of seeing Occulus this, Occulus that and nothing is available to actually buy (other than what Samsung releases) that they get tired of the hype and it dies as vaporware. Or someone sees that they can make a quick buck and releases crap, and the public buys into it because Occulus has been hyping it up as the next big thing, but someone else releases a product to get first-mover advantage and satisfy pent up demand. Doesn't matter if it's crap or it makes people sick, people will see it as a Occulus competitor and assume that it'll be representative of the state of VR.
And if it makes people sick, guess what? People will think Occulus isn't all that based on what people experienced with what they could buy.
Remember, the public is going to latch onto what they can get first
And that's the thing. Plastic is cheap - it's why the vast majority of cheap crap is made from plastic. Nice stuff is made from metal, which isn't as easy to work with (you can't really injection-mold metal very well - you could with liquidmetal but that's Apple-exclusive), so building out of metal already costs a lot more to build. When you're spending $600, you sort of want to feel like you're getting your money's worth.
Going from metal to plastic is considered the #1 cost cutting measure in industry - consumers generally view going from metal to plastic as a move that cheapens stuff because plastic is tackier.
Building a good device out of plastic is quite hard - you need to pick the right surface finishes otherwise your plastic can lead to interesting long term issues. You need to assemble it correctly - there's nothing more disconcerting than buying something for $600 and it creaks at the slightest bend (usually a sign of poorly-fitted parts).
This is an unfortunate part of the Blu-Ray standard - the only people who are supposed to be able to author a Blu-Ray disc using BDMV profile are... studios. Initially, back during the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray war (who I found out that they did actually want to unify the two into one rather than go to battle it out - they just couldn't agree on BD-Java vs. JavaScript (HD Interactive) and dug their heels in), HD-DVD was AACS-optional, allowing for home authored HD-DVD discs which played everywhere.
But Blu-Ray was designed to be an exclusively Hollywood format with content dictated by the Blu-ray association (Sony proudly declared they were never going to make porn Blu-Rays, for example back then). AACS was mandatory, which meant you couldn't make a BDMV profile disc at home - you were given the BDAV profile instead which allowed for non-AACS content. In fact, it was so bad that if you mastered a BDMV disc, it would play in some Blu-Ray players but not others.
These days, either through lax enforcement or explicit standards, AACS is optional on Blu-Rays and you can author basic BDMVs. But early players did not allow BD-R's to be BDMV, not by physical limitations, but software.
Having used both removable batteries and external battery bricks, the external battery brick is FAR more useful.
First of all - how do you charge a removable battery? Very, very, very few phones come with an external battery charger, so if you want to charge your batteries, you have to charge the battery, then turn it off, remove the charged battery, stick in the low battery, then put it on charge again. That's annoying and requires discipline.
An external battery I just plug its adapter into the wall, then plug the output of the external battery into my phone, or my phone into its won charger. Boom, two fully charged batteries and zero intervention other than plugging them in when I get home. None of this having to check it, if it's done then swap, nonsense that gets dull the second day.
The phone I had previous to the very first iPhone I had 3 external batteries for. Keeping all three charged was a royal PITA. (I had to have extras because a bug meant using the camera killed battery life unless you remembered to reboot it). Having used external packs for the iPhone, it was way easier and more convenient.
Plus, I didn't have to worry about my external packs shorting out and creating a fire. Something extra batteries have the danger of since the contacts are exposed and easily bridged.
A "low temp" superconductor relies on liquid helium to keep it cool (approx 4K). A 'high temp" superconductor relies on liquid nitrogen to keep it cool (77K).
Liquid nitrogen is stupidly cheap - tons of places use liquid nitrogen for a lot of non-superconducting purposes including packaged food preparation, cooling, experimentation (a lot of "cryo" experiments use liquid nitrogen, including the ever popular frozen rose, frozen banana and other science demonstrations).
In fact, to get rid of a small dewar of liquid nitrogen, it's usually just dumped on the table after the demo is done creating a nice effect. A more controlled evaporation is simply leaving the lid off and letting it boil off naturally.
No one keeps stuff cool by liquifying nitrogen onsite. Instead, they just have Air Liquide and similar companies come by every week or so and top off the cryo tank. The cryo tank provides the supply of liquid nitrogen that's needed for the equipment (MRI machines use it in superconducting magnets). Most labs have it available freely as well.
Liquid helium is much more expensive. Liquid nitrogen is so cheap that having it transported and even any wastage is considered "meh". Hell, schools probably buy way more than they need simply because to make it worthwhile you end up with a huge dewar of it.
Actually, the first is a standard joe-job where they fake the From address. Obviously your ISP isn't using SPF to whitelist the servers that could send the email allowing spammers to use your email as the From address and you're seeing the bounces. Just be lucky most servers don't actually obey the RFC anymore and don't send bounces or other error failed messages because a joe-job like that could easily net you 1000+ bounce replies.
The second I get a lot around the new years and september - basically when school gets back in session so it appears spammers phish the freshmen into giving up their email information. I know they're spam because they're sent to a few email addresses I've never used other than as a honeypot. Oddly, my legit email address gets far less spam than the honeypots
Well, two people are very interested in that, one can find out, and the fourth can exert some leverage and get at information.
The first two are your DMV (or other agency) and insurance company. The DMV is interested if there's any commercial operations going on by unlicensed drivers. Penalties for such generally are minor, usually just suspension of the commercial activity to suspension of the license and a small fine.
The second would be insurance companies, who now have a list of people who operated in a commercial capacity. Knowing how they like to weasel out of any insurance payout, they can simply use this to note you did commercial activities on a personal insurance policy and use that as justification to cancel your policy. Of course, they won't do this until you get into an accident, at which point you do get a payout ... of all the premiums you paid from when they cancelled to the accident. Yes, it's a very nasty surprise waiting for people who expect insurance to cover them only to find out they're now stuck with a massive personal liability bill.
Third group would be tax agencies who are very interested to know about your income-generating activities and did you report it on your income tax form. This takes a bit of work since they generally don't have access to the driver license database to look up people. Maybe you find out when you try to renew that someone wants to have a nice talk first.
Fourth, well, taxi companies who exert a little pressure on someone to take the driver license number and put them to names and addresses... and I'll leave that one at that.
The link between person and drivers license isn't only held by the DMV or similar agencies - if you've ever used a driver's license as an ID card, well...
DigitalRiver has stopped providing those ISOs for a little while now. If you visit any of those links, they just redirect you back to Microsoft.com.
Yes, I tried last week when I had to get a Win7 image for a friend. None of those links work anymore.
Or Lenovo realizes a couple of things.
1) People who buy Lenovo aren't the price-sensitive type, or
2) People who buy Lenovo are corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
Basically, Lenovo's not really catering to the price-sensitive consumer - someone who will spend no more than $500 for a new computer (laptop or desktop). Plenty of companies to fulfill that market segment.
Instead, Lenovo realizes that people buy it for the legacy and thus will pay more for it. So even if the lack of shovelware causes Lenovo PCs to cost $100 more, their customers are such that they will pay for that benefit.
Either that, or they're corporate clients who wipe the PCs anyways.
You want cheap PCs? You're gonna get shovelware. You willing to pay for quality? Less to none.
I think the real reason is that rhythm games are last gen right now - and there is a small core group of players that really do like them, so it's time to move them to current gen hardware.
Otherwise it'll die out in short order as the PS3 and Xbox360 fade out, and there's nowhere those players will be able to progress to.
And these group of people are worth a lot of money - because DLC for those games was still being released despite the last release being over 5 years ago.
Are you playing a DVD rip or a DVD?
If it's a DVD, what you're seeing is DVD copy protection - since you're using Windows, you need to get AnyDVD to remove the copy protection.
Yes, besides the CSS protection, there are other copy protections on DVDs too.
Without a DVD decryptor or AACS decryptor, playing DVD or Blu-Ray from disc on VLC is impossible because of the protections. AnyDVD is what I use because it's updated practically daily.
No, it's not beta. Beta's a lot worse (think full of AJAX). This is really a bunch of minor tweaks that kinda-sorta broke whitepacing and other things. Which is probably why it isn't as objectionable - there are still plenty of issues (missing Post buttons and the reply link often overlaps the comments), but it works and is really a bunch of minor changes than the crap that was beta.
The proper name is "Presenteeism" as in the opposite of absenteeism.
And no, it turns out stupid corporate policies often encourage people to come into work sick as well as unpaid sick leave.
Some policies such as requiring a doctor's note to take sick leave - which often incurs a charge as well as hours spent at the doctor's waiting room. Sure $30 might not be a lot, but that and the wait is sufficient discouragement from taking sick leave that even if you're clearly in no position to work, coughing up your lungs every couple of minutes and imitating Niagara falls with your sputum and whatnot, it's still easier to come into work and make the entire office miserable.
And no, doctor's don't want clearly sick patients in their waiting rooms either - they hate these policies too because it means they get exposed to the cold or flu and they don't appreciate having you spread it around their office, either. Some actually have gone so far that instead of billing the employee, they're billing the employer for it..
Hell, during the ebola epidemic, we basically had a joke that went around in the office - if anyone got it, the company would fold because everyone would have it by the end of the day.
That doesn't work, usually.
Modern USB-IDE adapters use LBA mode to access data but that mode is usually implemented on drives larger than 8.4GB or so.
Smaller drives don't usually implement LBA mode and you have to talk to them in CHS mode, and very very very few USB-IDE adapters can talk this way.
It'll look like it works, but nothing really happens.
The best way (the way I did it) was find a PC with an IDE interface - but modern enough to have network adapters (or USB) or even run Linux or Windows. Then just slurp the data off the disk - even modern OSes still have the ability to talk CHS through the controller.
it's worse than that.
The business models for developers is different. On iOS, sell your app - everywhere Apple officially sells their products, they have at least an app store and will take money to pay for the app. And Apple's customer base generally pays for stuff, so as an app developer selling apps is potentially viable.
On Android, most Android users don't pay for apps. Either because they can't (Google Wallet isn't universal), or other reasons. And if Google Wallet doesn't support the country, Google only shows free apps. So selling an app for 99 cents can easily put your visibility down from worldwide to 20% of that.
So the Android business model is to sell ads and give the app away - because free apps are available everywhere. And you'll get tons of personal data you can use too.
Of course, most of the time, iOS sells more so you're more likely to recoup the money by iOS sales first...
And that's where something like SteamOS can help by being "the definitive Linux". It eliminates all the political power plays, backstabbing and other nastiness that happens over Linux.
Yes, Linux is great - its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness - the diversity.
Developers don't care about fights over systemd or PulseAudio or whatever else stuff powers the modern Linux system. They don't. But with all sorts of distributions doing all sorts of different things, well, it doesn't help in the porting.
But Valve can easily dictate the game environment and say games must work on SteamOS. And SteamOS will (or will not - up to Valve) have services like systemd or PulseAudio or NetworkManager or whatever. So by basically dictatorial dictate, Valve creates a Linux-based OS for games without all the political Linux BS that goes with it. Sure the Linux admins will whine and complain that it's not "their one true Unix" or whatever, but everyone else is happy to have something to code for and work on.
And if it happens to work outside of SteamOS, bonus.
Pick up an HP Stream 7 tablet and try it ($100). It's surprisingly perky and speedy despite its 1GB of RAM, Windows and Atom processor.
it's no speed demon, and yes it can bog down, but it runs Windows impressively fast
No, I think people are wanting "something different" more so than "flat look".
Because you know what the biggest complaint about iOS 6 was? The UI was "dated" and "looked the same".
It never was about usability - it's people thinking that something that looks different is a good thing - that every year things must look different and things must be better because of it.
If you don't change your look, people think you're dated and "not innovating".
Basically it's change for the sake of change. Because otherwise people don't think anything's changed.
That's not a Pi problem.
Because the Pi's CPU is designed as a set top box processor - the ARM for the UI and networking, while the VideoCore IV does the heavy lifting.
In fact, the Pi's CPU is used in set top boxes right now - I believe if you go to your favorite electronics retailer (online or off), pick up a Roku 2. The same CPU powering the Pi powers that. (Same amount of RAM, too I believe, and Ethernet.).
So you're saying because the Chinese Edward Snowden hasn't come forward, the Chinese aren't doing it?
That's a very dangerous attitude. Fact is, EVERYONE is doing it. At the very least, for industrial espionage. That's the truth.
In fact, if you're waiting for the Chinese Edward Snowden to appear, realize that he's probably been "disappeared" by the Chinese government before he even had a chance to open his mouth.
You may think the US isn't a free country, but it is. A country like China is not going to allow anyone to air the dirty laundry without consequences. Sure Snowden may be exiled outside the US, but leaking state secrets in China means your disappearance and likely that of your family.
In fact, Snowden really didn't reveal anything noteworthy - you cannot do anything online without leaving a footprint, and anyone can see those footprints. So the fact that the government is tracking you should come as no surprise.
Except things are different now.
With HTML5, you have a LOT more control over everything. With Flash, it was all or nothing. An HTML5 ad is still an ad, and it still can be blocked in the same way other ads are blocked.
But your browser can do a lot of things you can't do if it was flash - e.g., your browser can easily block popups (something a lot harder to do on a flash ad). If a flash ad takes too many CPU cycles, you're SOL, but the browser can easily go and limit the CPU cycles an HTML5 ad uses.
I would add a couple of things.
- Stay curious. Do not accept things as they are said - ask why. If they do not give an answer, that usually means the answer either is beyond our means of knowing (e.g., Why did the Big Bang happen?), or someone is hiding something (Why is climate change not happening?).
- Along the same lines, be inquisitive. Lifelong learning. Always attempt to learn something new - a new skill, new knowledge, new language, whatever. There should be no time where you think "I know all I need to know" - there is always something new to learn. And no, the something new doesn't have to be useful to anyone - if you want to learn to speak Latin, do it. Do it for the fun and enjoyment of learning. Always be learning.
- Enjoy the world - explore the beauty of nature. Examine the complexity of modern day life. Just sit back - do not spend all your time on practicalities, but learn to just step back, put away your daily distractions, and just ... enjoy. Take in the bigger picture. Do not let the minutiae of everyday life bog you down. Appreciate simple joys like how a dog might spend hours with a rope or ball.
- Realize there is much evil in the world, and strive to not contribute to it. Realize there are those who are not as fortunate, who may have lost much more than you, and to not judge them for you may find yourself in the same spot.
- If something does not feel right, act on that feeling. There are very few things in life that require immediate action. If your life is not in danger, take your time. Make it feel right. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it.
Not likely. Patent trolling has been going on for CENTURIES. It's NOT a new thing. in fact, abusing the patent system has been worse in the past than it is right now. Sure it seems like a lot, but remember, you're on a tech website and tech is where a lot of patent fights are right now in the past 30 years. But since the 19th century, there have been tons of patents and patent wars and patent trolls.
Way back when, it was sewing machines. There were so many patents filed related to sewing machines that it ended up in a stalemate as no one could actually make a sewing machine without violating someone's patent somewhere.
And yes, many patents overlapped then as well.
To counter this, a conglomerate went out and bought up many of the patents (eventually becoming Singer) so people could go to one place to buy licenses for a set of patents and make sewing machines. Probably one of the first patent pools around, and this was an era where FRAND didn't exist. So you ended up with a huge corporate entity that basically holds everything sewing machine related to which you paid license fees for.
Then there were vehicles... the internal combustion engine was highly patented and the current Otto cycle engines we use today was patented, avoided, etc. Then other aspects of the car were patented, avoided, sued over, etc.
Then there was the case of intermittent windshield wipers (invented about a half dozen times), but the modern version would be by Robert Kearns who did a fully solid-state version, and offered it to the Ford Motor Company who copied the ideas and made their own, resulting in a massive patent litigation that spanned 26 separate car manufacturers and lasted until the mid 90s through appeals and the Supreme Court.
Yes, you can imagine that in the 90s when intermittent wipers were basically almost standard, patent litigation was STILL going on about it.