For small cameras, digital rules. Same with 35mm. Medium format digital cameras cost US$10,000 to $50,000 while film cameras cost far less. But there is no large format digital cameras, and my 4x5 (100mm x 125mm) Sinar is equal to a 200 to 800 megapixel camera if you scan the film. Digital has yet to match 4x5 and is far away from 8x10 film.
I shoot full-frame Nikon digital for color, but nothing comes close to 4x5 film for large prints.
The problem with medium format and larger film stock is the sensor. Given the sensor has a fixed area of silicon, it costs the same to fabricate, no matter if it's 1MP, 10MP, 100MP - the number of transistors can vary, but the silicon area cannot. It's why dSLRs are often APS-sized sensors (more sensors per wafer == cheaper), why full-frame dSLRs are pricier (less sensors), and medium format digitals are as they are (you can fit maybe 4 or 5 on an old 120mm wafer, of which maybe 0 or 1 might be viable. A 300mm wafer can hold more, so you can get a greater chance of getting a few good ones, but they have to pay for all the bads. The raw cost of that sensor can be a couple of thousand dollars or more.
The larger formats? Forget it - you'd be looking at high end house mortgage pricing.
It's actually easier (and cheaper) ot make a denser smaller sensor than a larger one.
I don't think they ever moved anything out of the holodeck, and when it lost power everything vanished. If there was actual energy to mater conversion, wouldn't the meat-puppets stay behind/could be moved out of the holodeck?
Holodecks are a combination of projections, force fields, and replicators. The projections and force fields keep the user away from the holodeck walls, and able to climb stairs, bump into walls, hit things, etc. It's like VR with a super-haptic interface.
The replicator technology is required for times when that isn't enough - e.g., the user decides to partake in a meal, or some effect (like water) needs to hit the user and affect the user in some way.
Replicator technology, however, has not been able to create life, so characters weren't real. Of course, I can't imagine a failure mode that owuld allow holodeck characters to walk outside the holodeck unless the whole ship was outfitted with similar equipment. Nor a failure mode where the computer cannot shut down a running holodeck program. I mean, did the Star Trek universe forget how to kill programs as root?
The Star Trek trek that I thought was the most futuristic was the Personal Waste Transporters that would automatically beam out solid, liquid, and gaseous human waste, plus dirt, oil, etc.; which eliminated the need for toilets, showers, etc. from Star Ships and Away Missions.
Eh? TNG onwards had sonic showers, and there was a door to the bathroom right off the bridge of the Enterprise D.
Then again, Trek regressed in many ways. I mean, given how crews get thrown about and how panels explode, you'd think they'd have seatbelts or something to keep crews from flying about. and some sort of protection from things that overload so they don't explode in the face of the user.
Javascript is not the problem. Plenty of big applications are done in Javascript. The problem is that iOS's implementation of Javascript is quirky, buggy, and almost impossible to debug. There in no error console in a UIWebView. Html5 audio is broken. Canvases don't work quite right. So you can't develop in a browser, and then deploy in an app, because they don't work the same.
A conspiracy theorist might conclude that Apple is making html5 difficult intentionally, because it is against their interest for developers to create portable apps.
Or, if you're making an HTML5 app, why are you making a native app be what is effectively a locked-down web browser. Given that the iOS native browser has a better javascript engine (by really dumping priviledges which means it's even more heavily sandboxed), they could just do it as a mobile web site. If people wanted an icon, iOS supports that.
Even better, no approval needed - anyone who visits facebook.com gets the optoin to visit the mobile version and can set a little popup on how to add the icon to the home screen.
As a bonus, it works for Android as well.
You want portable web apps - Apple supports it just fine, and is the Apple-supported method for getting around the App Store. No reason Facebook had to build their own web browser for that stuff.
I'm German, I buy from Amazon.de and German and international merchants on Amazon Marketplace, paying with Amazon Payments.
So you where saying?
Ahem, buying is NOT "being a merchant" (which is SELLING).
Anyone with a merchant account, like I said, can accept any network cards from anywhere. If you have a Visa merchant account, you can accept ANY Visa card aorund the world.
However, can you accept payment via Amazon Payments? As in, open an Amazon Payment account so people can pay YOU? From Europe, maybe. From China, most likely not. Ditto Square/Dwolla and Paypal (except SEZs like Hong Kong).
China's unlikely to support many external payment methods - preferring their own banking system naturally. However, it doesn't mean you can't buy stuff from China with your Visa or Mastercard, but the seller probably has opened a merchant account with their Chinese bank.
Buying with credit cards is easy. Selling is another matter and opening a merchant account usually is geographically restricted. (Also there are certain qualifications you have to meet - a random Joe can't open a merchant account and start accepted credit cards. It's the niche no one other than Paypal fulfills.)
Most of the EBay sellers I buy from anymore ship directly from Asia. I doubt purchasing from Alibaba would be much different, so long as the seller accepted payment from well vetted processors such as Dwolla, Square, AmazonPayments or even those PayPal creeps.
Question is - I don't think Square, Dwolla or Amazon Payments support being a merchant outside the US. Merchant accounts are normally very country specific as they have to apply to banking rules per country. Note that this is for being able to *accept* the credit card - the payer can be from anywhere that the credit card network is present (i.e., anyone who can get a Visa/Mastercard/etc).
China's probably got very strict restrictions on how money is handled, so unless those companies specifically create a Chinese branch, they wouldn't be avaialble.
Heck, I'm not entirely sure if Paypal is even in there for the same reason, short of the seller using a drop in another country (Hong Kong, but that's a "specizl economic zone". Not sure if rest of China is Paypal friendly).
Seems to cover a wide range of range applications. I wonder why they left out loseless encoding. That would have made it the one true codec for everything.
A quick look at the graph shows that they stop at 128kbps, which would mean it's a great codec for high-quality real-time audio telephony rather than as a codec to span the spectrum of low end real time to lossless audio.
At least looking at the page - the summary mentions it's the "one codec to rule them all", but the page leads me to believe it's something you'd use for say, teleconferencing and VoIP more so than multichannel lossless high-definition audio.
Perhaps they intend it to work reasonably well in all cases, but it looks like testing was done only to low-bitrate encodings of 128kbps and lower. At which point it looks like yes, for that scenario, it's the best.
I'll wager that pretty much all of it is recorded - and then the owner presses "share" and it's uploaded to wherever... there's no real creation going on
A lot of directors are using iPads these days - perhaps not in the actual recording of movies and film, but definitely in the content creation process. They seem to have figured out that being mobile is far more useful during a shoot, and load the dailies and previs work on their iPads as well as scripts and shooting notes, so they can run around directing the scene and not schlepping a laptop (which would save them the "sync" stage).
I'd argue that's content creation, at least in the assistance of. It's more important to be a tablet form factor than the obvious utility of a laptop which they would otherwise keep at the table and have to walk back and forth to reference.
Of course, for these people, you'd think they'd be the first to use tablet PCs rather than tablets.
If these patents are covered under FRAND, then by definition, the patent owner has to offer similar licensing terms to all comers. They can't charge Apple more just because they think Apple can afford it.
That being said, I don't know the details, so it's entirely possible that the patents in question are not covered under FRAND, in which case Apple may have to pony up or use slower wireless data speeds.
Funny thing is, Apple owns a bunch of LTE patents as well that they bought from Nortel. In the end, it'll all end up cross-licensed with no change of money (Apple acquired the LTE patents so they'd have to FRAND those to get access to all the other FRAND patents. An interesting one of those is nano-SIM which was approved and Apple also has to FRAND that.)
This one is more interesting because it's FRAND patents versus FRAND patents.
Perhaps for 5G the 3GPP should just set up a patent pool like the MPEG-LA and be done with it. Pay one fee per phone and you're legally licensed on all the patents. And everyone pays the same fee. Then they can spend years arguing over the splitting of the fees collected, but that's it.
No reason this should be restricted to apple products as an android tablet would work just as well to view pdf files, but still, very reasonable savings estimate.
For basic documentatoin, yes, it's just PDFs (there are people selling subscriptoins to PDF plates).
Non-airliner operations often have better capabilities - like geo-referenced plates (where it'll display your location in relation to where you should be).
But the iPad has appeared to capture the most fascination with pilots (and the number of aviation-related apps for it doesn't hurt, though the prices do...).
As a professional researcher, it's much more reliable to use the paper version of manuals and hardware documentation.
I'm all for consolidating text and tasks to a convenient gizmo for personal use, but when it comes to work, you can't be at the mercy of a power outage, dead battery, virus, etc, when you need to reference something important. We keep paper logbooks for a reason, and I'm surprised to hear the airline industry is forsaken what works flawlessly for snappy, computer interfaces.
Power outage - well, if the plane's running on batteries, I think you have a bigger problem than worrying about following the approach plates in the iPad. And I'm sure the cockpit can have neat little things called 'charging ports' so your iPad can be charged from aircraft power.
Though, for the vast majority of flight, the ipad will sit in the flight bag unused so as long as it's reasonably charged (more than 10% battery - which would give roughly an hour's worth of usage, which is plenty for most flights).
Virus - well, ATC systems often use Windows, and those are a touch more vulnerable than say, an iPad. We are talking walled garden here after all (and "jailbreaking" is a pretty foreign term for them).
The *interesting* thing is the iPad, while there are a few aviation apps (ported from iOS) for Android, it seems the vast majority concentrate on iOS, and the iPad specifically (very little for the iPhone).
The aviation world has gone nuts for the iPad, primarily because an iPad with an AHRS system (total cost under $2000) can serve as a pretty good GPS system with a larger screen and better battery life. It beats having to retrofit a glass cockpit in your plane (if one's available - you're looking at easily $50k+ all in), a penel-mount GPS unit ($10k+), and cost-competitive with many handheld GPS units (around $2k). Except the iPad can also help you file your flight plan, do flight planning, and has a larger screen (and is more user (pilot) friendly). About the biggest complaint is the inability to use it with gloves.
You should check out the aviation mags from around 2010 or so - they all went ga-ga for the iPad and possibilities for pilots. These days, reading those mags you'd think every pilot uses one.
So just share them with your peers who may have a student forget or loose their calculator.
Really helpful - offer them as loaners as well if needed for homework.
You can also erase their memory and enforce their usage during tests and finals, too - no calculators allowed - they will be provided for you.
But loaning them out is the perfect scenario - if you have too many, offer them to the math and science classes so they can have loaners as well.
Depending on the principal, you might be able to have them as school-wide loaners for standardized tests. There'll always be people who can't afford a calculator or forgot theirs or didn't bring one, so having a pile for them to use is one less thing they need to worry about during SATs and such.
And maybe if there's an underpriviledged student in your class, you could give them one on a long-term loan just so it's one less thing they have to struggle with in school.
The tracking dots are for output devices and apply to all output, counterfeit or not.
On the input side, there's a pattern of 5 dots on practically all currency that programs like Photoshop and scanners recognize to degrade scanned images of currency. It looks like a distorted X with a dot at the ends and in the middle..
"Liquidity" as the argument for allowing HFT doesn't really prove anything, either.
Okay, so it grants near-perfect liquidity. Great. So what? Is that more important than market stability and sane trading practices?
Liquidity is important. To take a real life example - take say a store selling two products - a Playstation Vita and an iPod Touch. The store needs $1000 soon (say, tomorrow), perhaps to pay some upcoming bills. They could do it by selling 4 of either units at full asking price (they sell for $250 each). The problem is, the more liquid item (more readily convertible to cash) is the iPod Touch - they sell, so a store only has to sell 4 of them because buyers are willing to pay that for it. However, if the store wanted to clear out its Vitas, it would have to discount them in order to move them as buyers aren't willing to buy them at $250. (This may mean selling 10 at $100 each - taking a loss but if you need the money...).
For thinly traded products, they aren't liquid. If you need cash (perhaps for retirement, paying off some loans or sudden large bill coming due (medical, say)), you're going to have to significantly discount in order to meet the obligation because buyers are asking way less than what the sellers want to sell at (bid-ask spread - the thinner, the more liquid stock).
Trading in say, Apple or Google is easy - they're liquid stock and the bid-ask spreads tend to be very small and the trading price hovers around the last trade value. But if you want to trade in some thinly traded stock, ABC Co., perhaps to liquidate your holdings in there, you have to discount. How much you discount depends on when you need the cash (you can't just "sell" your stock. You have to find a buyer to trade with). As such, buyers are willing to pay a very low price, while sellers want as much as they can get. You can list your shares for sale at the Last Trade price and hope maybe a buyer meets you in the middle, but that could be an hour, a day, a week, months or even more.
It's like selling a house - if you're like Romney and have a bunch of houses to sell and need the cash, you put the house up for sale. But you may not get a sale for a little while (or even an offer). Selling stock is like this. Given current market conditions, real estate isn't very liquid - you have to discount significantly to convert to cash. But during boom times, it's extremely liquid and houses are selling for above asking price and selling within minutes of listing.
Anyhow, banning HFT will just mean HFT traders move to a less regulated currency. Like say, bitcoin.
And an ebook version of a book does not need any more than the physical version. I would argue less (no typesetter, for example). You should, in theory, be able to take the same text and output it in whatever ebook version you want without much extra effort.
A typesetter doesn't just set type and hit print, they're responsible for the layout of the entire book.
This includes formatting of chapter headings and layout of images, tables, headers and footers, as well as table of contents, indicies, etc.
All an author does is submit a manuscript. The editor catches stuff like mispellings, typos, and other grammatical errors (but never about content). The manuscript goes back to the author for corrections and it's submitted again.
Then it goes to the typesetter whose job is to properly format the document. Did the author use styles, or did the author just boldface the chapter headings in the text, making it impossible ot pull out? Images have to be extracted and properly placed in the text (depending on the author, it may be inline, poor quality (think blown up low-res JPEG), or located in the wrong section (or thrown in as a bunch of loose image files which have to be inserted into the text).
It's true the typesetter no longer has to set up printing presses, but the electronic distribution format still requires a lot of work, especially if you want cover art and proper book formatting and front/back matter
Some authors beautifully typeset their text - it's "camera ready" from the get-go. Others basically submit the equivalent of a ASCII text file with no formatting (or crude markups) and a bunch of random images. (And said text file may be hard-returned so the challenge is to figure out if the author intentionally did it to break the text up, or did it because they hit the end of a random-length line).
Anyhow, if you like what Amazon is doing, consider Amazon to be the next Walmart. It's the same strategy. It'll soon only be between pirates and kindle's azw books.
This is a perfect example of redundancy not being the same as backups. They had redundant encryption devices, but the failure of one rolled over into the other. They had no backups (that's right, none at all) that they could restore from. From what they've told us, they intend to resolve this issue by adding more redundancy.
Correction, they have no backups of the keys that the encryption accellerators used. End result is now they have a bunch of encrypted data, with little in the way of being able to recover it because the keys used are lost or corrupted.
Sounds like they need to be hacked and their information "liberated" so they can recover it:).
My cellphone? An iPhone... With a prepaid SIM card!
That way I'm sure that: a) I'll spend way less than any "plan" (master plan one could say ; ) any operator could come up with and b) no malware / premium SMS service / crazy app/site eating my 3G bandwith can never "eat" more than the data limit available on my prepaid card.
Technically, malware like that on iPhone won't get very far because of Apple restrictions.
First, an app can only send an SMS surreptitiously if it uses its own SMS network (kinda defeats the purpose of using the customer's SMS and phone bill). Otherwise it'll have to bring up the Messages app with the SMS pre-filled in and the user MUST click send on their own. There's no ability to send an SMS without the user knowing.
Likewise, all phone calls route to the standard dialer (and Apple doesn't allow alternative dialers unless they're VoIP or run on their own network separate from the user's).
The only thing malware can ding you for is 3G data doing these things, but that sort of payment only goes to the carrier, not so much a third party.
So your prepaid method generally works much better on Android where you don't have such OS restrictions and walled gardens to deal with.
There is a fundamental flaw in elections today: lack of consideration for "margin of error". In my opinion, margin of error should be calculated and any election which falls within the margin of error should either be held again or some sort of tie breaker should kick in.
In Canada, the law states that if the winning margin is less than 1% of the votes cast, a recount is mandatory. Additionally, any candidate may request a recount. This includes after the mandatory recount, as well.
Experience has shown that the recounts generally tend to be very good - even in very tight races (under 10 votes) the recounts vary only by a vote or so.
It's helped by the fact that counting is done by having a large number of people count a small number of votes each (which means each person's work can be checked by someone else), and the results tallied up (which is simple to do accurately).
Everyone knew FB was overvalued. Well everyone who watched the news, or read anything about it for months leading up to it.
People weren't trying to invest in FB, they were trying to ride the "bump" they expected when it went public. They hoped that it would bump up to some dumb number and they would sell off at the ridiculous price before it went down. The problem is... everyone did that and there were not enough suckers to propel it above the IPO price for any appreciable amount of time.
More like, everyone was expecting dot-com-boom 2.0, where early investors can make tons of money flipping IPO stock. And Facebook's a household name these days, so it must be dot-com boom 2.0.
Greed is blinding, and give someone an easy way to make money (dot com 2.0!) and they'll blindly throw money at it. This is especially since the first boom was barely a decade and a half earlier so many people have memories of people throwing in $1000 and making millions.
Of course, there's no such thing.
Hell, tech is generlaly very bad for investments - your ROI in tech is far lower than other industries. Even if you invested in Apple (which is the best performing stock in tech), you'd make some money, but you'd have made more by not buying into tech. Even the financial industry did better, and they had a meltdown to deal with.
So, let's allow a bunch of people to get hacked because the developer doesn't meet your standards. That's not a dick move at all.
OTOH, who's to say they haven't ALREADY been hacked and this disclosure merely was bringing attention to the public?
That's the problem with responsible disclosure - it's really hard to do. Wait too long and people exploit it without your knowledge. Wait too short and they have no chance to fix it (and how long is "enough"? QA processes vary and some places do extensive testing to ensure things don't break, others only do a casual (i.e., it compiles) and ship that).
And then you have to figure out how much to tell people. I mean, tell too little and the developer just says "it's a theoretical hack". Tell too much and people cry "you just told everyone how to hack everyone's account!".
It's just like how PSN was shut down last year. It wasn't because hackers got the information and triggered some sort of Sony network monitoring alarm. It was because a bunch of people were getting PSN downloads (games and DLC) for free using PS3s that should never been able to access it. Only when they looked deeper did they realize something was wrong. But until then, who knows how much data was taken, or how long they had access to it?
Came here to say this. The Cuyahoga caught fire in 1969. How long will it take China to start taking their environment seriously? I can't believe that they would let this go on forever, but it isn't a democracy and money makes people blind to the effects of their actions.
Consider the Chinese to be the ultimate in capitalists. They know that the US with its pansy environmental laws hurt profits, and you can't have that.
Plus, when a few people die, so what? China's population numbers are big enough that a bunch of people can die without many people noticing.
And democracy's got nothing to do with it - convince enough people that environmental protection laws hurt their pocketbooks and they'll vote for anything.
Additionally, Apple gets revenue from app sales and is the one responsible for pushing OS updates so they have a strong incentive to make sure that development is easy.
That revenue from app sales doesn't go very far, when you consider Mac sales (declining along with general PC sales) outrank it by an order of magnitude, and iOS sales by a further order of magnitude. That's just revenue - actual profits will be far lower (they have data centers and payment processors and security etc to run, plus the behemoth sloth known as iTunes...).
In a similar vein, I don't think Google makes a pile off the Play Store either (and they too take a 30% cut).
One of the big problems though is that each new Android version brings with it a new kernel, and kernel porting isn't that easy a task. Of course, given that new SoCs support the latest version of Android, it means if a manufacturer wants to ship 2.3, they have to backport everything. Which given a bunch of new phones get released with kickass hardware but 2.3, makes no sense at all.
Plus, it's not like ICS was released yesterday - it's nearly a year now, and new Androids still come with 2.3 on release.
The real irony is I think the cheapass Chinese Androids using AOSP probably come with Jelly Bean by default, while new phones from the big vendors ship with Gingerbread, to get ICS updates later.
It makes sense - because Wikipedia pages are not supposed to be primary sources. Wikipedia is a great way to learn stuff and get an overview, but it's not a place to get actual research from.
The author, trying to update his page, violated this because it's now uncitable. I mean, sure the author can write it, but how is it authoritative? Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, and they don't want to be - because encyclopedias are never primary sources. And really, any line without a citation is suspect - where's the proof?
The author should've published a page perhaps about "Things wrong about my wikipedia page" on their website, then link it up.
(And who's to say it's not some joker with the same name? Uncited statements are unsupportable).
I run 2.3.6 on my phone, and 4.1 something on my (Nexus) tablet - let me assure you all 200+ apps I have installed on both (thanks, local backup) are at the exact same version on both devices. If you replace your launcher, you don't even see the OS unless you open the settings screen.
Of course, because all your apps are written for Gingerbread or Froyo to begin with. Basically if you write for Froyo, you're encompassing the vast majority of Android phones out there. If you write for Jelly Bean, your app only works on 1% of the phones out there. Ice Cream Sandwich at least gets you 20%.
Of course, if developers only write for the old APIs, it really means that all the capabilities of the newer OSes go unused and all the nifty features shown off at Google I/O are basically frills that have no application for most users because they can't use it because developers won't code for it.
Which is annoying as developers rapidly embrace new iOS features when they come out.
So Sony, Nintendo, et al want an iOS style cut with high AAA game on PC like prices
Trust me, 30% is a pittance of a cut - while the license fee per game is around $5 or so per copy for the PS3 and Xbox360 for disc-games, the actual split for DLC or downloadables is MUCH higher. 30% is nothing - it can easily be 50% or more to the console maker.
Heck, Sony used to (maybe they still do?) charge by the gigabyte in hosting the game and its demos.
Anyhow, Sony's already scared of anything that could possibly be used for piracy - even unfeasible ones. After all, OtherOS was eliminated because of a purely theoretical hack to the PS3 (that wasn't even used to get the PS3 master keys). And earlier in the year, Sony removed several Vita downloadable games because they had various homebrew loader flaws. Sony's going to close this hole no matter what because it may be a vector for piracy,.
(And really, once you can run unsigned code, you can look for flaws to get full access to the system, so while you may not be able to do it NOW, it greatly enables analysis of the system to find other flaws).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with medium format and larger film stock is the sensor. Given the sensor has a fixed area of silicon, it costs the same to fabricate, no matter if it's 1MP, 10MP, 100MP - the number of transistors can vary, but the silicon area cannot. It's why dSLRs are often APS-sized sensors (more sensors per wafer == cheaper), why full-frame dSLRs are pricier (less sensors), and medium format digitals are as they are (you can fit maybe 4 or 5 on an old 120mm wafer, of which maybe 0 or 1 might be viable. A 300mm wafer can hold more, so you can get a greater chance of getting a few good ones, but they have to pay for all the bads. The raw cost of that sensor can be a couple of thousand dollars or more.
The larger formats? Forget it - you'd be looking at high end house mortgage pricing.
It's actually easier (and cheaper) ot make a denser smaller sensor than a larger one.
Holodecks are a combination of projections, force fields, and replicators. The projections and force fields keep the user away from the holodeck walls, and able to climb stairs, bump into walls, hit things, etc. It's like VR with a super-haptic interface.
The replicator technology is required for times when that isn't enough - e.g., the user decides to partake in a meal, or some effect (like water) needs to hit the user and affect the user in some way.
Replicator technology, however, has not been able to create life, so characters weren't real. Of course, I can't imagine a failure mode that owuld allow holodeck characters to walk outside the holodeck unless the whole ship was outfitted with similar equipment. Nor a failure mode where the computer cannot shut down a running holodeck program. I mean, did the Star Trek universe forget how to kill programs as root?
Eh? TNG onwards had sonic showers, and there was a door to the bathroom right off the bridge of the Enterprise D.
Then again, Trek regressed in many ways. I mean, given how crews get thrown about and how panels explode, you'd think they'd have seatbelts or something to keep crews from flying about. and some sort of protection from things that overload so they don't explode in the face of the user.
Or, if you're making an HTML5 app, why are you making a native app be what is effectively a locked-down web browser. Given that the iOS native browser has a better javascript engine (by really dumping priviledges which means it's even more heavily sandboxed), they could just do it as a mobile web site. If people wanted an icon, iOS supports that.
Even better, no approval needed - anyone who visits facebook.com gets the optoin to visit the mobile version and can set a little popup on how to add the icon to the home screen.
As a bonus, it works for Android as well.
You want portable web apps - Apple supports it just fine, and is the Apple-supported method for getting around the App Store. No reason Facebook had to build their own web browser for that stuff.
Ahem, buying is NOT "being a merchant" (which is SELLING).
Anyone with a merchant account, like I said, can accept any network cards from anywhere. If you have a Visa merchant account, you can accept ANY Visa card aorund the world.
However, can you accept payment via Amazon Payments? As in, open an Amazon Payment account so people can pay YOU? From Europe, maybe. From China, most likely not. Ditto Square/Dwolla and Paypal (except SEZs like Hong Kong).
China's unlikely to support many external payment methods - preferring their own banking system naturally. However, it doesn't mean you can't buy stuff from China with your Visa or Mastercard, but the seller probably has opened a merchant account with their Chinese bank.
Buying with credit cards is easy. Selling is another matter and opening a merchant account usually is geographically restricted. (Also there are certain qualifications you have to meet - a random Joe can't open a merchant account and start accepted credit cards. It's the niche no one other than Paypal fulfills.)
Question is - I don't think Square, Dwolla or Amazon Payments support being a merchant outside the US. Merchant accounts are normally very country specific as they have to apply to banking rules per country. Note that this is for being able to *accept* the credit card - the payer can be from anywhere that the credit card network is present (i.e., anyone who can get a Visa/Mastercard/etc).
China's probably got very strict restrictions on how money is handled, so unless those companies specifically create a Chinese branch, they wouldn't be avaialble.
Heck, I'm not entirely sure if Paypal is even in there for the same reason, short of the seller using a drop in another country (Hong Kong, but that's a "specizl economic zone". Not sure if rest of China is Paypal friendly).
A quick look at the graph shows that they stop at 128kbps, which would mean it's a great codec for high-quality real-time audio telephony rather than as a codec to span the spectrum of low end real time to lossless audio.
At least looking at the page - the summary mentions it's the "one codec to rule them all", but the page leads me to believe it's something you'd use for say, teleconferencing and VoIP more so than multichannel lossless high-definition audio.
Perhaps they intend it to work reasonably well in all cases, but it looks like testing was done only to low-bitrate encodings of 128kbps and lower. At which point it looks like yes, for that scenario, it's the best.
A lot of directors are using iPads these days - perhaps not in the actual recording of movies and film, but definitely in the content creation process. They seem to have figured out that being mobile is far more useful during a shoot, and load the dailies and previs work on their iPads as well as scripts and shooting notes, so they can run around directing the scene and not schlepping a laptop (which would save them the "sync" stage).
I'd argue that's content creation, at least in the assistance of. It's more important to be a tablet form factor than the obvious utility of a laptop which they would otherwise keep at the table and have to walk back and forth to reference.
Of course, for these people, you'd think they'd be the first to use tablet PCs rather than tablets.
Funny thing is, Apple owns a bunch of LTE patents as well that they bought from Nortel. In the end, it'll all end up cross-licensed with no change of money (Apple acquired the LTE patents so they'd have to FRAND those to get access to all the other FRAND patents. An interesting one of those is nano-SIM which was approved and Apple also has to FRAND that.)
This one is more interesting because it's FRAND patents versus FRAND patents.
Perhaps for 5G the 3GPP should just set up a patent pool like the MPEG-LA and be done with it. Pay one fee per phone and you're legally licensed on all the patents. And everyone pays the same fee. Then they can spend years arguing over the splitting of the fees collected, but that's it.
For basic documentatoin, yes, it's just PDFs (there are people selling subscriptoins to PDF plates).
Though, it appears that Apple actually got approval on the battery for iPad use in the cockpit (AC 120-76, which applies to airliner operations), which is why it's the iPad and not some random Android tablet.
Non-airliner operations often have better capabilities - like geo-referenced plates (where it'll display your location in relation to where you should be).
But the iPad has appeared to capture the most fascination with pilots (and the number of aviation-related apps for it doesn't hurt, though the prices do...).
Power outage - well, if the plane's running on batteries, I think you have a bigger problem than worrying about following the approach plates in the iPad. And I'm sure the cockpit can have neat little things called 'charging ports' so your iPad can be charged from aircraft power.
Though, for the vast majority of flight, the ipad will sit in the flight bag unused so as long as it's reasonably charged (more than 10% battery - which would give roughly an hour's worth of usage, which is plenty for most flights).
Virus - well, ATC systems often use Windows, and those are a touch more vulnerable than say, an iPad. We are talking walled garden here after all (and "jailbreaking" is a pretty foreign term for them).
The *interesting* thing is the iPad, while there are a few aviation apps (ported from iOS) for Android, it seems the vast majority concentrate on iOS, and the iPad specifically (very little for the iPhone).
The aviation world has gone nuts for the iPad, primarily because an iPad with an AHRS system (total cost under $2000) can serve as a pretty good GPS system with a larger screen and better battery life. It beats having to retrofit a glass cockpit in your plane (if one's available - you're looking at easily $50k+ all in), a penel-mount GPS unit ($10k+), and cost-competitive with many handheld GPS units (around $2k). Except the iPad can also help you file your flight plan, do flight planning, and has a larger screen (and is more user (pilot) friendly). About the biggest complaint is the inability to use it with gloves.
You should check out the aviation mags from around 2010 or so - they all went ga-ga for the iPad and possibilities for pilots. These days, reading those mags you'd think every pilot uses one.
Really helpful - offer them as loaners as well if needed for homework.
You can also erase their memory and enforce their usage during tests and finals, too - no calculators allowed - they will be provided for you.
But loaning them out is the perfect scenario - if you have too many, offer them to the math and science classes so they can have loaners as well.
Depending on the principal, you might be able to have them as school-wide loaners for standardized tests. There'll always be people who can't afford a calculator or forgot theirs or didn't bring one, so having a pile for them to use is one less thing they need to worry about during SATs and such.
And maybe if there's an underpriviledged student in your class, you could give them one on a long-term loan just so it's one less thing they have to struggle with in school.
The tracking dots are for output devices and apply to all output, counterfeit or not.
On the input side, there's a pattern of 5 dots on practically all currency that programs like Photoshop and scanners recognize to degrade scanned images of currency. It looks like a distorted X with a dot at the ends and in the middle..
Liquidity is important. To take a real life example - take say a store selling two products - a Playstation Vita and an iPod Touch. The store needs $1000 soon (say, tomorrow), perhaps to pay some upcoming bills. They could do it by selling 4 of either units at full asking price (they sell for $250 each). The problem is, the more liquid item (more readily convertible to cash) is the iPod Touch - they sell, so a store only has to sell 4 of them because buyers are willing to pay that for it. However, if the store wanted to clear out its Vitas, it would have to discount them in order to move them as buyers aren't willing to buy them at $250. (This may mean selling 10 at $100 each - taking a loss but if you need the money...).
For thinly traded products, they aren't liquid. If you need cash (perhaps for retirement, paying off some loans or sudden large bill coming due (medical, say)), you're going to have to significantly discount in order to meet the obligation because buyers are asking way less than what the sellers want to sell at (bid-ask spread - the thinner, the more liquid stock).
Trading in say, Apple or Google is easy - they're liquid stock and the bid-ask spreads tend to be very small and the trading price hovers around the last trade value. But if you want to trade in some thinly traded stock, ABC Co., perhaps to liquidate your holdings in there, you have to discount. How much you discount depends on when you need the cash (you can't just "sell" your stock. You have to find a buyer to trade with). As such, buyers are willing to pay a very low price, while sellers want as much as they can get. You can list your shares for sale at the Last Trade price and hope maybe a buyer meets you in the middle, but that could be an hour, a day, a week, months or even more.
It's like selling a house - if you're like Romney and have a bunch of houses to sell and need the cash, you put the house up for sale. But you may not get a sale for a little while (or even an offer). Selling stock is like this. Given current market conditions, real estate isn't very liquid - you have to discount significantly to convert to cash. But during boom times, it's extremely liquid and houses are selling for above asking price and selling within minutes of listing.
Anyhow, banning HFT will just mean HFT traders move to a less regulated currency. Like say, bitcoin.
A typesetter doesn't just set type and hit print, they're responsible for the layout of the entire book.
This includes formatting of chapter headings and layout of images, tables, headers and footers, as well as table of contents, indicies, etc.
All an author does is submit a manuscript. The editor catches stuff like mispellings, typos, and other grammatical errors (but never about content). The manuscript goes back to the author for corrections and it's submitted again.
Then it goes to the typesetter whose job is to properly format the document. Did the author use styles, or did the author just boldface the chapter headings in the text, making it impossible ot pull out? Images have to be extracted and properly placed in the text (depending on the author, it may be inline, poor quality (think blown up low-res JPEG), or located in the wrong section (or thrown in as a bunch of loose image files which have to be inserted into the text).
It's true the typesetter no longer has to set up printing presses, but the electronic distribution format still requires a lot of work, especially if you want cover art and proper book formatting and front/back matter
Some authors beautifully typeset their text - it's "camera ready" from the get-go. Others basically submit the equivalent of a ASCII text file with no formatting (or crude markups) and a bunch of random images. (And said text file may be hard-returned so the challenge is to figure out if the author intentionally did it to break the text up, or did it because they hit the end of a random-length line).
Anyhow, if you like what Amazon is doing, consider Amazon to be the next Walmart. It's the same strategy. It'll soon only be between pirates and kindle's azw books.
Correction, they have no backups of the keys that the encryption accellerators used. End result is now they have a bunch of encrypted data, with little in the way of being able to recover it because the keys used are lost or corrupted.
Sounds like they need to be hacked and their information "liberated" so they can recover it :).
Technically, malware like that on iPhone won't get very far because of Apple restrictions.
First, an app can only send an SMS surreptitiously if it uses its own SMS network (kinda defeats the purpose of using the customer's SMS and phone bill). Otherwise it'll have to bring up the Messages app with the SMS pre-filled in and the user MUST click send on their own. There's no ability to send an SMS without the user knowing.
Likewise, all phone calls route to the standard dialer (and Apple doesn't allow alternative dialers unless they're VoIP or run on their own network separate from the user's).
The only thing malware can ding you for is 3G data doing these things, but that sort of payment only goes to the carrier, not so much a third party.
So your prepaid method generally works much better on Android where you don't have such OS restrictions and walled gardens to deal with.
In Canada, the law states that if the winning margin is less than 1% of the votes cast, a recount is mandatory. Additionally, any candidate may request a recount. This includes after the mandatory recount, as well.
Experience has shown that the recounts generally tend to be very good - even in very tight races (under 10 votes) the recounts vary only by a vote or so.
It's helped by the fact that counting is done by having a large number of people count a small number of votes each (which means each person's work can be checked by someone else), and the results tallied up (which is simple to do accurately).
More like, everyone was expecting dot-com-boom 2.0, where early investors can make tons of money flipping IPO stock. And Facebook's a household name these days, so it must be dot-com boom 2.0.
Greed is blinding, and give someone an easy way to make money (dot com 2.0!) and they'll blindly throw money at it. This is especially since the first boom was barely a decade and a half earlier so many people have memories of people throwing in $1000 and making millions.
Of course, there's no such thing.
Hell, tech is generlaly very bad for investments - your ROI in tech is far lower than other industries. Even if you invested in Apple (which is the best performing stock in tech), you'd make some money, but you'd have made more by not buying into tech. Even the financial industry did better, and they had a meltdown to deal with.
OTOH, who's to say they haven't ALREADY been hacked and this disclosure merely was bringing attention to the public?
That's the problem with responsible disclosure - it's really hard to do. Wait too long and people exploit it without your knowledge. Wait too short and they have no chance to fix it (and how long is "enough"? QA processes vary and some places do extensive testing to ensure things don't break, others only do a casual (i.e., it compiles) and ship that).
And then you have to figure out how much to tell people. I mean, tell too little and the developer just says "it's a theoretical hack". Tell too much and people cry "you just told everyone how to hack everyone's account!".
It's just like how PSN was shut down last year. It wasn't because hackers got the information and triggered some sort of Sony network monitoring alarm. It was because a bunch of people were getting PSN downloads (games and DLC) for free using PS3s that should never been able to access it. Only when they looked deeper did they realize something was wrong. But until then, who knows how much data was taken, or how long they had access to it?
Consider the Chinese to be the ultimate in capitalists. They know that the US with its pansy environmental laws hurt profits, and you can't have that.
Plus, when a few people die, so what? China's population numbers are big enough that a bunch of people can die without many people noticing.
And democracy's got nothing to do with it - convince enough people that environmental protection laws hurt their pocketbooks and they'll vote for anything.
That revenue from app sales doesn't go very far, when you consider Mac sales (declining along with general PC sales) outrank it by an order of magnitude, and iOS sales by a further order of magnitude. That's just revenue - actual profits will be far lower (they have data centers and payment processors and security etc to run, plus the behemoth sloth known as iTunes...).
In a similar vein, I don't think Google makes a pile off the Play Store either (and they too take a 30% cut).
One of the big problems though is that each new Android version brings with it a new kernel, and kernel porting isn't that easy a task. Of course, given that new SoCs support the latest version of Android, it means if a manufacturer wants to ship 2.3, they have to backport everything. Which given a bunch of new phones get released with kickass hardware but 2.3, makes no sense at all.
Plus, it's not like ICS was released yesterday - it's nearly a year now, and new Androids still come with 2.3 on release.
The real irony is I think the cheapass Chinese Androids using AOSP probably come with Jelly Bean by default, while new phones from the big vendors ship with Gingerbread, to get ICS updates later.
It makes sense - because Wikipedia pages are not supposed to be primary sources. Wikipedia is a great way to learn stuff and get an overview, but it's not a place to get actual research from.
The author, trying to update his page, violated this because it's now uncitable. I mean, sure the author can write it, but how is it authoritative? Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, and they don't want to be - because encyclopedias are never primary sources. And really, any line without a citation is suspect - where's the proof?
The author should've published a page perhaps about "Things wrong about my wikipedia page" on their website, then link it up.
(And who's to say it's not some joker with the same name? Uncited statements are unsupportable).
Of course, because all your apps are written for Gingerbread or Froyo to begin with. Basically if you write for Froyo, you're encompassing the vast majority of Android phones out there. If you write for Jelly Bean, your app only works on 1% of the phones out there. Ice Cream Sandwich at least gets you 20%.
Of course, if developers only write for the old APIs, it really means that all the capabilities of the newer OSes go unused and all the nifty features shown off at Google I/O are basically frills that have no application for most users because they can't use it because developers won't code for it.
Which is annoying as developers rapidly embrace new iOS features when they come out.
Trust me, 30% is a pittance of a cut - while the license fee per game is around $5 or so per copy for the PS3 and Xbox360 for disc-games, the actual split for DLC or downloadables is MUCH higher. 30% is nothing - it can easily be 50% or more to the console maker.
Heck, Sony used to (maybe they still do?) charge by the gigabyte in hosting the game and its demos.
Anyhow, Sony's already scared of anything that could possibly be used for piracy - even unfeasible ones. After all, OtherOS was eliminated because of a purely theoretical hack to the PS3 (that wasn't even used to get the PS3 master keys). And earlier in the year, Sony removed several Vita downloadable games because they had various homebrew loader flaws. Sony's going to close this hole no matter what because it may be a vector for piracy,.
(And really, once you can run unsigned code, you can look for flaws to get full access to the system, so while you may not be able to do it NOW, it greatly enables analysis of the system to find other flaws).