Did anyone here actually believe this? The big power draw is from the backlight, which is still running even with black pixels.
Actually, it can. Modern LCD displays are crap at this - they employ crap like "local dimming" and "global dimming" to get their stupid contrast ratios. As a side effect, displaying a dark screen does save power because the backlight dims to make the black blacker.
Conversly, displaying a white screen cranks up the backlight to make it brighter, which takes more power.
Since contrast ration is the difference between darkest black and brightest white, this artifically inflates the number. Some monitor specs actually list "dynamic contrast ratio" for this, but it's usually listed as "contrast ratio".
And yes, it's crap. It makes dark images harder to look at because the stuff you want to see is dimmer. And dark stuff on a mostly white screen is harder to look at as well from the retina searing brightness. In an effort to increase global contrast, they reduced local contrast.
Fun fact: a modern TFT display is really like DRAM memory - you have a transistor and a capacitor (the pixel). The only difference is an LCD is write-only electrically, and read-only optically.
If you calibrate your monitor, the first thing you do is turn off auto-dimming because it'll screw up your calibration.
I'd hate to die in a huge interstate pileup because some dipshit decided to push the overclocking on his car too far and it blue-screened on him at 80 mph.
That would happen with closed source as well, only instead of fixing the problem with transparency, you'd be fighting with lawyers!
Your insurance company will find the guy running the "open source" car, and decide to go after everyone who made the software, ESPECIALLY if they have money. It's why lawsuits go after more than the person responsible - suing some poor sap who just happened to cause it won't make money, but suing everyone related can.
And if someoen checks in a fix afterwards, they can go after "hiding known issues" offense as well (negligence)
The open source car will be a field day for the lawyers.
This doesn't make a lot of sense, because most of the things that software could do will only be minor tuning of specific systems, and anything that's likely to cause a catastrophic failure will usually stop the car before it starts. Even a blue screen will usually just cause the car to stall, which is unlikely to cause a pileup.
Unless the transmission locks in gear and the throttle gets stuck. And the cheapass mechanic using it skimped on brakes (possible - they wanted sportiness and handling, who cares about stopping? The brakes are to get into donuts and spinouts).
A modern car is basically entirely software controlled except for two safety-critical systems - steering and brakes (the software can modulate power going to the brakes (traction control, ABS) and steering, but if it fails, it still works
Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
So they're saying that they're no longer going to purchase HP, Dell, or Acer PCs? Somehow I suspect that bill is just posturing, and will not amount to anything.
Still leaves Apple (who opened a new call center in Texas I think?).
Thanks. I believe I heard that from Leo Laporte on TWiT as well. I'm going to do it! Now the bigger issue: Will my wife kill me if I buy a nice ham rig? I do have a nice "man cave" in the basement with a spot for it:)
Depends.
A nice radio (used) can be around $1000-2000+. A nice HF rig can be $5000+. And don't forget the antenna farm you need, so if your wife cares about the backyard, it can be an issue.
(If you have a PC, a fully kitted out Flex 5000 (HF+VHF/UHF, tuner, 2nd receiver) is only around $5000. But it's a completely SDR system so PC required).
not to mention the benefits of talking to genius bar people for support, rather than calling some foolio in india.
Apple's one of the few companies that didn't outsource their call center. Heck, didn't they just open up a new one in Texas? Other than a souther drawl sometimes when they answer, Apple's call center tends to be pretty good. You do have the odd person with a strong accent, but that's bound to happen if you hire enough people.
it's not like they had any choice on picking up the tab. they were known to be defective(anyhow, due to accounting/tax reasons it's helpful for them to upmark the replacement board which they were "paying" for.)..
Well, it can cost $1700 to remanufacture the board in the end... first, the board is not made anymore, so all boards have to be repaired. Removing a BGA part and replacing it is VERY expanesive - the part has to be removed from the board without damaging anything else (and with dense double sided boards, it's very tricky). Then the BGA pads have to be cleaned and solder removed. Next, you can't just plop the new one in, you have to use a special solder screen to apply solder paste on and align the new chip to the pads, then finally get it soldered in.
All in all, a BGA part replacement can easily cost anywhere from $400-600+. Plus designing the solder screen costs another $200 in and of itself (and they're fragile, delicate and don't last long).
And then the board has to be tested as parts may have gotten desoldered and moved during the entire process or nearby BGA parts may not be soldered anymore, etc. Add in the labor (including time for an Apple engineer to look at it and determine that yes, it's a faulty GPS) and you can probably see it gets close to $1400+ easy. Add in warranty handling and how much they have to pay a tech to replace the part for the customer, and the margin on that $1700 board gets very small indeed. And of course storage and warehousing of the refurb part, and possibly disposal at the end.
I mean, take anything and there's always a malicious use for it. A car can serve as transportation for someone (good), or as a quick getaway after committing a crime (bad).
The computer can be used to educate and communicate, or to create misery for others and steal (real cybercrime here). And that doesn't even involve the murkiness of copyright.
A camera can be used to document a crime, or to commit one (e.g., pedophillia creation).
A book can be used to educate, inform or provide entertainment, or to spread ugly rumors and how to make say, bombs to kill people.
Really - where's the line? This research can be used to spur new advances in medicine, or be used to create a mass plague.
A design patent is effectively a trademark on a physical implementation, except unlike trademarks, they last for a VERY short time (5 years). They differ from trademarks in that you don't have a use ir or lose it, and trademarks are more ethereal - they don't apply to physical objects, but to abstract designs and text (for obvious reasons).
Given how often consumers ARE confused by similar trademarks (look at how many people try to copy a can of Coke - the color, the way the text is done, etc), shows it's actually something a lot of companies do to intentionally mislead.
Hell, go to China sometime and look at all the iPhone and iPod ripoffs. On a lark a coworker bought one of the MP3 players - looked like an iPod Nano until you looked at it closely. Worked like crap, though.
And hell, there were ads a few years ago from some computer company (MDG?) that said "FREE iPOD WITH EVERY COMPUTER". Turned out it was one of the clones as the ads the next week said "FREE iPOD-LIKE PLAYER" and eventually turned into "FREE MP4 PLAYER".
I have probably a first generation of these "smart TVs". I played with it for all of 5 minutes before I got bored and unplugged the network connection.
Faee it - even if the vast majority of TVs sported WiFi adapters and Ethernet ports, a good majority wouldn't be connected either out of sheer laxiness or incompetence, or users not caring at all (they wanted a TV first).
So the attack surface is huge, but it's a lot smaller in that most won't be network connected anyways - people would do their Netflix and such on set top boxes like a Roku or AppleTV or WDTV because it also a lot easier to use and get to than the TV. And with TVs changing models every few months, even the software itself will probably get updates here and there.
Hell, wireless HDMI is probably a much bigger attack vector because it's something likely to be used by the customer than the network stuff.
A smart carrier can do it without capping data connections. They cap the data connectivity itself.
E.g., a dataplan for a featurephone is really cheap - $5 for unlimited access to social networks, and email for example. For a blackberry, it's a bit pricier, smartphones more expensive still, and most expensive are laptop plans.
The difference is that the service is differentiated already - the carrier proxies (non-transparently) featurephone data connections - the phone connects to carrier which then repackages your facebook/twitter/etc content for you. Ditto email.
Blackberry is similar - except the carrier shuffles the data off to RIM's servers and lets RIM do whatever with it.
Smartphone - toss in a transparent proxy, a NAT or 3 along the way, and have the transparent proxy resize images and compress text and such along the way. Restrict outbound connections to 80/443/21 and most users probably won't notice.
Laptop - light NAT, firewall, maybe port restrictions.
Laptop VPN - full on data connectivity - you get a real live IP address (most expensive).
Some carriers like Sprint offer full connectivity to everything (being a Tier 1 ISP). Others like Verizon do a lot of traffic manipulation in the background (do a test with HTTP vs. HTTPS) - it makes their network appear to go faster.
If they feel their wireline service is in trouble, well, they have a lot of ways to fix it - a laptop data plan is already more expensive than most broadband out there already. And you can be stuck behind a NAT or firewall you don't control - something that's sure to strike the ire of gamers, say (if the jitter in the latency wasn't bad enough).
No need to cap anything at all. Just rejigger the data connectivity.
Well, Java might be free, but the patents used to implement the JVM may not be.
It's why Microsoft licenses the patents in question from Sun/Oracle even though they don't do Java anymore. They license it for their.NET CLR.
Now, Sun back then gave anyone with a compatible J2SE implementation (and probably J2EE) a license to the patents for free (because you can't implement a JVM without them).
However, they didn't extend this to J2ME, and reaped tons of money off of licensing for cellphones, blu-ray players, etc. It's a pretty profitable part of Java.
Yes, if a record earthquake whips up a wave nobody could have thought possible hits a land that suddenly sinks a foot or two, AND they make several other mistakes.... then a old first generation nuke plant can have a total failure and what? Leak tiny amounts of radiation?
Suck it up, turn on the frickin' lights and start designing better reactors. Live and learn.
The problem has never been nuclear - it's a great option. However, it's the management of such facilities that's a problem - in the goal to extract greater and larger profits (bigger bonus!), they start cutting, and the problem is, once you start cutting down maintenance and safety at a nuclear plant, things start going bad.
Hell, they're even reducing the amount of money needed to clean up after a plant closes (cuts into profits, and they want that bond money back - not have some governement agency spend it "cleaning" - that's a problem for the next guy).
Nuclear power is great, just it demands that people running it not be money-grubbing profit-seekers. Maybe they should be run like non-profits and forced to spend the excess money they have on improvements and new technology.
and connect them together using some custom-laid fiberoptic WAN or something? Wouldn't you - for security's sake - maybe use custom CPUs/OSs on those systems that aren't even available on the free market?
And you, the taxpayer then immediately questions why the government is spending billions of dollars on a private fiber connectivity links and paying $5000 for hardware when they could be spending only millions and hundreds using COTS stuff. Government is so wasteful!
Hell, I'm sure the ire of/. is raised should the government pay $400 to buy a 2TB hard drive from a SAN vendor when they could've gotten the NewEgg special for under $100.
Citation is, of course, needed. Macbooks, being made out of the exact same consumer-grade components that every other laptop is made out of, tend to have an expected lifetime of 3-4 years with daily use, again just like every other laptop. Unless we're talking about the type of user who replaces their laptop every year and sells last year's model, which I am not sure I'd really call "frugal", I highly doubt anybody is getting any reasonable dollar value out of reselling old equipment.
Maybe I'm wrong and there is a burgeoning market in secondhand post-warranty laptops that could stop working any day now, but I'm doubtful.
Two things - if everything were the same quality, then even the cheapest Acer or Asus laptop would be the top sellers. Or hell, HP computers for that matter - they'd all last forever. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the case (even though they're all made by the same Foxconn factory in the end). What happens it the manufacturer specifies a quality level - from "just throw the parts in the box and ship it" to "carefully lay out all the cables along the guides in the case so the case can be opened fully with the wires routed to the side pivoting..." sort of quality. (Anyone's who had to deal with OEM machines with too-short cables in the case requiring unplugging every part to replace the RAM can attest).
Anyhow, it seems Macs have long useful lives - my old Powerbook (!) dates to 2003 and is still in use today - probably a good 10 years of service out of what I paid. And most people find that's the case - machines that are 6+ years old (the early Intel Macs, for example) are still useful. The eBay prices for used Macs tends to attest to that - still considerably higher than a PC of equivalent age. Sure my Mac will probably never fetch more than $200 or so, but a 10 year old PC getting $200 is pretty unheard of unless it's special in some way - and most people would scoff if you tried to get more than $20 for it.
That's just the Mac market. I guess it also helps that the metal casing generally tends to be of good quality so the worst damage a Mac usually has is missing rubber feet and scratches. PCs having lots of little plastic bits all over the place will have pieces falling off.
The other thing Apple does is concentrate on experience. Apple packages stuff really well compared to a lot of other manufacturers and it shows. The paper's not some recycled crap that's covering your new device in little bits of paper dust when you open the box, it doesn't look like someone randomly took all the pieces and thrown it in the box and be done with it or have the nasty folded cardboard packaging cut with some strange wavy saw that saws through your hand as you extract it out (it seems the Japanese love it - Sony and Panasonic packaging...).
Not to say there isn't well-packaged stuff (Nintendo's DSi and later handhelds are pretty good compared to the DS series and prior). My Gnex came in a nice box with well laid out accessories. Then again, there's some Datel stuff I got in a nice box, but held in a nasty cheap cardboard holder that covered my "shiny" new product in a fine brown dust. Bleh.
I think it kind of depends on whether you've reached a point with the electronics where you can kind of buy whatever and trust that it's "good enough". Like I don't go around spending lots of time shopping out light bulbs. I'm not an audiophile, so as long as speakers don't totally stink, I'd probably be fine with them being built into the walls or into furniture. The main reason I wouldn't want a TV built into my furniture is really because TV designs are still in such flux, and there will probably be something 10 times better in the next 5 years, and there's such a wide disparity right now between different sets.
I think TVs have settled down - I mean, what is there to improve? OLED? Better picture quality? 3D? Not much improvement for people who'd be interested in Ikea furniture with built-in entertainment system, really
And most of the improvements are pretty minimal - the only real thing a customer notices is well, the price is going down.
And yeah yeah, there will be the AVSForum guys - to whom Ikea won't be bothered with.
TVs have reached a maturity point again where tomorrow's new model doesn't really have much over today. The only really big thing on the horizon would be 4K, but given it's taken over 20 years to get HDTV out and done with, this thing will probably still be good enough when 4K starts getting really popular. Hell, I'm sure a lot of old RCA big-screen (27" or so) TV chests are still used in basements and such for kids and the like..
Actually what makes westerners, you and me included, to buy new items instead of fixing them is the just cost of repair.
That's why repair is a hobby (DIY). That way your time is basically free and you're doing it for fun or experience. (It's just like people who admin Linux machines for fun).
Now, a toaster is actually a very simple product and a poor example - anyone competent with electricity can rapidly fix it.
Take something that doesn't cost a lot more - say a computer monitor - you can pick up a 20" or more one for under $200 on sale. Now it breaks - do you fix it, or buy a new one? Fixing it will probably cost you a high-paid technician to look at it at probably a good $50+/hr plus parts ($expensive in most cases). At which point you probably have to invest around $150 or so to fix it. Or just buy a new monitor on sale that probably does more for a few bucks more.
If you do repair as a hobby - you stand to benefit since you can ask for these old broken electronics and fix it yourself - if the part costs $100, it's a $100 monitor to you.
For a lot of things, even the manufacturer never repairs individually - phones and such the store will gather up a pile of them then send it off to the manufacturer to refurbish. Even then the manufacturer will probably wait for more units to come in before sending the whole lot off to refurbish (parts from several phones combined to make a working one, that sort of thing). It's just cheaper that way (depending on the circuit board, it may not be economical to fix - if it's a dud capacitor or resistor, it's easy, but if it's a chip that's BGA or so, it can easily cost $200 to replace the chip).
Now go to places like China where labor is cheap, and you'll find people repairing lots of stuff because even highly paid technical people are really cheap. (It's the flip side to all the factory workers making peanuts a day - even the highly skilled workers make just a few peanuts more. Though in China, there is also a pile of businesspeople that really rake in big bucks the same way Wall Street does).
I detect a hint of sarcasm but to be honest it was downright fucking scary the first trip but after a few trips it became as exciting to me as an old fashioned roller coaster is to the guy who stands up on it all day operating the brake. Although a stingray the size of a family dinner table flapping about on an 8X12 deck was never boring.
Waves are never boring, especially big ones. The key is to cut through them - if you let them hit the side, you risk capsizing. The only way to do this is engine power (running low on fuel or having an engine failure is extremely scary).
Rogue waves can be problematic because the engine/rudder may not have enough power and authority to maintain direction perpendicular to the wave. It doesn't matter if it crests over you (boat floats and a lot of water goes all over the place and masts and stuff can break), as long as the bow is pointed straight at the wave. But once it starts turning..
Only 5 GB? Anyone else a little surprised by that?
My gmail accounts have more space than that, and people have been writing browser extensions and apps for a while to leverage that as cloud storage. 5 GB is at the high end of current free offerings (it matches SugarSync and Box), but by no means revolutionary. You'd think Google, with their resources, would be offering a bit more, especially with their late entry into the game. I guess they can push the tie-ins to other services - like being able to send attachments in Gmail straight to your Google cloud storage. But other than that, what's the incentive, especially if already using another service?
Easy - Google knows the utilization rate of Gmail is quite low. They can offer everyone 9+GB of mail storage knowing perhaps only 2% or so of users actually use that much and are actively bumping against that limit.
With GDrive though, people will probably store a LOT of data on there because it's storage that's much more useful to people. So utilization of that would be much higher and maybe even use more storage than gmail.
It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.
I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculus that carries so much meaning. That there's really no reason to assign problems with so much "drudgery" that a computer becomes indispensable.
I think that there's a real balance that needs to be found, where learning to work by hand leads into interesting problems that lend themselves to application of computers. That's so much different than just using a computer to skip to the answers.
Nothing wrong with that. But it's a ladder. You start with the absolute basics of pen and paper arithmetic - it's dull and boring and really the only way to teach it is drilling. Though situational word problems definitely help (especially since a lot of times you only need basic arithmetic - e.g., shopping/going out/etc).
One the basic building block of arithmetic is done, you move up to algebra and the like, to which a calculator can be handy after all the symbolic manipulation is done to get the final result. But here the skill is in the algebra - the calculator is to prevent the skull-drudgery of the arithmetic from getting in the way of learning when it adds nothing ot the lesson.
Then comes calculus, where a computer helps with the basic algebra so the lessons on doing the derivatives and integrals can sink in and it's reduced down to an algebraic expression, at which point you might as well just pass it through as doing the algebra achieves little learning.
From there comes applications, where one would actually use those mathematical skills in practical situations. Here a computer is handy in getting the final answer - the hard part is finding out how to get to the answer, not the actual grinding through.
Though having the basic skills down pat can help you apply judgement as appropriate. Because knowing what the range of the answer should be is paramount in order to ensure a mistake wasn't made - either in data entry, setting up the equations, or bugs in the calculation program. At the very least, one should be able to guesstimate the magnitude of the answer (0 significant figures) - which can also be done through experience. But also looking at the calculations, you can get maybe 1 significant figure for your estimate, which would be good enough to verify that the mechanical part of the task was done correctly.
And even though you're doing the physics part and letting the computer do all the pages of algebra and calculus for you, it never hurts to review the work. Nothing would suck worse than to realize for some reason, your paper boiled down to 2+2=5 (unless that was your goal) because you took the answer the computer gave you blindly.
I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.
I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental toolkit? And simplifying fractions isn't just an exercise to satisfy your 4th grade teacher; it prepares you for algebra.
Being able to know when to use math-on-paper and when to switch to your graphing calculator or excel shows that you have a better sense of what you're working with, not that you're anachronistic. Understanding what your calculator does when it solves a matrix is a strength, not a weakness.
I mean, is it so crazy that I can touch-type 90 wpm, and yet also believe that people should be able to write legibly with a pen and paper?
Ditto. Because doing things "the hard way" teaches you things that being a computer technician or calculator technician never will. (And yes, mindlessly punching in numbers and recording the answers down makes you a technician - you just operate the machine).
Math should be taught first by hand done longform, then mentally. Being able to qo simple basic arithmetic in your head is VERY valuable - and if you wish ti participate in society, you will be doing math mentally. E.g., estimating how much tax is to be added on an item when you go shopping. Or eat out - having a rough idea of the bill beforehand is very valuable in not busting the budget. No you don't have to get it down to the exact penny, but knowing the general amount is sufficient. It's useful to figure out if you need to take out another bill, or if maybe the cashier has charged you wrong and you're about to be over or undercharged.
Writing legibly is important as well - tablets are everywhere, but not quite prevalent, and you might need to actually write something down and give it to someone. Writing down an address or phone number takes seconds, whereas trying to exchange email addresses can be an exercise in frustration and take 10 times longer. Hell, business cards - lets you write notes about the company - like "call about supergizmowidget special offer" or "sells test equipment" that sort of thing.
Imagine if you had someone buy a Hollywood CD/DVD/BluRay overseas, send it to you in the USA and then you sold it on ebay in the USA.
The catch here is that the USA market is absurdly cheap so Americans don't do that... people who live outside the USA do it.
And that my friends is why region coding, etc, was introduced.
Thus far the only country to decide that mod'ing your player that allowed grey market imports has been Australia because Sony took it to court and lost. Sony hasn't made that same mistake anywhere else.
Actually, the main reason people overseas bought (North) American DVDs was because movies there took forever to arrive, not that they were cheaper (sometimes they were cheaper, but other times not).
It's one of the nails on the HD-DVD coffin - HD-DVD got rid of ALL region protection. Theatre owners in other countries complained to the MPAA because HD-DVD owners were importing HD-DVDs from Amazon.com and the like and watching movies that were still in theatres, or even before the theatrical release!
The studios countered this by releasing HD-DVDs much later (if it was an HD-DVD-only studio, they'd release the DVD early, then HD-DVD 3 months later. If it was Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, they released the Blu-Ray with the DVD, and then later the HD-DVD would come along).
Blu-Ray, having region coding, didn't have this problem at all.
Places like Canada and Siberia are very likely to benefit from it.
MAYBE.
We think "global warming" means "temperatuers are going to rise" and while they are, that doesn't mean that chilly parts get warmer.
It could mean we get less severe winters (good), but more severe summers (bad). Or current models show that what happens is we get an oscillation that reaches even more extremes. Winters get colder, and summers get hotter. Rather than cold areas getting more temperate (and temperate areas turning to desert).
There's also a good reason that the loss of food-bearing temperate regions can NOT be made up by the introduction of new growing regions due to the sun's cycles - the growing season in Canada is already by definition shorter (global warming can't change the Earth's tilt).
Hosting providers should have a "kill switch" such that in the event of litigation, all hard drives will be physically removed, boxed, and turned over to law enforcement, all contracts terminate instantly, and if anyone wants their data back they can go fight DOJ etc.
Which would be irrelevant in this case, because the DOJ is refusing to accept the servers. So they're all boxed up ready for the DOJ and the DOJ just says "YOU hang onto it".
Otherwise why is the DOJ fighting all attempts by Carpathia to offload the servers? They don't want it, MU is not allowed to purchase them, the hosting company is forced to store the servers and incur all costs for doing so. (And the DOJ's argument that Carpathia "benefited" and can pay? Sorry, that's like saying that since my income exceeded expenses last year, I don't deserve to get a salary. Especially since profit margins aren't necessarily high to begin with.)
Could be Valve is trying to leverage Apple's AppleTV. And maybe why Apple has been slow to roll out apps for AppleTV.
I mean, Apple's got an interesting "console" in the form of iOS devices (we'll call it console-lite in that the requirements for the App Store are way looser than what Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo reqiure for their consoles). Perhaps if Valve could get Steam on there, maybe do the controller design (the AppleTV is ripe for controllers - I believe Bluetooth is on board)...
Heck, maybe it's getting Valve's games on iOS, period. Play on your TV, carry your progress onto your iDevice. Maybe even try an Android with controller support.
Jobs' disdain for video games seemed to have waned - he was veyr much against it initally, out of fears that people would see the Mac as a toy suitable for games only (the irony is thick). The second time around, he's seemed to have accepted gaming and openly adopted it when iOS got the App Store in 2008 (iOS 2, then just called iPhone OS 2.0).
we DID kludge in NAT, but the proper solution was to increase the available resources
NAT does have one major advantage. Ignoring the possible "firewall" just by the way it operates, it isolates the inner network from the outer network. One thing people with static IPs constantly complain about is having to renumber their network when their ISP decides to change their "static" IP address allocation.
Think of it on the inside network side - the router will always be 192.168.x.1 (usually). If you don't care what the external network address is, that's all you need to know and as long as every PC can see that IP, you're done.
IPv6 attempted to do this by allowing multiple addresses per interface, which is great until you lose connectivity one day. You name the router FC00::1, your PC is FC00::2, etc. You ping FC00::1, see the router is up, great. Other PCs on the network can access it just fine.
Now you know there's something wrong, but what? Then it hits you that maybe the IP address is wrong and sure enough, the IP used to access the internet is wrong.
Easy enough, you're a network admin and know this stuff. Explain it to your mom who's calling because their PC can't get on the Internet anymore. Or better yet, the exec who's VPN'd in and suddenly can't access his presentation but the internet works fine.
And that's a real issue IPv6 when it was designed 20 years ago didn't encounter - everyone and their dog can have a billion addresses, then came up firewalls (sure, every PC *has* a public IP, but someone's thrown a firewall in-between the two hosts), all the various TCP hacks and DoS crap, portable devices each with their own IP addresses (and who knows what security holes they have - blocked by firewalls on IPv4 but open on IPv6), and used by people who have no clue about networking or anything. Hell, these people might not even own a computer anymore!
Sure, Ipv6 has a ton of features that make it "just work", but that ends up like Macs - for 95% of the population, they do "just work", but when they don't, it can be a real PITA to fix. And it'll break on the person least able to understand what to do.
The adult citizens should be intelligent enough to realize the rumors are just lies, and develop skepticism about the things they read.
I don't know - the average American doesn't seem to inspire much confidence about that. Isn't that how we get the birther movement or that Obama is Muslim?
Hell, there are probably people who believe that cigarettes don't cause cancer and are perfectly safe, too.
Or take a look what happens when some blog or website posts some news or rumors about a company - it can send the stock price soaring or falling. Pump and dump scams are common, as are most other forms of mail fraud. Hell, people keep falling for 419 scams.
China only gets singled out because they call out that fact. Do it in the free world and you're called a lunatic.
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Actually, it can. Modern LCD displays are crap at this - they employ crap like "local dimming" and "global dimming" to get their stupid contrast ratios. As a side effect, displaying a dark screen does save power because the backlight dims to make the black blacker.
Conversly, displaying a white screen cranks up the backlight to make it brighter, which takes more power.
Since contrast ration is the difference between darkest black and brightest white, this artifically inflates the number. Some monitor specs actually list "dynamic contrast ratio" for this, but it's usually listed as "contrast ratio".
And yes, it's crap. It makes dark images harder to look at because the stuff you want to see is dimmer. And dark stuff on a mostly white screen is harder to look at as well from the retina searing brightness. In an effort to increase global contrast, they reduced local contrast.
Fun fact: a modern TFT display is really like DRAM memory - you have a transistor and a capacitor (the pixel). The only difference is an LCD is write-only electrically, and read-only optically.
If you calibrate your monitor, the first thing you do is turn off auto-dimming because it'll screw up your calibration.
Your insurance company will find the guy running the "open source" car, and decide to go after everyone who made the software, ESPECIALLY if they have money. It's why lawsuits go after more than the person responsible - suing some poor sap who just happened to cause it won't make money, but suing everyone related can.
And if someoen checks in a fix afterwards, they can go after "hiding known issues" offense as well (negligence)
The open source car will be a field day for the lawyers.
Unless the transmission locks in gear and the throttle gets stuck. And the cheapass mechanic using it skimped on brakes (possible - they wanted sportiness and handling, who cares about stopping? The brakes are to get into donuts and spinouts).
A modern car is basically entirely software controlled except for two safety-critical systems - steering and brakes (the software can modulate power going to the brakes (traction control, ABS) and steering, but if it fails, it still works
Still leaves Apple (who opened a new call center in Texas I think?).
Perhaps that's the whole goal of the bill...
Depends.
A nice radio (used) can be around $1000-2000+. A nice HF rig can be $5000+. And don't forget the antenna farm you need, so if your wife cares about the backyard, it can be an issue.
(If you have a PC, a fully kitted out Flex 5000 (HF+VHF/UHF, tuner, 2nd receiver) is only around $5000. But it's a completely SDR system so PC required).
Apple's one of the few companies that didn't outsource their call center. Heck, didn't they just open up a new one in Texas? Other than a souther drawl sometimes when they answer, Apple's call center tends to be pretty good. You do have the odd person with a strong accent, but that's bound to happen if you hire enough people.
Well, it can cost $1700 to remanufacture the board in the end... first, the board is not made anymore, so all boards have to be repaired. Removing a BGA part and replacing it is VERY expanesive - the part has to be removed from the board without damaging anything else (and with dense double sided boards, it's very tricky). Then the BGA pads have to be cleaned and solder removed. Next, you can't just plop the new one in, you have to use a special solder screen to apply solder paste on and align the new chip to the pads, then finally get it soldered in.
All in all, a BGA part replacement can easily cost anywhere from $400-600+. Plus designing the solder screen costs another $200 in and of itself (and they're fragile, delicate and don't last long).
And then the board has to be tested as parts may have gotten desoldered and moved during the entire process or nearby BGA parts may not be soldered anymore, etc. Add in the labor (including time for an Apple engineer to look at it and determine that yes, it's a faulty GPS) and you can probably see it gets close to $1400+ easy. Add in warranty handling and how much they have to pay a tech to replace the part for the customer, and the margin on that $1700 board gets very small indeed. And of course storage and warehousing of the refurb part, and possibly disposal at the end.
Wouldn't that be most technology out there?
I mean, take anything and there's always a malicious use for it. A car can serve as transportation for someone (good), or as a quick getaway after committing a crime (bad).
The computer can be used to educate and communicate, or to create misery for others and steal (real cybercrime here). And that doesn't even involve the murkiness of copyright.
A camera can be used to document a crime, or to commit one (e.g., pedophillia creation).
A book can be used to educate, inform or provide entertainment, or to spread ugly rumors and how to make say, bombs to kill people.
Really - where's the line? This research can be used to spur new advances in medicine, or be used to create a mass plague.
Practically everything has a malicious use to it.
I have probably a first generation of these "smart TVs". I played with it for all of 5 minutes before I got bored and unplugged the network connection.
Faee it - even if the vast majority of TVs sported WiFi adapters and Ethernet ports, a good majority wouldn't be connected either out of sheer laxiness or incompetence, or users not caring at all (they wanted a TV first).
So the attack surface is huge, but it's a lot smaller in that most won't be network connected anyways - people would do their Netflix and such on set top boxes like a Roku or AppleTV or WDTV because it also a lot easier to use and get to than the TV. And with TVs changing models every few months, even the software itself will probably get updates here and there.
Hell, wireless HDMI is probably a much bigger attack vector because it's something likely to be used by the customer than the network stuff.
A smart carrier can do it without capping data connections. They cap the data connectivity itself.
E.g., a dataplan for a featurephone is really cheap - $5 for unlimited access to social networks, and email for example. For a blackberry, it's a bit pricier, smartphones more expensive still, and most expensive are laptop plans.
The difference is that the service is differentiated already - the carrier proxies (non-transparently) featurephone data connections - the phone connects to carrier which then repackages your facebook/twitter/etc content for you. Ditto email.
Blackberry is similar - except the carrier shuffles the data off to RIM's servers and lets RIM do whatever with it.
Smartphone - toss in a transparent proxy, a NAT or 3 along the way, and have the transparent proxy resize images and compress text and such along the way. Restrict outbound connections to 80/443/21 and most users probably won't notice.
Laptop - light NAT, firewall, maybe port restrictions.
Laptop VPN - full on data connectivity - you get a real live IP address (most expensive).
Some carriers like Sprint offer full connectivity to everything (being a Tier 1 ISP). Others like Verizon do a lot of traffic manipulation in the background (do a test with HTTP vs. HTTPS) - it makes their network appear to go faster.
If they feel their wireline service is in trouble, well, they have a lot of ways to fix it - a laptop data plan is already more expensive than most broadband out there already. And you can be stuck behind a NAT or firewall you don't control - something that's sure to strike the ire of gamers, say (if the jitter in the latency wasn't bad enough).
No need to cap anything at all. Just rejigger the data connectivity.
Well, Java might be free, but the patents used to implement the JVM may not be.
It's why Microsoft licenses the patents in question from Sun/Oracle even though they don't do Java anymore. They license it for their .NET CLR.
Now, Sun back then gave anyone with a compatible J2SE implementation (and probably J2EE) a license to the patents for free (because you can't implement a JVM without them).
However, they didn't extend this to J2ME, and reaped tons of money off of licensing for cellphones, blu-ray players, etc. It's a pretty profitable part of Java.
The problem has never been nuclear - it's a great option. However, it's the management of such facilities that's a problem - in the goal to extract greater and larger profits (bigger bonus!), they start cutting, and the problem is, once you start cutting down maintenance and safety at a nuclear plant, things start going bad.
Hell, they're even reducing the amount of money needed to clean up after a plant closes (cuts into profits, and they want that bond money back - not have some governement agency spend it "cleaning" - that's a problem for the next guy).
Nuclear power is great, just it demands that people running it not be money-grubbing profit-seekers. Maybe they should be run like non-profits and forced to spend the excess money they have on improvements and new technology.
And you, the taxpayer then immediately questions why the government is spending billions of dollars on a private fiber connectivity links and paying $5000 for hardware when they could be spending only millions and hundreds using COTS stuff. Government is so wasteful!
Hell, I'm sure the ire of /. is raised should the government pay $400 to buy a 2TB hard drive from a SAN vendor when they could've gotten the NewEgg special for under $100.
Two things - if everything were the same quality, then even the cheapest Acer or Asus laptop would be the top sellers. Or hell, HP computers for that matter - they'd all last forever. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the case (even though they're all made by the same Foxconn factory in the end). What happens it the manufacturer specifies a quality level - from "just throw the parts in the box and ship it" to "carefully lay out all the cables along the guides in the case so the case can be opened fully with the wires routed to the side pivoting..." sort of quality. (Anyone's who had to deal with OEM machines with too-short cables in the case requiring unplugging every part to replace the RAM can attest).
Anyhow, it seems Macs have long useful lives - my old Powerbook (!) dates to 2003 and is still in use today - probably a good 10 years of service out of what I paid. And most people find that's the case - machines that are 6+ years old (the early Intel Macs, for example) are still useful. The eBay prices for used Macs tends to attest to that - still considerably higher than a PC of equivalent age. Sure my Mac will probably never fetch more than $200 or so, but a 10 year old PC getting $200 is pretty unheard of unless it's special in some way - and most people would scoff if you tried to get more than $20 for it.
That's just the Mac market. I guess it also helps that the metal casing generally tends to be of good quality so the worst damage a Mac usually has is missing rubber feet and scratches. PCs having lots of little plastic bits all over the place will have pieces falling off.
The other thing Apple does is concentrate on experience. Apple packages stuff really well compared to a lot of other manufacturers and it shows. The paper's not some recycled crap that's covering your new device in little bits of paper dust when you open the box, it doesn't look like someone randomly took all the pieces and thrown it in the box and be done with it or have the nasty folded cardboard packaging cut with some strange wavy saw that saws through your hand as you extract it out (it seems the Japanese love it - Sony and Panasonic packaging...).
Not to say there isn't well-packaged stuff (Nintendo's DSi and later handhelds are pretty good compared to the DS series and prior). My Gnex came in a nice box with well laid out accessories. Then again, there's some Datel stuff I got in a nice box, but held in a nasty cheap cardboard holder that covered my "shiny" new product in a fine brown dust. Bleh.
I think TVs have settled down - I mean, what is there to improve? OLED? Better picture quality? 3D? Not much improvement for people who'd be interested in Ikea furniture with built-in entertainment system, really
And most of the improvements are pretty minimal - the only real thing a customer notices is well, the price is going down.
And yeah yeah, there will be the AVSForum guys - to whom Ikea won't be bothered with.
TVs have reached a maturity point again where tomorrow's new model doesn't really have much over today. The only really big thing on the horizon would be 4K, but given it's taken over 20 years to get HDTV out and done with, this thing will probably still be good enough when 4K starts getting really popular. Hell, I'm sure a lot of old RCA big-screen (27" or so) TV chests are still used in basements and such for kids and the like..
That's why repair is a hobby (DIY). That way your time is basically free and you're doing it for fun or experience. (It's just like people who admin Linux machines for fun).
Now, a toaster is actually a very simple product and a poor example - anyone competent with electricity can rapidly fix it.
Take something that doesn't cost a lot more - say a computer monitor - you can pick up a 20" or more one for under $200 on sale. Now it breaks - do you fix it, or buy a new one? Fixing it will probably cost you a high-paid technician to look at it at probably a good $50+/hr plus parts ($expensive in most cases). At which point you probably have to invest around $150 or so to fix it. Or just buy a new monitor on sale that probably does more for a few bucks more.
If you do repair as a hobby - you stand to benefit since you can ask for these old broken electronics and fix it yourself - if the part costs $100, it's a $100 monitor to you.
For a lot of things, even the manufacturer never repairs individually - phones and such the store will gather up a pile of them then send it off to the manufacturer to refurbish. Even then the manufacturer will probably wait for more units to come in before sending the whole lot off to refurbish (parts from several phones combined to make a working one, that sort of thing). It's just cheaper that way (depending on the circuit board, it may not be economical to fix - if it's a dud capacitor or resistor, it's easy, but if it's a chip that's BGA or so, it can easily cost $200 to replace the chip).
Now go to places like China where labor is cheap, and you'll find people repairing lots of stuff because even highly paid technical people are really cheap. (It's the flip side to all the factory workers making peanuts a day - even the highly skilled workers make just a few peanuts more. Though in China, there is also a pile of businesspeople that really rake in big bucks the same way Wall Street does).
Waves are never boring, especially big ones. The key is to cut through them - if you let them hit the side, you risk capsizing. The only way to do this is engine power (running low on fuel or having an engine failure is extremely scary).
Rogue waves can be problematic because the engine/rudder may not have enough power and authority to maintain direction perpendicular to the wave. It doesn't matter if it crests over you (boat floats and a lot of water goes all over the place and masts and stuff can break), as long as the bow is pointed straight at the wave. But once it starts turning..
Easy - Google knows the utilization rate of Gmail is quite low. They can offer everyone 9+GB of mail storage knowing perhaps only 2% or so of users actually use that much and are actively bumping against that limit.
With GDrive though, people will probably store a LOT of data on there because it's storage that's much more useful to people. So utilization of that would be much higher and maybe even use more storage than gmail.
Nothing wrong with that. But it's a ladder. You start with the absolute basics of pen and paper arithmetic - it's dull and boring and really the only way to teach it is drilling. Though situational word problems definitely help (especially since a lot of times you only need basic arithmetic - e.g., shopping/going out/etc).
One the basic building block of arithmetic is done, you move up to algebra and the like, to which a calculator can be handy after all the symbolic manipulation is done to get the final result. But here the skill is in the algebra - the calculator is to prevent the skull-drudgery of the arithmetic from getting in the way of learning when it adds nothing ot the lesson.
Then comes calculus, where a computer helps with the basic algebra so the lessons on doing the derivatives and integrals can sink in and it's reduced down to an algebraic expression, at which point you might as well just pass it through as doing the algebra achieves little learning.
From there comes applications, where one would actually use those mathematical skills in practical situations. Here a computer is handy in getting the final answer - the hard part is finding out how to get to the answer, not the actual grinding through.
Though having the basic skills down pat can help you apply judgement as appropriate. Because knowing what the range of the answer should be is paramount in order to ensure a mistake wasn't made - either in data entry, setting up the equations, or bugs in the calculation program. At the very least, one should be able to guesstimate the magnitude of the answer (0 significant figures) - which can also be done through experience. But also looking at the calculations, you can get maybe 1 significant figure for your estimate, which would be good enough to verify that the mechanical part of the task was done correctly.
And even though you're doing the physics part and letting the computer do all the pages of algebra and calculus for you, it never hurts to review the work. Nothing would suck worse than to realize for some reason, your paper boiled down to 2+2=5 (unless that was your goal) because you took the answer the computer gave you blindly.
Ditto. Because doing things "the hard way" teaches you things that being a computer technician or calculator technician never will. (And yes, mindlessly punching in numbers and recording the answers down makes you a technician - you just operate the machine).
Math should be taught first by hand done longform, then mentally. Being able to qo simple basic arithmetic in your head is VERY valuable - and if you wish ti participate in society, you will be doing math mentally. E.g., estimating how much tax is to be added on an item when you go shopping. Or eat out - having a rough idea of the bill beforehand is very valuable in not busting the budget. No you don't have to get it down to the exact penny, but knowing the general amount is sufficient. It's useful to figure out if you need to take out another bill, or if maybe the cashier has charged you wrong and you're about to be over or undercharged.
Writing legibly is important as well - tablets are everywhere, but not quite prevalent, and you might need to actually write something down and give it to someone. Writing down an address or phone number takes seconds, whereas trying to exchange email addresses can be an exercise in frustration and take 10 times longer. Hell, business cards - lets you write notes about the company - like "call about supergizmowidget special offer" or "sells test equipment" that sort of thing.
Important skills to keep up.
Actually, the main reason people overseas bought (North) American DVDs was because movies there took forever to arrive, not that they were cheaper (sometimes they were cheaper, but other times not).
It's one of the nails on the HD-DVD coffin - HD-DVD got rid of ALL region protection. Theatre owners in other countries complained to the MPAA because HD-DVD owners were importing HD-DVDs from Amazon.com and the like and watching movies that were still in theatres, or even before the theatrical release!
The studios countered this by releasing HD-DVDs much later (if it was an HD-DVD-only studio, they'd release the DVD early, then HD-DVD 3 months later. If it was Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, they released the Blu-Ray with the DVD, and then later the HD-DVD would come along).
Blu-Ray, having region coding, didn't have this problem at all.
MAYBE.
We think "global warming" means "temperatuers are going to rise" and while they are, that doesn't mean that chilly parts get warmer.
It could mean we get less severe winters (good), but more severe summers (bad). Or current models show that what happens is we get an oscillation that reaches even more extremes. Winters get colder, and summers get hotter. Rather than cold areas getting more temperate (and temperate areas turning to desert).
There's also a good reason that the loss of food-bearing temperate regions can NOT be made up by the introduction of new growing regions due to the sun's cycles - the growing season in Canada is already by definition shorter (global warming can't change the Earth's tilt).
Which would be irrelevant in this case, because the DOJ is refusing to accept the servers. So they're all boxed up ready for the DOJ and the DOJ just says "YOU hang onto it".
Otherwise why is the DOJ fighting all attempts by Carpathia to offload the servers? They don't want it, MU is not allowed to purchase them, the hosting company is forced to store the servers and incur all costs for doing so. (And the DOJ's argument that Carpathia "benefited" and can pay? Sorry, that's like saying that since my income exceeded expenses last year, I don't deserve to get a salary. Especially since profit margins aren't necessarily high to begin with.)
Could be Valve is trying to leverage Apple's AppleTV. And maybe why Apple has been slow to roll out apps for AppleTV.
I mean, Apple's got an interesting "console" in the form of iOS devices (we'll call it console-lite in that the requirements for the App Store are way looser than what Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo reqiure for their consoles). Perhaps if Valve could get Steam on there, maybe do the controller design (the AppleTV is ripe for controllers - I believe Bluetooth is on board)...
Heck, maybe it's getting Valve's games on iOS, period. Play on your TV, carry your progress onto your iDevice. Maybe even try an Android with controller support.
Jobs' disdain for video games seemed to have waned - he was veyr much against it initally, out of fears that people would see the Mac as a toy suitable for games only (the irony is thick). The second time around, he's seemed to have accepted gaming and openly adopted it when iOS got the App Store in 2008 (iOS 2, then just called iPhone OS 2.0).
NAT does have one major advantage. Ignoring the possible "firewall" just by the way it operates, it isolates the inner network from the outer network. One thing people with static IPs constantly complain about is having to renumber their network when their ISP decides to change their "static" IP address allocation.
Think of it on the inside network side - the router will always be 192.168.x.1 (usually). If you don't care what the external network address is, that's all you need to know and as long as every PC can see that IP, you're done.
IPv6 attempted to do this by allowing multiple addresses per interface, which is great until you lose connectivity one day. You name the router FC00::1, your PC is FC00::2, etc. You ping FC00::1, see the router is up, great. Other PCs on the network can access it just fine.
Now you know there's something wrong, but what? Then it hits you that maybe the IP address is wrong and sure enough, the IP used to access the internet is wrong.
Easy enough, you're a network admin and know this stuff. Explain it to your mom who's calling because their PC can't get on the Internet anymore. Or better yet, the exec who's VPN'd in and suddenly can't access his presentation but the internet works fine.
And that's a real issue IPv6 when it was designed 20 years ago didn't encounter - everyone and their dog can have a billion addresses, then came up firewalls (sure, every PC *has* a public IP, but someone's thrown a firewall in-between the two hosts), all the various TCP hacks and DoS crap, portable devices each with their own IP addresses (and who knows what security holes they have - blocked by firewalls on IPv4 but open on IPv6), and used by people who have no clue about networking or anything. Hell, these people might not even own a computer anymore!
Sure, Ipv6 has a ton of features that make it "just work", but that ends up like Macs - for 95% of the population, they do "just work", but when they don't, it can be a real PITA to fix. And it'll break on the person least able to understand what to do.
I don't know - the average American doesn't seem to inspire much confidence about that. Isn't that how we get the birther movement or that Obama is Muslim?
Hell, there are probably people who believe that cigarettes don't cause cancer and are perfectly safe, too.
Or take a look what happens when some blog or website posts some news or rumors about a company - it can send the stock price soaring or falling. Pump and dump scams are common, as are most other forms of mail fraud. Hell, people keep falling for 419 scams.
China only gets singled out because they call out that fact. Do it in the free world and you're called a lunatic.