Do they do everything *EXCEPT* a space program now?
Remember what the first "A" stands for - Aeronautics. Their big PR thing is a space program, but they are really big in other fields and because of the demands required in a modern space program, very multi-disciplined. Heck, even doing the aeronautics part requires a lot of disciplines.
It's not just rocket scientists, but you'll have scientists and engineers from all the major disciplines because they're required. From biology and earth sciences (and atmospheric study) to computer science, engineering (electrical, mechanical, civil), to the "soft" sciences like human-machine interactions (e.g., UI designs) all readily available. And they have to work together and interact in order to achieve the final result, be it advanced aircraft or spacecraft.
Analyzing failures is very complex these days because it's often not a single event but a chain, and you'd need to pull in a lot of people from a lot of disciplines in order to properly analyze the problem. Otherwise you'd end up with stuff like IT-Developer standoffs ("It's IT's fault" "Developers write sucky code"), or hardware-software standoffs ("It's a problem with hardware", "It's a software problem").
I don't think there's very many other places to go where under one roof you have access to all those resources.
The main problem with NASA has never been the science part - it's been politics.
I agree what they should have done is remove java entirely.
They did. Java and Flash have no longer been shipped with OS X for ages now. The primary reason is people keep reinstalling OS X and thus those vulnerable versions. Far better to let the user download and install the latest and greatest from Adobe and Oracle.
Final Cut Pro X is a recent example. they added some interesting stuff if you're shooting multi-cam, and broke EDL, XML, backward compatibility, the ability to share projects and removed Color entirely.
Well, Final Cut Pro X is a completely new rewrite. Apple's tradition is new rewrites of software is to get the basics working rock solid first, then add back missing features. This has been true since OS X was first released and didn't have half the stuff (e.g., DVD player) that OS 9 it shipped with also had. It happened again with QuickTime X - there's a reason why OS X supported a dual install of QT X and QT 7. FCP X is more of the same. They also retargeted it for prosumers rather than pros And yes, they still sell FCP 7 - but only by phone sales.
hardware wise... if they could remove the home, power and volume buttons they would. they lost me as a supporter when they removed the "reset" button - an arrogant statement that their (then OS 8.6) machines will never crash and hence never need the kill button. had to wrench the fuckers out of the wall. God help you if you had a laptop.
Does a modern PC have a reset button these days? Most of the time if it hard locks, you hold the power button a few seconds and it turns off. You then hit it again to turn it on. Reset's kinda useless since most people found they needed to mollyguard their PCs. Hell, an office full of white box PCs on the floor is a tempting target around family days - little buggers go running off and pushing all the buttons on a PC, including reset. Anyhow, old Macs had them, but they were pin-holes to prevent exactly that sort of problem. (You needed it if you wanted to get into the debugger).
Am I the only one who thinks it shouldn't take 3 years to figure out how to make a car produce engine noises?
No, no you are not. When I read that, I thought, really? 3 years? Uh, lemme see... loudspeaker + audio source + the tachometer = programmable sound that varies with engine speed. Took me all of 10 seconds.
So what sounds do you play (a normal engine whirr or a deep-throated big-block?)? How do you scale that sound with RPMs? How do you ensure the sound you're playing won't be irritating to everyone after a period of time?
Even more important - how do you handle interior vs. exterior sounds? Car makers do NOT make the whole cabin soundproof - they actually do funnel some engine sound into the cabin. Do you play an "idling" sound? Do you consider the inside and outside to be separate sounds? Do you simulate gears (and if so, at what points? and do you base it on speed or RPMs or how the driver is pressing down?). And how does it sound in the rain/snow/sand/dirt?
It's the whole UI thing - that takes far longer to do than the technical steps. Little things like where you put the speaker can have a huge effect - it tane turn a great sound into a muffled annoying rumble. Or the mixing of existing car noise (motor/controller whine, wind noise) may turn the noise into something horrible.
Hell, there are apps for your phone that play back engine noiess, but the whole acoustic package has to be considered.
Sometimes I think letting engineers have all the fun when it comes to design is part of the problem; they tend to forget Occam's Razor. Then again, with all the drive-by-wire stuff they're mucking about with these days, maybe I shouldn't be surprised the auto engineers forgot that, at it's base, a car is a mechanical device.
Drive by wire has several advantages, including reliability, economy (cars are "twist'n'go" these days - the computer does all the necessary adjustments to ensure it can start in the harshest conditions with a simple twist of the key - no accellerator flooring/choke adjusting/etc), emissions, etc. Plus information sharing - the navigation system can do dead reckoning based on wheel motion, speed, the steering wheel position, etc when it loses GPS signal. Nevermind all the safety features that people love, and cruise control.
This is just another "It's different because of the internet." bullshit justifications.
People have always let those they are close to to know where they are.
People have always talked about sex.
People have always talked about their health issues.
The internet IS different.
For starters - here's two ways it's different from what people have traditionally expected.
First, its reach is global. Second, it's memory is infinite, and it remembers everything.
The first point is what gets a lot of people. If I talk about sex on say, a street corner with a few friends, the general expectation is that the only people who will hear it would be my friends, and the people in the immediate vicinity (and likewise my friends' friends and their local group). Either way, it generally won't spread too far (the worst is the whole town if it's small).
With the Internet, that blog post or status update, becomes global as friends notice and re-post/re-tweet/congratuate etc. You may make it private, they, public. And now the whole world knows.
The second gets people over and over again - the internet does not forget. You put something up, and others copy it and put it around. It works for software, and it works for everything else as well. Old newsgroup posts people thought were dead were resurrected. Old tales of misdeeds haunt them at the next job interview, that sort of thing.
Thing is, most people don't realize it and they think telling everyone their FourSquare location is only going to be of interest to friends when a lot more people may stumble upon it.
If you can't be bothered to look both ways before crossing the street, it's you who are negligent. The only exception is the blind, and we have audible crosswalks now, so this technology is pointless.
So why fight all those texting/cellphone use-while-driving laws? I mean, the VAST majority of people blindly crossing the street are probably on their cellphones.
Perhaps we should ban all cellphone use while mobile. People can't drive and talk/text (if you think you can - you can't, and you're plainly obvious to everyone who's behind you by your erratic driving), and we know they certainly can't walk and talk/text. I think a lot of police departments are now tracking incidents like this.
And nevermind the idiotic redlight runners - at least you can hear a revving engine half a block away and look to see if someone will run the red. Or green if someone intends to cut off the pedestrians just starting to cross the street by turning ahead of them.
Anyhow, having a quiet car does nothing when the car next to you at the light has their bass thumping out playing today's crappy rap/hip-hop song.
What if you need access to three or more windows, and need to switch back and forth between them quickly
That's what virtual desktops are for.
Obviously by someone who doesn't do it often to be annoying.
Here's how I have things. I have two RDP sessions to machines in the lab. I have a PDF document open containing a datasheet on some hardware, and a web browser open to HTML register settings for the processor I'm using. Switching windows and desktops is very expensive because it relies on short-term memory - (datasheet - oh, I need to set these registers, processor - I need to use these registers, code - type type oh wait, what bit was it again?).
Wherease a large montior or multiple, I can have each and refer to each one by turning my head. A lot faster, and especially if you also have code windows open with headers and other code simultaneously.
Background windows include two RDP seesions to lab PCs, my build window and email client.
Being able to quickly glance at information I need on another monitor or the window on the side is far better than having to swap between windows. Once you have to juggle 3 or more windows it gets downright annoying.
I've been looking into replacing my current laptop, which has a 1680x1050 resolution. But I see that MOST laptops nowadays have this crappy 1366x768 screen. What gives? Why isn't our screen resolution improving along with out CPU speed, RAM capacity, HD capacity, and virtually everything else???
Because you've been shopping on price, not quality.
Laptops cost the same as they always have. If your old one costed $2000 when you bought it, you should look at $1500-2000 laptops. Not $500.
Because to get to $500, manufacturers had to design to cost, and display screens and GPUs are extremely expensive parts that most people don't care about (people say "I want a 15-inch laptop" not "I want a laptop with 1400x900"). CPU, hard disk, RAM, those are expensive, but people know they want "more" and leave out graphics and display. Plus those items are relatively cheap - tossing in a low end 2.6GHz processor in place of a 2.5GHz one isn't a lot of cash. Or switching from a 320GB to a 500GB hard disk. Or doubling RAM from 2GB to 4GB.
But an LCD display is expensive, especially higher resolution ones. GPUs are optional because there are ones built in (making Intel the largest display controller manufacturer - nVidia and ATI/AMD are bit-players). So a cheap LCD coupled with expensive-sounding parts and you have your $500 laptop.
That $500 laptop isn't a bargain - it's just a pricepoint manufacturers are using to say laptops are available cheap. Last time I looked, you were looking at $1000 and up before they started bumping up resolution and even adding in low-end GPUs. $1500 should get you what you want quite readily.
Everyone's fixated on cheap. Apple is one of the few that tends to use higher resolution screens by default, and Dell often offers it as an option on a lot of their higher end laptops. Get out of the budget lines and look at the more performance lines.
Ah, but this is one port to rule them all. Conceivably, this could be the only port (aside from the charger) on an ultrabook, maybe a USB port or two in addition. Add a Thunderbolt docking station and you can add ANY port that can be placed on a PCIe bus, even an external GPU.
Those exist. Sony uses it in one of their ultrathin ultraportable laptops - it comes with a "media dock" that adds blu-ray and a GPU, so when docked, you can play games and when undocked, rely on a less powerful graphics card that'll get you better battery life
And anyone complaining about Thunderbolt docking ports needs to remember how stuff like USB serial ports and USB parallel ports (err, "printer adapters") suck ass. A Thunderbolt dock with a real (PCIe-LPC bridge to serial/parallel) will be just like a built-in serial/parallel port. Or PS2. SO your legacy ports just became much better than the USB emulations of same.
Obvious example of where a brand suffix would make sense: Apple/iPhone/iPad/iOS, Android, etc.. For example:
"Check out our new mobile Tux racing game at www.disgruntledpenguins.apple or download the Android version at www.disgruntledpenguins.android.
I'd say "go to www.disgruntledpenguis" would be a far more obvious answer, especially if the app is going cross-platform.
Now, someone like Apple might want to buy say,.itunes, so if you wanted a particular app, you could go to "pages.itunes" to see the iTunes page about Pages. Or numbers.itunes, garageband.itunes, etc for Numbers and Garage Band, respectively. Because right now, getting iTunes preview is a HUGE PITA (I think it's itunes.apple.com/something/app-name).
Likewise, Google can get.play to get Google Play pages on their market. So say, swiftkeyboard.play gets you to the Google Play page on Swift Keyboard.
Given Motorola's apparently willingness to extort companies on F/RAND patents, I don't have much pity for them.
Does it say the lawsuit is against Microsoft? The same Microsoft that gets paid $5 for every Android device sold in the world while they had 0 participation in making it? They also made no claims that Android uses any of Microsoft IP. What they said was: pay us or we use our vast patent portfolio and a small army of layers to make you pay. That's called extortion. I say good luck Motorola, go after them in every jurisdiction! Microsoft's lawyers need to be kept busy or they get out of hand and start raping and pillaging.
A difference though.
FRAND patents are mandated to be FRAND because they're essential to implement a standard. E.g., if you want to make a cellphone, you will naturally hit patented parts, because the standard used those patented things as part of the standard. Similarly, the MPEG group used a bunch of patented stuff when it created h.264. So implementing either of those, or many other standards, including 802.3 and 802.11 requires licensing of patents. You cannot implement those standards in a patent-free way.
So to encourage use of these standards, the various entities involved in setting the standards agree to license those patents at Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing. Which means I can be your largest competitor, and I can still license your patent ("Non Discriminatory") so I can implement the standard.
Some standards groups like MPEG have a separate licensing agency (MPEG-LA) to which any company wanting to license all the patents used in a standard can simply pay one entity one licensing fee and that's it (the fee depends on intended purpose - e.g., personal/commercial, restrictions on resolution, etc).
Other standards groups (3GPP, for example, and IEEE) leave it up to the market. So to create a cellphone, you'd have to obtain licenses for patents from companies like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, RIM, Qualcomm, etc. All of whom agree to license it to anyone at fair and reasonable rates.
Microsoft's Android licensing are for patents that aren't essential to implementing a cellphone or smartphone. You don't need FAT support, for example. And if you look carefully, you'll notice Google has tried to work around as many of them as possible, proving they aren't necesary at all. So no, Microsoft is in the right - if you make a smartphone, an Android smartphone, you don't HAVE to implement the things Microsoft claims. It's not required.
It's just like Apple's iCloud and Motorola's paging patent - Apple can't use the FRAND argument as those patents aren't required at all to implement a smartphone spec.
And FYI, it's also why there's a huge fight over the nano-SIM standard. Even though Apple has offered to license the required patents for FREE, everyone is still highly opposed to it. Because it means it weakens their position of FRAND portfolio with Apple's licensing of them. Nokia, RIM and everyone else opposed would have to license the patent (even though it's free), and Apple would have leverage to get access to the other FRAND patents at rates lower than what they're paying for them now.
And yes, standards making is highly political because of it - all the companies involved make their own back-room deals because they want their patents used in the standard (FRAND licensing means a steady money supply, after all). The technologically superior method can and does often lose out to those with the most power to wield in setting the standard. (Also another problem those companies have with Apple - if Apple's spec is let in, all those companies would be forced to give up power to Apple since Apple will now have a seat (or two or three) and the rest of the group has correspondingly less power - yes, there's a clique and an old boy's club at many standards organizations).
Incidentally, the Titanic was carrying more lifeboats than the regulations required at the time.
Just a bit more. But the regulations didn't require everyone to be able to get in a lifeboat (i.e., it wasn't 1:1 - the ratios still dependend on which class you were in - it was an enormously complex formula).
Ironically, the White Star Line did outfit Titanic's sister ship with enough lifeboats to meet 1:1, except there was a shortage, so they used whatever they could find, including untested collapsible ones they acquired surplus from the military.
Of course, I'm wondering if 1:1 is enough, as Costa Concordia has shown that once a ship lists enough, it can render an entire side of lifeboats useless as they can't be launched.
So there you have it - caveat emptor. If you throw money at a stranger, based on a promise, it's down to you. Most of the Kickstarter projects I've seen have been 'hey fans, you love our website, help us make a book' kind of things, which would certainly bite the owner in the ass if they let you down.
And that's what Kickstarter is. It's basically a crowdsourced and funded VC company, except instead of needing tons of money, you need only a little bit, and instead of having just a few companies, you have many.
The inventor builds something (or intends to build something), people get interested and fund it to help pay for its manufacture or development. If it works, great, everyone benefits. If it fails, too bad. It's like VC funding - a VC may fund 10 companies and know from experience that 9 of the 10 will fail and he will lose the money invested. But the 10th may be a winner - how much is up in the air (which is why VCs typically demand huge stakes).
What everyone using Kickstarter should know is, by getting rid of the VC middleman (who uses experience and management to typically ensure he's cash-flow positive), the people who fund Kickstarter projects is basically being that VC guy.
So why Kickstarter over VC funding? Easy - VCs demand a lot - and many projects on Kickstarter are small and no VC in their right mind will bother with dinky little $100k type projects. Especially if it's not big projects with big goals.
Silicon AREA is cheap, and it's getting cheaper. Today's processors dedicate half their die space to CACHE. Transistors per die, cores per die, and transistors per core are all increasing at (different) exponential rates. And with power density increasing at a quadratic rate, we're already facing the dark silicon problem, where if we power on the entire chip at nominal voltage, we have trouble delivering the power, and we can't dissipate the heat.
Actually, no.
Silicon area is *extremely* expensive. The larger the chip, the less you can fit on a wafer. Plus the wafer has randomly-distributed flaws on it, which means that the larger the chip, the greater chance of a flaw affecting operation. This all combines to reduce yield per wafer, and since a wafer has a fixed cost, the less good chips per wafer, the more they cost because the cost of the entire wafer is amortized over less chips.
Moore's law helps because reducing the size of a transistor means the silicon area is much lower which gives you more chips per wafer, each chip is less likely to be in a flawed region of silicon, which all increase yield and makes it cheaper to produce.
What's cheap is transistors - the transistor density of non-memory devices is extremely low purely because most of the area is used up by wiring. Memory devices have a little bit of "random" logic beside a huge array of highly ordered regular memory cells, which can be made extremely dense.
On a modern CPU, cache is the biggest consumer of transistors, but makes up very little area because it's so dense. The other logic's not dense purely because of wiring. It's gotten to the point where every chip like this is built with a sea of extra transistors and logic gates that are sitting there unused. If a revision is needed, those spares can often be called into action by a metal rework (much cheaper). Or ion rework if it's to confirm if a fix to a problem would suffice (the ion rework lets you rewire parts of the chip around).
It's also why fixed-area devices like say, a full-frame sensor for a digital camera still cost a LOT of money. And most camera sensors have flaws that the imaging processor has to work around (dead pixels, hot pixels, etc)
Focus your Facebook account on your off-hours hobby of DJ'ing for gay Jewish inter-racial couples retreats.
Then let them explain themselves if they don't hire you. They'd have to demonstrate how your off-hours activity did NOT influence their hiring process.
After they kind of implied that your off-hours hobbies WOULD influence their hiring decision.
It's a lose-lose for them. I don't see why any company with any intelligent HR person would even broach the subject of "social media" with applicants.
There are third party services that'll google you and search for public social network information. These services are the ones who see your actual information and they black out anything that is illegal to be used - i.e., if you have a normal photo of yourself, your face and hands (but not, say your T-shirt) will be blacked out to prevent revealing race, age, and gender. Any other information that reveals it will also be blacked out.
So the company can claim ignorance by presenting this stuff.
Of course, things that invalid this check would be asking for you password directly (since they could access it). Which s why these companies don't do that - they just seek out blogs, profiles and other stuff publicly accessible.
When was the last time ANY computer got a "virus"? A self replicating piece of code that spread from that PC via contact with storage media, etc.?
"Viruses" are long dead. They are now worms, trojans, spyware, etc. etc. They do not spread the way a real virus spreads. Its an antiquated term than people just use to mean "malware" these days.
So apple can certainly claim they do not get "viruses". Neither do PC's.
I can think of several in recent memory. Hell, Stuxnet (remember that?) used at least 3 different methods to ensure it gets installed by USB drive. And viruses do exist, because otherwise airgapped networks would be perfectly safe from them.
The big one was an exploit using Windows Explorer's auto-thumbnail processing. And Stuxnet was also a worm because it tried to find vulnerable hosts once introduced inadvertently to the secure network.
And given the poor security of SCADA systems out there and everyone saying they should be airgapped, well, Stuxnet proves you don't need an internet connection to still be vulnerable.
Oh, hell, didn't the USAF get infected with a virus? Apparently they brought USB drives containing map updates to the Predator control computers and those got infected. Sure they couldn't do much (yet...), but it goes to show.
Nevermind those infected iPods, LCD photoframes, hard drives and other stuff that came out of the factory with viruses on them that infected the user's PC. Older, but probably still relevant.
Too many in the FOSS community think the programmers are all you need to make decent software. So they take a "Who needs UI designers and technical writers?" approach that leaves the software produced sorely lacking in the kind of polish that people are willing to spend money for with commercial software.
Exactly. Then again, given the derision towards companies that repackage technology (e.g., Apple) into more user-friendly form...
I mean, Apple's big points on marketing, but they score a pile on usability. With Jobs it was easy - he'd scream his head off if something was just a little bit off.
Then again, maybe it's just derision when we see our computers and other gadgets being used and enjoyed by the hoi polloi and realize that computer operation isn't as elite as it used to be even just 30 years ago. Especially since everyone needs to use a computer to do anything it seems.
Or maybe it's just human nature- I suppose the mechanics have similar "cupholder" stories to tell about people who use their cars as mere transportation rather than moving works of art they should be priviledged to touch?
I've always used $6 HDMI cables with no problem, though it is possible a few cheap ones are completely defective by design as you ran into it. That doesn't mean an $80 HDMI cable is justified.
True on the $60 cable part, false on the digital cable not undergoing signal degradation.
For runs of less than 15', any cable will do, really. Over 15' and you'd want to consider better cables (and over 50', forget it - you really do want impedance matched cables).
The problem is at high bitrates, analog effects come into play in the cable - these effects narrow the "eye" and skew the bits. Narrowing the eye means it's a lot harder to differentiate a 1 from a 0 (even with differential signalling, there has to be a certain voltage differential), and skewing the bits means that jitter between the lines increases (it's differential, so two wires are used but that doesn't mean the signal arrives at the same time). Impedance mismatches cause reflections at the connector, shrinking teh eye further and making it even harder to differentiate.
All this leads to dropped bits which can show up as speckling in the image, to complete loss of sync or shifted lines. It's really quite evident on the longer runs. For a 6' cable, you can use anything and it'll work as there's enough headroom. For 50', not so much.
I'm currently trying out IPVanish - they have servers everywhere (including at least 6 locations in the US), and yes, it can be used with OpenVPN, L2TP, and PPTP (on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android). Besides US servers, they also have a ton more around the world.
It's fairly new so the utilization is really low (they were partnered with Easynews)
Works well enough for Hulu, I'd guess Netflix as well.
I'm having a hard time understanding why anyone would install the typical greyware apps from a random source outside of the android market... seems pretty risky.
Easy - piracy. It's the same reason people will happily torrent new release games and applications and run them on their PCs, or download Windows 7 to install on a brand new PC. Hell, malware infested versions of OS X and Photoshop abounded a couple of years ago (they installed a botnet client during the install).
And face it - a large number of places do not support Google Wallet/Checkout/whatever, especially in places like China. They might now, but once a habit is ingrained, it tends to stay such.
These sites popped up because of that (you couldn't get the app otherwise) and the end result is they florished and people pretty much got used to the idea of "apps are free" - why pay $2 at Play when your favorite app site has it for free within hours? And if you didn't know of any, your friends who told you what phone to get will steer you in the right direction.
Even Google's DRM thing isn't that effective - I have seen many DRM-cracker apps available on the torrents that remove it from an APK file.
And let's not even begin to talk about AOSP-based phones which have to be rooted/hacked to run Play - it's often easier to just download the damn app for free than hack in Play or hope that whatever market came with the device (if any) will carry it.
For those, perhaps many of these stores have their own market apps and they get preloaded, so users don't know any better. Especially if normal developers also use those stores
Heck, you should see the iOS piracy sites sometimes - they get overrun with people who buy the latest Apple iDevice and plead "HOW DO I INSTALL?!?!? I NEED IT NOW!!!" long before jailbreaks are released (you have to jailbreak to install the modified installer binary to allow unsigned stuff to run). Of course, without that 15-minute Google refund thing, new apps actually have to be bought and paid for, so app selection is far more limited.
That, and Apple tends to ensure everywhere they can officially buy devices to access the App Store, Apple is right there willing to sell. (The biggest news is that Apple finally allowed Chinese customers pay in Yuan instead of US dollars).
I don't know what NASA's current soln is (other than bland food/tube food), but any advancement in making space easier to inhabit is a great one.
Those days are long gone. These days it's pouches like MREs, except the food selection is limited - it's difficult to pour or put stuff on food so post-spicing is practically impossible - the best they can manage is rehydrating and heating. Dry powders have a habit of going everywhere and clogging things up. Wet spices just ball up and spashes turn into smaller balls that hide everywhere.
And no crumbly food - about the only bread available is a tortilla.
Coupons are probably the most effective form of advertising - give people an appearance of great savings and they're more likely to buy your brand and not a cheaper one. Give some of these people the ability to get instant coupons on things they're specifically looking at, and they'll eat it up. At least at first.
Given the popularity of stuff like groupon and other paid-"coupon" (they're really more like short-lived gift cards) sites, they apparently work.
And yes, they are advertising. Just like people like to praise Steam for their sales, or when Amazon discounts something, it's all advertising in the end.
hell even G+ is forcing crap at us all the time. Larry, remember why Google became great in the first place - it had an unobtrusive search page that was not filled to bursting with flashing banners and adverts.
And GOogle's ads used to be nice text ads that tended to be quite relevant and unobtrusive.
Now Google's the purveyor of some of the most obnoxious flashing and noisy ads. Sure they have Google Ads, but I haven't seen those around as much as I have Google's OTHER ad services - doubleclick et al.
Hell, if you look at the unfiltered 'net, most of the ads you see providing all that stuff is served by a Google-owned company. Hell, I don't think I've seen a Google ad in ages.
Hell, the public knows it's something about display technology because the term AMOLED has been plastered all over the place.
Bullshit.
That is all.
I went to a cellphone provider's webiste and looked at their phones. Like this one. Of which "AMOLED" is plastered on at least 6 phones.
It's a technology, and it's a marketing spec plastered all over the place. I just saw an ad for some Samsung Android phone, and it claimed a Super AMOLED screen. A radio ad for the Galaxy Nexus (heard of that phone? It came with Ice Cream Sandwich since day 1) praises its AMOLED HD screen.
The only way you might not know about it is if you lock yourself in the basement, never step outside (oh look, a billboard for an Android phone with AMOLED screen!), use any media like radio, TV, or step inside any store or mall (thus skipping all the cellphone displays), it's plastered everywhere I go.
Hell, the term is so popular, I bet some of the very same will mistakenly say the iPhone or iPad has an AMOLED screen.
Sure, they won't know what makes it special or advanced, but they know what it is.
I haven't the time to look up every acronym and backronym on the entire internet. I strongly suspect very few people do. As a basic standard any news reporter should clarify at a minimum the more eldritch terms. And this isn't being particularly picky, it is a literal journalistic standard.
True. However, if you're the/. crowd, you'd know it was something related to display technology already. Hell, the public knows it's something about display technology because the term AMOLED has been plastered all over the place. You can hardly go a day without someone saying something like "Super AMOLED" this and "AMOLED+" that.
Samsung plasters it everywhere since it seems all their phones use it. And it appears a large number of Android phones have an AMOLED screen as well.
Two years ago, you'd be correct. These days, it's a technology and used in marketing materials everywhere. (Hell, Samsung has Super AMOLED, Super AMOLED+ (RGB instead of Pentile), Super AMOLED HD,... blah blah blah).
Honestly, if I wanted to do stuff like this, I wouldn't ban porn. I would just ban the anti-government stuff. So similar to China and such, but without blocking porn. Or gambling. Or other sites holding vices that society might not approve.
Keep the general public amused with crap like that and they won't bother looking up anti-government information because they'd be too busy with Facebook and YouTube to care.
Make it appear free and people won't test the boundaries. Sure make it illegal, but just turn a blind eye and you'll find the vast majority of the population won't be trying to bypass the filter because there isn't one. All the dissidents now stick out like a sore thumb to be dealt with.
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Remember what the first "A" stands for - Aeronautics. Their big PR thing is a space program, but they are really big in other fields and because of the demands required in a modern space program, very multi-disciplined. Heck, even doing the aeronautics part requires a lot of disciplines.
It's not just rocket scientists, but you'll have scientists and engineers from all the major disciplines because they're required. From biology and earth sciences (and atmospheric study) to computer science, engineering (electrical, mechanical, civil), to the "soft" sciences like human-machine interactions (e.g., UI designs) all readily available. And they have to work together and interact in order to achieve the final result, be it advanced aircraft or spacecraft.
Analyzing failures is very complex these days because it's often not a single event but a chain, and you'd need to pull in a lot of people from a lot of disciplines in order to properly analyze the problem. Otherwise you'd end up with stuff like IT-Developer standoffs ("It's IT's fault" "Developers write sucky code"), or hardware-software standoffs ("It's a problem with hardware", "It's a software problem").
I don't think there's very many other places to go where under one roof you have access to all those resources.
The main problem with NASA has never been the science part - it's been politics.
They did. Java and Flash have no longer been shipped with OS X for ages now. The primary reason is people keep reinstalling OS X and thus those vulnerable versions. Far better to let the user download and install the latest and greatest from Adobe and Oracle.
Well, Final Cut Pro X is a completely new rewrite. Apple's tradition is new rewrites of software is to get the basics working rock solid first, then add back missing features. This has been true since OS X was first released and didn't have half the stuff (e.g., DVD player) that OS 9 it shipped with also had. It happened again with QuickTime X - there's a reason why OS X supported a dual install of QT X and QT 7. FCP X is more of the same. They also retargeted it for prosumers rather than pros And yes, they still sell FCP 7 - but only by phone sales.
Does a modern PC have a reset button these days? Most of the time if it hard locks, you hold the power button a few seconds and it turns off. You then hit it again to turn it on. Reset's kinda useless since most people found they needed to mollyguard their PCs. Hell, an office full of white box PCs on the floor is a tempting target around family days - little buggers go running off and pushing all the buttons on a PC, including reset. Anyhow, old Macs had them, but they were pin-holes to prevent exactly that sort of problem. (You needed it if you wanted to get into the debugger).
So what sounds do you play (a normal engine whirr or a deep-throated big-block?)? How do you scale that sound with RPMs? How do you ensure the sound you're playing won't be irritating to everyone after a period of time?
Even more important - how do you handle interior vs. exterior sounds? Car makers do NOT make the whole cabin soundproof - they actually do funnel some engine sound into the cabin. Do you play an "idling" sound? Do you consider the inside and outside to be separate sounds? Do you simulate gears (and if so, at what points? and do you base it on speed or RPMs or how the driver is pressing down?). And how does it sound in the rain/snow/sand/dirt?
It's the whole UI thing - that takes far longer to do than the technical steps. Little things like where you put the speaker can have a huge effect - it tane turn a great sound into a muffled annoying rumble. Or the mixing of existing car noise (motor/controller whine, wind noise) may turn the noise into something horrible.
Hell, there are apps for your phone that play back engine noiess, but the whole acoustic package has to be considered.
Drive by wire has several advantages, including reliability, economy (cars are "twist'n'go" these days - the computer does all the necessary adjustments to ensure it can start in the harshest conditions with a simple twist of the key - no accellerator flooring/choke adjusting/etc), emissions, etc. Plus information sharing - the navigation system can do dead reckoning based on wheel motion, speed, the steering wheel position, etc when it loses GPS signal. Nevermind all the safety features that people love, and cruise control.
The internet IS different.
For starters - here's two ways it's different from what people have traditionally expected.
First, its reach is global. Second, it's memory is infinite, and it remembers everything.
The first point is what gets a lot of people. If I talk about sex on say, a street corner with a few friends, the general expectation is that the only people who will hear it would be my friends, and the people in the immediate vicinity (and likewise my friends' friends and their local group). Either way, it generally won't spread too far (the worst is the whole town if it's small).
With the Internet, that blog post or status update, becomes global as friends notice and re-post/re-tweet/congratuate etc. You may make it private, they, public. And now the whole world knows.
The second gets people over and over again - the internet does not forget. You put something up, and others copy it and put it around. It works for software, and it works for everything else as well. Old newsgroup posts people thought were dead were resurrected. Old tales of misdeeds haunt them at the next job interview, that sort of thing.
Thing is, most people don't realize it and they think telling everyone their FourSquare location is only going to be of interest to friends when a lot more people may stumble upon it.
So why fight all those texting/cellphone use-while-driving laws? I mean, the VAST majority of people blindly crossing the street are probably on their cellphones.
Perhaps we should ban all cellphone use while mobile. People can't drive and talk/text (if you think you can - you can't, and you're plainly obvious to everyone who's behind you by your erratic driving), and we know they certainly can't walk and talk/text. I think a lot of police departments are now tracking incidents like this.
And nevermind the idiotic redlight runners - at least you can hear a revving engine half a block away and look to see if someone will run the red. Or green if someone intends to cut off the pedestrians just starting to cross the street by turning ahead of them.
Anyhow, having a quiet car does nothing when the car next to you at the light has their bass thumping out playing today's crappy rap/hip-hop song.
Obviously by someone who doesn't do it often to be annoying.
Here's how I have things. I have two RDP sessions to machines in the lab. I have a PDF document open containing a datasheet on some hardware, and a web browser open to HTML register settings for the processor I'm using. Switching windows and desktops is very expensive because it relies on short-term memory - (datasheet - oh, I need to set these registers, processor - I need to use these registers, code - type type oh wait, what bit was it again?).
Wherease a large montior or multiple, I can have each and refer to each one by turning my head. A lot faster, and especially if you also have code windows open with headers and other code simultaneously.
Background windows include two RDP seesions to lab PCs, my build window and email client.
Being able to quickly glance at information I need on another monitor or the window on the side is far better than having to swap between windows. Once you have to juggle 3 or more windows it gets downright annoying.
Because you've been shopping on price, not quality.
Laptops cost the same as they always have. If your old one costed $2000 when you bought it, you should look at $1500-2000 laptops. Not $500.
Because to get to $500, manufacturers had to design to cost, and display screens and GPUs are extremely expensive parts that most people don't care about (people say "I want a 15-inch laptop" not "I want a laptop with 1400x900"). CPU, hard disk, RAM, those are expensive, but people know they want "more" and leave out graphics and display. Plus those items are relatively cheap - tossing in a low end 2.6GHz processor in place of a 2.5GHz one isn't a lot of cash. Or switching from a 320GB to a 500GB hard disk. Or doubling RAM from 2GB to 4GB.
But an LCD display is expensive, especially higher resolution ones. GPUs are optional because there are ones built in (making Intel the largest display controller manufacturer - nVidia and ATI/AMD are bit-players). So a cheap LCD coupled with expensive-sounding parts and you have your $500 laptop.
That $500 laptop isn't a bargain - it's just a pricepoint manufacturers are using to say laptops are available cheap. Last time I looked, you were looking at $1000 and up before they started bumping up resolution and even adding in low-end GPUs. $1500 should get you what you want quite readily.
Everyone's fixated on cheap. Apple is one of the few that tends to use higher resolution screens by default, and Dell often offers it as an option on a lot of their higher end laptops. Get out of the budget lines and look at the more performance lines.
Those exist. Sony uses it in one of their ultrathin ultraportable laptops - it comes with a "media dock" that adds blu-ray and a GPU, so when docked, you can play games and when undocked, rely on a less powerful graphics card that'll get you better battery life
And anyone complaining about Thunderbolt docking ports needs to remember how stuff like USB serial ports and USB parallel ports (err, "printer adapters") suck ass. A Thunderbolt dock with a real (PCIe-LPC bridge to serial/parallel) will be just like a built-in serial/parallel port. Or PS2. SO your legacy ports just became much better than the USB emulations of same.
I'd say "go to www.disgruntledpenguis" would be a far more obvious answer, especially if the app is going cross-platform.
Now, someone like Apple might want to buy say, .itunes, so if you wanted a particular app, you could go to "pages.itunes" to see the iTunes page about Pages. Or numbers.itunes, garageband.itunes, etc for Numbers and Garage Band, respectively. Because right now, getting iTunes preview is a HUGE PITA (I think it's itunes.apple.com/something/app-name).
Likewise, Google can get .play to get Google Play pages on their market. So say, swiftkeyboard.play gets you to the Google Play page on Swift Keyboard.
A difference though.
FRAND patents are mandated to be FRAND because they're essential to implement a standard. E.g., if you want to make a cellphone, you will naturally hit patented parts, because the standard used those patented things as part of the standard. Similarly, the MPEG group used a bunch of patented stuff when it created h.264. So implementing either of those, or many other standards, including 802.3 and 802.11 requires licensing of patents. You cannot implement those standards in a patent-free way.
So to encourage use of these standards, the various entities involved in setting the standards agree to license those patents at Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing. Which means I can be your largest competitor, and I can still license your patent ("Non Discriminatory") so I can implement the standard.
Some standards groups like MPEG have a separate licensing agency (MPEG-LA) to which any company wanting to license all the patents used in a standard can simply pay one entity one licensing fee and that's it (the fee depends on intended purpose - e.g., personal/commercial, restrictions on resolution, etc).
Other standards groups (3GPP, for example, and IEEE) leave it up to the market. So to create a cellphone, you'd have to obtain licenses for patents from companies like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, RIM, Qualcomm, etc. All of whom agree to license it to anyone at fair and reasonable rates.
Microsoft's Android licensing are for patents that aren't essential to implementing a cellphone or smartphone. You don't need FAT support, for example. And if you look carefully, you'll notice Google has tried to work around as many of them as possible, proving they aren't necesary at all. So no, Microsoft is in the right - if you make a smartphone, an Android smartphone, you don't HAVE to implement the things Microsoft claims. It's not required.
It's just like Apple's iCloud and Motorola's paging patent - Apple can't use the FRAND argument as those patents aren't required at all to implement a smartphone spec.
And FYI, it's also why there's a huge fight over the nano-SIM standard. Even though Apple has offered to license the required patents for FREE, everyone is still highly opposed to it. Because it means it weakens their position of FRAND portfolio with Apple's licensing of them. Nokia, RIM and everyone else opposed would have to license the patent (even though it's free), and Apple would have leverage to get access to the other FRAND patents at rates lower than what they're paying for them now.
And yes, standards making is highly political because of it - all the companies involved make their own back-room deals because they want their patents used in the standard (FRAND licensing means a steady money supply, after all). The technologically superior method can and does often lose out to those with the most power to wield in setting the standard. (Also another problem those companies have with Apple - if Apple's spec is let in, all those companies would be forced to give up power to Apple since Apple will now have a seat (or two or three) and the rest of the group has correspondingly less power - yes, there's a clique and an old boy's club at many standards organizations).
Just a bit more. But the regulations didn't require everyone to be able to get in a lifeboat (i.e., it wasn't 1:1 - the ratios still dependend on which class you were in - it was an enormously complex formula).
Ironically, the White Star Line did outfit Titanic's sister ship with enough lifeboats to meet 1:1, except there was a shortage, so they used whatever they could find, including untested collapsible ones they acquired surplus from the military.
Of course, I'm wondering if 1:1 is enough, as Costa Concordia has shown that once a ship lists enough, it can render an entire side of lifeboats useless as they can't be launched.
And that's what Kickstarter is. It's basically a crowdsourced and funded VC company, except instead of needing tons of money, you need only a little bit, and instead of having just a few companies, you have many.
The inventor builds something (or intends to build something), people get interested and fund it to help pay for its manufacture or development. If it works, great, everyone benefits. If it fails, too bad. It's like VC funding - a VC may fund 10 companies and know from experience that 9 of the 10 will fail and he will lose the money invested. But the 10th may be a winner - how much is up in the air (which is why VCs typically demand huge stakes).
What everyone using Kickstarter should know is, by getting rid of the VC middleman (who uses experience and management to typically ensure he's cash-flow positive), the people who fund Kickstarter projects is basically being that VC guy.
So why Kickstarter over VC funding? Easy - VCs demand a lot - and many projects on Kickstarter are small and no VC in their right mind will bother with dinky little $100k type projects. Especially if it's not big projects with big goals.
Actually, no.
Silicon area is *extremely* expensive. The larger the chip, the less you can fit on a wafer. Plus the wafer has randomly-distributed flaws on it, which means that the larger the chip, the greater chance of a flaw affecting operation. This all combines to reduce yield per wafer, and since a wafer has a fixed cost, the less good chips per wafer, the more they cost because the cost of the entire wafer is amortized over less chips.
Moore's law helps because reducing the size of a transistor means the silicon area is much lower which gives you more chips per wafer, each chip is less likely to be in a flawed region of silicon, which all increase yield and makes it cheaper to produce.
What's cheap is transistors - the transistor density of non-memory devices is extremely low purely because most of the area is used up by wiring. Memory devices have a little bit of "random" logic beside a huge array of highly ordered regular memory cells, which can be made extremely dense.
On a modern CPU, cache is the biggest consumer of transistors, but makes up very little area because it's so dense. The other logic's not dense purely because of wiring. It's gotten to the point where every chip like this is built with a sea of extra transistors and logic gates that are sitting there unused. If a revision is needed, those spares can often be called into action by a metal rework (much cheaper). Or ion rework if it's to confirm if a fix to a problem would suffice (the ion rework lets you rewire parts of the chip around).
It's also why fixed-area devices like say, a full-frame sensor for a digital camera still cost a LOT of money. And most camera sensors have flaws that the imaging processor has to work around (dead pixels, hot pixels, etc)
There are third party services that'll google you and search for public social network information. These services are the ones who see your actual information and they black out anything that is illegal to be used - i.e., if you have a normal photo of yourself, your face and hands (but not, say your T-shirt) will be blacked out to prevent revealing race, age, and gender. Any other information that reveals it will also be blacked out.
Here's an example one someone ran.
So the company can claim ignorance by presenting this stuff.
Of course, things that invalid this check would be asking for you password directly (since they could access it). Which s why these companies don't do that - they just seek out blogs, profiles and other stuff publicly accessible.
I can think of several in recent memory. Hell, Stuxnet (remember that?) used at least 3 different methods to ensure it gets installed by USB drive. And viruses do exist, because otherwise airgapped networks would be perfectly safe from them.
The big one was an exploit using Windows Explorer's auto-thumbnail processing. And Stuxnet was also a worm because it tried to find vulnerable hosts once introduced inadvertently to the secure network.
And given the poor security of SCADA systems out there and everyone saying they should be airgapped, well, Stuxnet proves you don't need an internet connection to still be vulnerable.
Oh, hell, didn't the USAF get infected with a virus? Apparently they brought USB drives containing map updates to the Predator control computers and those got infected. Sure they couldn't do much (yet...), but it goes to show.
Nevermind those infected iPods, LCD photoframes, hard drives and other stuff that came out of the factory with viruses on them that infected the user's PC. Older, but probably still relevant.
Exactly. Then again, given the derision towards companies that repackage technology (e.g., Apple) into more user-friendly form...
I mean, Apple's big points on marketing, but they score a pile on usability. With Jobs it was easy - he'd scream his head off if something was just a little bit off.
Then again, maybe it's just derision when we see our computers and other gadgets being used and enjoyed by the hoi polloi and realize that computer operation isn't as elite as it used to be even just 30 years ago. Especially since everyone needs to use a computer to do anything it seems.
Or maybe it's just human nature- I suppose the mechanics have similar "cupholder" stories to tell about people who use their cars as mere transportation rather than moving works of art they should be priviledged to touch?
True on the $60 cable part, false on the digital cable not undergoing signal degradation.
For runs of less than 15', any cable will do, really. Over 15' and you'd want to consider better cables (and over 50', forget it - you really do want impedance matched cables).
The problem is at high bitrates, analog effects come into play in the cable - these effects narrow the "eye" and skew the bits. Narrowing the eye means it's a lot harder to differentiate a 1 from a 0 (even with differential signalling, there has to be a certain voltage differential), and skewing the bits means that jitter between the lines increases (it's differential, so two wires are used but that doesn't mean the signal arrives at the same time). Impedance mismatches cause reflections at the connector, shrinking teh eye further and making it even harder to differentiate.
All this leads to dropped bits which can show up as speckling in the image, to complete loss of sync or shifted lines. It's really quite evident on the longer runs. For a 6' cable, you can use anything and it'll work as there's enough headroom. For 50', not so much.
I'm currently trying out IPVanish - they have servers everywhere (including at least 6 locations in the US), and yes, it can be used with OpenVPN, L2TP, and PPTP (on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android). Besides US servers, they also have a ton more around the world.
It's fairly new so the utilization is really low (they were partnered with Easynews)
Works well enough for Hulu, I'd guess Netflix as well.
Easy - piracy. It's the same reason people will happily torrent new release games and applications and run them on their PCs, or download Windows 7 to install on a brand new PC. Hell, malware infested versions of OS X and Photoshop abounded a couple of years ago (they installed a botnet client during the install).
And face it - a large number of places do not support Google Wallet/Checkout/whatever, especially in places like China. They might now, but once a habit is ingrained, it tends to stay such.
These sites popped up because of that (you couldn't get the app otherwise) and the end result is they florished and people pretty much got used to the idea of "apps are free" - why pay $2 at Play when your favorite app site has it for free within hours? And if you didn't know of any, your friends who told you what phone to get will steer you in the right direction.
Even Google's DRM thing isn't that effective - I have seen many DRM-cracker apps available on the torrents that remove it from an APK file.
And let's not even begin to talk about AOSP-based phones which have to be rooted/hacked to run Play - it's often easier to just download the damn app for free than hack in Play or hope that whatever market came with the device (if any) will carry it.
For those, perhaps many of these stores have their own market apps and they get preloaded, so users don't know any better. Especially if normal developers also use those stores
Heck, you should see the iOS piracy sites sometimes - they get overrun with people who buy the latest Apple iDevice and plead "HOW DO I INSTALL?!?!? I NEED IT NOW!!!" long before jailbreaks are released (you have to jailbreak to install the modified installer binary to allow unsigned stuff to run). Of course, without that 15-minute Google refund thing, new apps actually have to be bought and paid for, so app selection is far more limited.
That, and Apple tends to ensure everywhere they can officially buy devices to access the App Store, Apple is right there willing to sell. (The biggest news is that Apple finally allowed Chinese customers pay in Yuan instead of US dollars).
Those days are long gone. These days it's pouches like MREs, except the food selection is limited - it's difficult to pour or put stuff on food so post-spicing is practically impossible - the best they can manage is rehydrating and heating. Dry powders have a habit of going everywhere and clogging things up. Wet spices just ball up and spashes turn into smaller balls that hide everywhere.
And no crumbly food - about the only bread available is a tortilla.
No more tubes - it's all pouches now.
Given the popularity of stuff like groupon and other paid-"coupon" (they're really more like short-lived gift cards) sites, they apparently work.
And yes, they are advertising. Just like people like to praise Steam for their sales, or when Amazon discounts something, it's all advertising in the end.
And GOogle's ads used to be nice text ads that tended to be quite relevant and unobtrusive.
Now Google's the purveyor of some of the most obnoxious flashing and noisy ads. Sure they have Google Ads, but I haven't seen those around as much as I have Google's OTHER ad services - doubleclick et al.
Hell, if you look at the unfiltered 'net, most of the ads you see providing all that stuff is served by a Google-owned company. Hell, I don't think I've seen a Google ad in ages.
I went to a cellphone provider's webiste and looked at their phones. Like this one. Of which "AMOLED" is plastered on at least 6 phones.
It's a technology, and it's a marketing spec plastered all over the place. I just saw an ad for some Samsung Android phone, and it claimed a Super AMOLED screen. A radio ad for the Galaxy Nexus (heard of that phone? It came with Ice Cream Sandwich since day 1) praises its AMOLED HD screen.
The only way you might not know about it is if you lock yourself in the basement, never step outside (oh look, a billboard for an Android phone with AMOLED screen!), use any media like radio, TV, or step inside any store or mall (thus skipping all the cellphone displays), it's plastered everywhere I go.
Hell, the term is so popular, I bet some of the very same will mistakenly say the iPhone or iPad has an AMOLED screen.
Sure, they won't know what makes it special or advanced, but they know what it is.
True. However, if you're the /. crowd, you'd know it was something related to display technology already. Hell, the public knows it's something about display technology because the term AMOLED has been plastered all over the place. You can hardly go a day without someone saying something like "Super AMOLED" this and "AMOLED+" that.
Samsung plasters it everywhere since it seems all their phones use it. And it appears a large number of Android phones have an AMOLED screen as well.
Two years ago, you'd be correct. These days, it's a technology and used in marketing materials everywhere. (Hell, Samsung has Super AMOLED, Super AMOLED+ (RGB instead of Pentile), Super AMOLED HD, ... blah blah blah).
Honestly, if I wanted to do stuff like this, I wouldn't ban porn. I would just ban the anti-government stuff. So similar to China and such, but without blocking porn. Or gambling. Or other sites holding vices that society might not approve.
Keep the general public amused with crap like that and they won't bother looking up anti-government information because they'd be too busy with Facebook and YouTube to care.
Make it appear free and people won't test the boundaries. Sure make it illegal, but just turn a blind eye and you'll find the vast majority of the population won't be trying to bypass the filter because there isn't one. All the dissidents now stick out like a sore thumb to be dealt with.
At least, if I ran my own kingdom.,..