1) Lack of 64-bit apps for Windows. While I realize most apps don't need to be 64-bit, and 64-bit Windows provides flawless 32-bit support, you should still have 64-bit version available. They do run a tiny bit faster and it is just the right way of doing things. Let's start getting rid of the legacy stuff. What's more, it isn't hard to do, at least according to the developers I hang out with. You set the compile target for 64-bit and go. Maybe a couple things to correct but all in all the compiler takes care of the details. However most don't. The reason is they were doing shit in the code they never should have, like casting pointers in to 4 byte integers and so on. They write bad code, and it makes 32/64-bit porting a problem.
The problem is the whole ecosystem. If you're using a third-party product that's not 64-bit ready, then you're stuck in 32-bit mode. And said third-party product may never be updated to 64-bits if it's by some developer that has gone out of business.
Microsoft understands this, and it's why despite having Office be 64-bit, they still recommend installing the 32-bit version.
And they also understand that there will be some LOB apps that a business custom-wrote years ago that must still work because replacements either suck, cost way too much money or more likely, both. Business is such a huge customer for Microsoft that backwards compatibility is a requirement as otherwise an OS will be ditched as "doesn't work". For proof, see Vista.
Regarding maintaining 3D state - it happens to all display-related tasks. DirectX even has a specific error code for "lost control of DirectX" to tell app developers that they need to recreate everything again, right down to the surfaces.
I would anticipate iOS and Android to have the same notifications and issues to make it a common event for 3D, or even 2D.
As mobile as that occupation is, you be lucky to even apply for the position state-side. Be thankful they're outsourcing this cheap, mobile, low skill, unstable work locally and not overseas.
Actually, it's Apple - they have an image and customer service reputation to maintain. And part of that is, unfortunately, having people that can speak clearly and understand what you're saying.
So the main reason for having this call center here in the US is because customers have repeatedly told Apple that they don't want to talk to some offshore call center, but an American one with an American accent (maybe a touch of southern drawl).
Most likely this came from customer experience with other companies where it's been offshored and they had a really negative time communicating.
Due to the way lightfield works, the final resolution is fairly low, in this case only 1024x1024. I don't know if there's really a way around it, since they're substituting resolution for the depth of field focus feature.
Well, it's the first generation consumer lightfield camera. The first-gen digital cameras weren't that great either - they were overpriced and underperformed (you were lucky if you got VGA images).
It's a New Kind Of Camera(tm). There's a lot of refinement that can be done, but the first generation model is put out there to see how the consumer reacts. If people show interest, a second generation model with better capabilities will be produced. If it doesn't, well, it'll flop.
There's a chance for consumers to be very interested in this - just snap the picture and worry about focus later.
Heck, maybe there's interesting research to be had with a light-field camera that doesn't take up a wall of camera sensors and associated computing power behind it.
The leading cause of death is heart disease, most people only care about cancer and aids though (leading cause of death in the world is heart disease, more than cancer and aids combined). Yet, I never see any stickers on the back of cars shaped like a heart. Needless to say, but cancer researchers have done a much better job of marketing than those working on heart disease
It's because the general way to lower one's risk of heart disease is quite unappealing. Basically, stuff like eliminating trans fats (as much as possible - there are natural sources) and lowering one's intake of sodium (but not too much).
However, general experience has found that people hate when you reduce the salt - low sodium products don't sell as well as their high-sodium counterparts.
Ditto on laws against using hydrogenated oils - the leading source of trans fats in fried products. (Using non-hydrogenated oils causes the food fried that way to spoil quicker). Which has others up in arms about losing their favorite fried foods, usually with FUD like "the government is making it illegal to eat fried foods". Which isn't true since many manufacturers have switched their recipes to avoid hydrogenated oils and we still have fried potato chips and chicken and other things.
Cancer, OTOH, is a lot easier to deal with. "Avoid these chemicals? OK!" Most likely because avoiding the cancer causing agents doesn't affect lifestyle so much (i.e., it doesn't affect I feed myself).
It depends. A magnet link can store a LOT of information - it can be anywhere from a hash to a complete torrent file in a link. Or it can be a redirect to a different site hosting the torrent file.
It's actually important to know the difference because one requires the use of DHT, while the others simply point the torrent client elsewhere to fetch the torrent file.
Heck, TPB stopped their trackers years ago - but that didn't mean they went completely DHT - they just used a lot of other trackers out there
All TPB's doing is really turning themselves into a google for torrents.
It's not the cost of the games, but cost of the hardware. That's one reason I got out of the gaming scene -- to play a new game you had to have the latest, greatest, fastest, most expensive hardware.
Sweeny and company need to get a clue. I'm a nerd, but I'm not Steve Wozniac. I have bills to pay and much better things to do with my time and money than to spend half a C-note on hardware, take the time to install the hardware, just to play a $50 game I might not even enjoy that much.
I mean, its a GAME. I don't care that every hair on Duke Nukem's head is perfectly rendered. I just want it to be FUN.
Well, there are consoles, so you can just buy games for them and they last for years without needing upgrades other than maybe a peripheral or two every so often.
And thanks to consoles, you can actually get by with a modest PC - because the popularity of consoles means that PC hardware hasn't been advancing as fast as it once was as software to take advantage of it is much slower coming out.
Maybe the late 90's the mid-2000's what you said is true. But since the Xbox and PS3 are "good enough" for a rather large majority of people, most games target them then get ported to PC.
Heck, an "old" video card like an nVidia 8800GT is perfectly adequate for a lot of games.
I think the real focus ought to be on getting hold of open, documented, standards-based, royalty-free hardware.
That's a lot harder than you think.
All you have to do is rewind to Nokia, Samsung and Motorola's patent lawsuits over 3G and mobile technology against Apple. Apple buys the chips from Infineon (now Intel) or Qualcomm and sticks it in their phones and gets sued for not licensing the technology (which apparently aren't conveyed by purchasing hte chips). Which means the only products we can use would be ones where the license fees are paid up - either existing phones, or built-up modules like the "internet sticks".
The only thing protecting this is that it's fairly obscure and there's no money in it.
Given the little fuss over Apple's quiet-but-massive location tracking of cellular iDevices some time back,
It's not a tracking database, it's just a database of locations of WiFi accesspoints and towers. It LOOKS like a tracking database because it grabs a few MAC addresses and tower IDs and sends them to Apple, who then sends you back a list of lat/long coordinates of those MACs and towers and a bunch more of nearby ones so you can triangulate your location.
If it tracked your actual locatoin, the database will be far simpler since it can just record your lat/long and be done with that.
But it's most similar to a cache as it's far more complex and many reports of inaccuracy in the location information.
Apple's wifi-based location maps are quite good - there were videos of people claiming "GPS over Wifi" when they tethered their iPad to an iPhone and getting very good location information. Just turns out it's doing wifi-triangulation - the tethering gave the iPad an opportunity to ask Apple where those WiFi APs were and derive good location data from it.
Of course, the cache can be misused to figuring out your general area since the locations are retrieved on demand, but it won't be an exact track.
Some really surprising names (at the Gold/100k USD level) are Nokia and Sony. They've invested as much as SUSE (the only pure-Linux player at the gold level) and Google. Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux, that doesn't mean that the company overall isn't a huge user/supporter. As for Nokia...I got nuthin'....:)
Sony is understandable - their TVs (and most "smart TVs" for that matter) run Linux. Heck, my not-so-smart TV (it does have an Ethernet port though) run Linux on an ARM11 with 128MB RAM and 128MB flash to power its web browser and other features.
Sony's also one of the companies responsible for rewriting Busybox.
Linux is used in a lot of places these days- it even powers appliances like camcorders, Blu-Ray players and such - stuff where an RTOS would've been used, but RAM and flash are cheap that they can save more money by investing in hardware rather than paying for the software license. If you look closely at the manuals, there is often an "Open Source Licenses" section that details all the open-source stuff and where to get the source code. If you dig around the websites, you'll find the repositories as well (though some really are well buried as they're on some obscure server somewhere).
There's a PDF and an HTML version of their manual. With the advent of eBook readers like the Kindle, you think they'd release an eBook version. ePub is more open than Kindle's.mobi, but even an ePub version is easily convertible to.mobi.
If only ePub used HTML... then we could write a trivial converter that took HTML pages and zipped them up and call it an ePub.
Oh wait, that's what ePubs are!
Though, ePub uses a restricted subset of HTML - but it does support stuff like CSS. Heck, i think the Kindle format is also the same - restricted HTML.
X5 is strong but not catastrophic -- this might affect shortwave reception but it's not going to take down the power grid.
Actually, you're right AND wrong.
On the X scale, X1 is least and X5 is worst. However, an X5 corresponds to something like a 30mT change in 3 hours of Earth's magnetic field.
The problem is, X5 is where it stops. Storms of intensity of 300mT/sec have been recorded, and they too would be marked as an X5 (I believe that was the 187x "big one"). The Quebec one was of lower magnitude, but still X5.
That's been the problem with the scale - it's like measuring hurricanes with a scale that would stop at F2. It doesn't really tell you a whole lot since it can encompass "little damage" to "major flooding, destruction and deaths".
Or like the bars on a cellphone where it stays at 5 bars until you're at the edge, and then drops to 0 bars over the course of a few feet. Like say, the iPhone 4.
I generally don't use my cell phone where I think you shouldn't. This includes restaurants, theatres, public transit, etc.
If it rings, I may look at it to see who is calling. I won't answer it and sometimes just leave the phone on vibrate.
I don't understand why people think they must be able to talk on the phone everywhere. I find it more annoying now with a cell phone, as people pretty much expect you to answer it as they're calling you directly and not your house.
I do it in degrees. If it's a casual group of my friends, I will excuse myself and leave the group to take the call outside, so I don't subject them to my conversation, then return back when I'm done.
If it's a more formal event, phone's on vibrate and only in dire emergencies would I answer. And even then I'd politely excuse myself from the group.
And texting/emailing is a no-no unless there's a very good reason - all live conversations have priority over a texted one except in emergencies. Surfing the web is limited to only if it's something the group requires (e.g., resolving an argument or looking something up).
And no, I don't have voicemail.
Anyhow, yes it's illegal, but if you do it right, it can be hard to detect (the only way to track a jammer is to triangulate its position - there's no magic CSI GPS beacon). Perhaps when the bus reaches a certain intersection implying a dead spot for signals, and never more than neessary to break the connection (should just be a few seconds).
I suppose the bigger question is - why have manners deteriorated to the point that the general public feels it's necessary to take technological measures to fix social problems? The purchase and use of jammers is just a symptom of an underlying societal problem
Look at Amazon with their no shipping charges on anything over 25 dollars rule.
You are failing so hard at economics right now it's hard for me to type this right now. Let's be clear on something: The shipping company gets paid. The delivery driver gets paid. The warehouse owner gets paid. And they're all making a profit. And you get whatever you ordered. Amazon is allowed to do stuff like that because they don't pay sales tax, which if you did the math you'd notice sales tax costs more than the "delivery tax" as it were. So basically, you're getting that "free" shipping because you're not paying taxes on what you ordered. But it's not free. And other companes offer "free shipping too". It works like this $price = $price + $shipping cost...now the shipping is 'magically' free.
Actually, if you're a grocery store, you can milk extra money from insurance companies to help offset the cost of shipping.
Think of all the health insurance companies who will kill for information on their clients? And the onine grocery stores will have your name, address, AND what you buy every month from them! (Plus a credit card with billing address if they need to ensure proper correllation).
"Sorry, we see you've purchased nothing but hot dogs, chips and burgers, and no fruits and veggies. We're going to add a unhealthy diet surcharge to your health insurance premium".
It's effectively a super-loyalty card - one that you can't pass around to a friend (or swap with a group) and corrupt the marketing/tracking data for. Unless you're in the habit of having to order for your friend and then running around to pick up the groceries.
I'm sure there will be more than a few insurance companies willing to pay for such information. Heck, it will probably pay for the "free shipping"!
I hope they know what they're doing because I for one do not look forward to a PC marketplace dominated by only Intel and Nvidia.
And you won't.
Because Intel needs AMD just like Microsoft needs Apple. If Intel wanted, they could crush AMD in a heartbeat, but they won't because once AMD dies, Intel's going to get a lot of scrutiny, even if the sole reason AMD died was their CEO did something stupid and it wasn't Intel's fault.
So AMD keeps the regulators off Intel's back, just like Apple keeps regulators off Microsoft's back. (And how Apple keeps regulators of Google's back - if it wasn't for iAds, Google would be blocked from acquiring AdMob, the largest mobile advertising nework). Sure they all compete, but everyone knows that competition keeps the government at bay. The worst thing in the world for Android would be for Apple to abandon iOS, for example (which won't happen in the short term, given how much money Apple makes from iOS).
So with everyone's fortunes tied up in everyone else, it wouldn't surprise me if Intel offered foundry services to AMD (in secret with no direct contact), or if Intel had plans that amounted to buying up piles of AMD chips and burying them, just to keep AMD afloat.
The Intel-AMD situation is probably ideal for Intel - AMD's just that yappy little dog trying to get at your ankles that has some marketshare that doesn't really threaten Intel's, but offers just enough competition to ward off the big dogs of government.
Apple-Microsoft, not so much - Microsoft probably wanted to keep Apple small and yappy like AMD, except that yappy little dog decided to attack some other ankles and grew bigger.
Sure, the public PR has them attacking each other, but you can bet behind closed doors everyone's far more chummy. Heck, I don't think there's as much anti-Microsoft rhetoric from the Apple fanbois these days
Crash bugs are frustrating, but nowhere NEAR as scary as a bug that results in an incorrect but plausible computation. If the program crashes, you KNOW it crashed and you know the runs before that didn't crash are OK.
Well, there are several problems - in a production environment, you're looking at a possible DoS issue for this. If it happens in the kernel, it can BSoD or kernel panic - putting the whole system offline. Or even worse, it'll continue for a little while and corrupt data in weird and wonderful ways before the misaligned stack finally causes the CPU to walk off the plank.
If it's an application, having some Line of Business app continually crashing causes its own share of problems. Especially since developers may not realize it's a CPU issue and spend weeks debugging lines of code "that should work". And probably not found if you single-step.
Even worse, it happens during heavy load. I'm sure if Anonymous decides to DDoS you, having your server crash just adds icing to the cake. Or if it experiences heavy load during some of the bigger shopping days.
On the bright side, it probably happens very rarely so most production servers probably WON'T see it.
I agree with you. I've done blind tests between 48kHz and 96kHz and I cannot hear a difference. I used to hear a difference between 44.5kHz and 48kHz when I was younger, but it is getting harder as I age. Personally, I cannot see why 192kHz samples would be released outside of the studio.
I can hear the difference between 16-bit and 20-bit, but not so much between 20-bit and 24-bit. At that point, the noise floor for the media has gone below that of other components, so you really can't tell.
First, most studio masters are 48kHz. Finding 96kHz or even 192kHz mastered audio is HARD. The range and selection of media capable of those sample rates is extremely low. Maybe under 100 Blu-Rays have 96kHz audio tracks, and far fewer have 192kHz tracks. And 96kHz has been around since the DVD days, and we still get audio mixed at 48kHz.
They do, however use 24bit sampling.
As for why go 96kHz or 192kHz, it's quite minor. For this, we need to explore sampling theory.
First, you have an analog signal. Then you MUST pass it through a low-pass filter (called an anti-aliasing filter) that bandlimits the input signal so it doesn't exceed the Nyquist limit (which will cause aliasing in the sampled waveform).
The trouble spot is the analog filter. If we assume that human hearing stops precisely at 20kHz, at 44.1kHz, we have to have a filter that basically has a stop band from 20kHz to 22.05kHz. It takes a lot of work to do this and the filters tend to be pretty big if you want to achieve filters that have flat passbands and low phase-distortion.
At 48kHz, you have a stop band of 20kHz through 24kHz, which makes for a much easier design. At 96kHz, you have a LOT of stop band. Enough so that you can perhaps set the passband higher (you have to block frequencies above 48kHz, so you can start your stop band somewhere between 24-25kHz which should cover the majority of people's hearing. And you'll have a whopping 24kHz or so for the stop band, making for a very clean filter with gentle rolloff (which generally gives you better passband performance - flatter response on the pass band, and very low phase distortion).
At 192kHz, that's really getting excessive - even if you set the pass band at a ridiculous 48kHz to cover every possible human and dog, there's a pile of bandwidth available for the stop band.
96kHz audio may sound better if you're young (or a dog), but a good chunk of the older population has hearing that rolls off starting around 16kHz or so.
Hence why the vast majority of works are sampled at 48kHz - it really is good enough and those that can hear ultrasonic will lose the ability in a few years.
Nah, he's going to bring down the WaPo to the likes of the/. crowd. You know, the poor editing, poor grammar, incorrect summaries, that sort of thing. And lets's not forget about repeating yesterday's stories again (hey, it makes it look thicker!)
Oh yeah, and the April 1 edition of this year's WaPo will be in Klingon. Or feature ponies. Or have dupes.
Yes, it is. In fact, most of the Canadian labels LEFT CRIA! They had serious disagreements over suing those who pirated (like the RIAA labels did) and most left. What's left are the big three, and it's not really representing Canadian music at all.
As an aside, who wants to bet that this is the REAL reason why that spy bill was introduced? Not for the police, but for the music and movie industry?
Sure, data got in, Stuxnet got in. But no data got out. If you want to protect your IP from "theft" (they still have the data, so any file sharing evangelist won't call it theft) landlocking seems like a perfect layer of security. Trusting just the one layer is not very smart, but as security layers come, in this case, it would be quite effective.
If Stuxnet could get in, it could leak data out (It just wasn't designed to). The fact it got in meant people with thumbdrives were regularly plugging stuff into airgapped computers, and that's your method out.
So you have an infected PC - that infected PC grabs interesting files and copies them to the thumbdrive. It also bundles in a way to infect the next PC.
The next infection, the virus determines if it can access the 'net. If it can, it transmits the secret data. If not, it assumes it's still on a secret network and goes hunting around for information to steal, waiting for someone else to plug in another thumbdrive. Maybe it also caches the previous stolen data just in case it's a mobile device that doesn't temporarily have internet connectivity.
Stuff got in and infected the secure network. Unless everything is wiped, there's no way you can assume stuff can't get back out. It'll be slow and tedious, but I'm sure Stuxnet went through a long period of debugging like that.
Other than the "convenience" of being able to get at your email, a crutch for a stunted sense of direction, and a safety net for poor before-hand planning, the only reason I can see for having a smartphone is for keeping yourself entertained on the go. That brings me to: are people's minds so empty that they can't stand just a bit of quiet time without outside stimulation? Somehow we've been doing it for millennia without going completely bonkers, just sayin'.
I use mine for product research.
In case you didn't know, Canadian retail shopping is normally best done in the store - online shopping in Canada is typically just terrible - it costs more (you pay shipping and taxes) or wait for the item (if shipping is free). Unlike Amazon.com, Amazon.ca is barely more than a book/movie/music store (and their prices aren't terribly hot either - it's just they have a good selection).
So yes, I get surprised when I see something in store that I assumed was only available online, and then use my smartphone to look up reviews I may have skimmed to see if it was a good product, and look up what it should cost (sometimes it's cheaper to just buy it from the US and pay shipping+taxes+customs).
And other times, it's just to do quick price comparisons - is that other store really cheaper, or just a few cents cheaper?
So yeah, I could do it all online, if I wanted ot put up with it costing more and getting less service out of it (it costs to return stuff online since you're forced to pay return shipping, and many don't refund shipping).
Speaking of internet porn and going on a tangent: why is porn notorious as a virus vector? Is getting paid to film/participate in orgies really so bad that you have to do illegal things on the side to keep the lights on?
Just demand, really. And no, it doesn't have to be the providers doing it.
What happens is simple - malware authors look through say, the popular torrents and grab the filenames fro mthem. Then they make a plausible-looking file of the same that's around the right size but has something like "This file requires additional software to play. Please visit hxxp://malware-r-us.com/codecpack to download".
And yes, people will install it.
It seems people wanting porn are particularly vulnerable to the Dancing Pigs issue. They'll even disable firewalls for you if you ask nicely.
Capitalism simply does not deliver good education. There is no profit in a swathe of well-educated people, only the minimum needed to keep remaining consumers in line.
Actually, this is truer than you think. Not only is there no profit in a well educated population, a well-educated population costs companies a lot of money. It's far better that they have a legion of uneducated people who'll become wage slaves (i.e., cheap labor) than a swath of well-educated workers who will start demanding higher pay.
Also, the less educated are easier to swindle and get them to become mindless consumers to buy the next hot product.
Above that, the next goal is to swindle smart workers into thinking "it's always been that way> Like IT for example. The concept of "intern" meaning "unpaid intern" is pretty much confined to IT professionals - heck, even Foxconn pays their interns (not well, mind you, but still more than unpaid interns). Or exploitation of IT workers to work lots of unpaid overtime without much compensation (e.g., time off in lieu). Other industries either pay overtime, or when exempt, often give time off in lieu at a multiple (say, 1.5 to 2). That and 40 hour work weeks - I've seen people do 37.5 (7.5 hrs/day) or 35 (7 hrs/day), in North America as regular hours.
Now I'll probably get hate for this, which will be ironic and sad since/. is supposed to be libertarian, but WTF I don't care. We ALL know why GPL is going down, its because TINSTAAFL and with GPL V3 RMS has gone so damned anti business he's scared away too many folks.
I've seen this - companies have started instituting policies on use of open-source. It basically said if you wish to use (or to add) an open-source project, you must not only submit for approval, it has to be reviewed by the lawyers, who can then dictate what you're actually allowed to do with it.
Think spanish inquisition - what you plan to do with the software, how it fits in with the larger work, how you plan on complying with the license, etc.
Instituted for ALL open-source projects - just as tough as incorporating third-party commercially licensed code.
It's scared them enough that companies are reimplementing projects. Apple's been on a GPL eviscerating spree in OS X - they stopped using Samba when it went GPLv3 (in lieu of their own SMB implementation - it's why Snow Leopard (10.5) lost some Windows networking features). They migrated completely to LLVM/Clang - the last commit to GCC was to add Grand Central Dispatch support to it. I suspect other companies are doing the same - the BSD version of BusyBox probably started under fear of GPL violation lawsuits, but you can't dismiss the other fear that it may go GPLv3 at some point in the future.
The good news though is that even though the GPLv3 is what most people nowadays mean by "GPL", you can still release under the old GPLv2 - that license will not cease to exist. Though some may steadfastly insist on being GPLv2-only to avoid their project inadverntently being made GPLv3+ due to incorporation of GPLv3 code (GPLv2-only is NOT compatible iwth GPLv3, even the FSF maintains this. But a GPLv2+ project with GPLv3+ code turns the project into GPLv3+).
Life and limb trump free speech as shown with the "screaming fire in a crowded theater" example.
Actually they don't. You're free to shout "FIRE" in a crowded theatre even if there isn't one.
However, rights do not trump responsibilities. Your right to shout fire in a theatre must be balanced against the possible consequences - if someone gets trampled to death, you're responsible for manslaughter, possibly murder.
Likewise all the libel and slander laws - you're free to say what you want, but you're also responsible for that same speech should someone be hurt over it. Of course, this also has the reverse that those with means can use these laws to "shut up" people, hence Anti-SLAPP laws to enable those with something to say can say their piece responsibly without being muzzled.
Unfortunately, these days with the Internet, people don't realize that their speech lasts a LOT longer than the moment it was uttered - it effectively lasts forever, and what was said decades ago can come back to bite you. (This is in contrast with shouting at the street corner - for the audience is only those within earshot and the moment you stop, it's basically gone unless someone posts it online.)
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The problem is the whole ecosystem. If you're using a third-party product that's not 64-bit ready, then you're stuck in 32-bit mode. And said third-party product may never be updated to 64-bits if it's by some developer that has gone out of business.
Microsoft understands this, and it's why despite having Office be 64-bit, they still recommend installing the 32-bit version.
And they also understand that there will be some LOB apps that a business custom-wrote years ago that must still work because replacements either suck, cost way too much money or more likely, both. Business is such a huge customer for Microsoft that backwards compatibility is a requirement as otherwise an OS will be ditched as "doesn't work". For proof, see Vista.
Regarding maintaining 3D state - it happens to all display-related tasks. DirectX even has a specific error code for "lost control of DirectX" to tell app developers that they need to recreate everything again, right down to the surfaces.
I would anticipate iOS and Android to have the same notifications and issues to make it a common event for 3D, or even 2D.
Actually, it's Apple - they have an image and customer service reputation to maintain. And part of that is, unfortunately, having people that can speak clearly and understand what you're saying.
So the main reason for having this call center here in the US is because customers have repeatedly told Apple that they don't want to talk to some offshore call center, but an American one with an American accent (maybe a touch of southern drawl).
Most likely this came from customer experience with other companies where it's been offshored and they had a really negative time communicating.
Well, it's the first generation consumer lightfield camera. The first-gen digital cameras weren't that great either - they were overpriced and underperformed (you were lucky if you got VGA images).
It's a New Kind Of Camera(tm). There's a lot of refinement that can be done, but the first generation model is put out there to see how the consumer reacts. If people show interest, a second generation model with better capabilities will be produced. If it doesn't, well, it'll flop.
There's a chance for consumers to be very interested in this - just snap the picture and worry about focus later.
Heck, maybe there's interesting research to be had with a light-field camera that doesn't take up a wall of camera sensors and associated computing power behind it.
It's because the general way to lower one's risk of heart disease is quite unappealing. Basically, stuff like eliminating trans fats (as much as possible - there are natural sources) and lowering one's intake of sodium (but not too much).
However, general experience has found that people hate when you reduce the salt - low sodium products don't sell as well as their high-sodium counterparts.
Ditto on laws against using hydrogenated oils - the leading source of trans fats in fried products. (Using non-hydrogenated oils causes the food fried that way to spoil quicker). Which has others up in arms about losing their favorite fried foods, usually with FUD like "the government is making it illegal to eat fried foods". Which isn't true since many manufacturers have switched their recipes to avoid hydrogenated oils and we still have fried potato chips and chicken and other things.
Cancer, OTOH, is a lot easier to deal with. "Avoid these chemicals? OK!" Most likely because avoiding the cancer causing agents doesn't affect lifestyle so much (i.e., it doesn't affect I feed myself).
It depends. A magnet link can store a LOT of information - it can be anywhere from a hash to a complete torrent file in a link. Or it can be a redirect to a different site hosting the torrent file.
It's actually important to know the difference because one requires the use of DHT, while the others simply point the torrent client elsewhere to fetch the torrent file.
Heck, TPB stopped their trackers years ago - but that didn't mean they went completely DHT - they just used a lot of other trackers out there
All TPB's doing is really turning themselves into a google for torrents.
Hey, al someone had to do was watch this season's Brad Meltzer's Decoded. I think the Mafia episode would basically sum up the argument, literally.
Well, there are consoles, so you can just buy games for them and they last for years without needing upgrades other than maybe a peripheral or two every so often.
And thanks to consoles, you can actually get by with a modest PC - because the popularity of consoles means that PC hardware hasn't been advancing as fast as it once was as software to take advantage of it is much slower coming out.
Maybe the late 90's the mid-2000's what you said is true. But since the Xbox and PS3 are "good enough" for a rather large majority of people, most games target them then get ported to PC.
Heck, an "old" video card like an nVidia 8800GT is perfectly adequate for a lot of games.
That's a lot harder than you think.
All you have to do is rewind to Nokia, Samsung and Motorola's patent lawsuits over 3G and mobile technology against Apple. Apple buys the chips from Infineon (now Intel) or Qualcomm and sticks it in their phones and gets sued for not licensing the technology (which apparently aren't conveyed by purchasing hte chips). Which means the only products we can use would be ones where the license fees are paid up - either existing phones, or built-up modules like the "internet sticks".
The only thing protecting this is that it's fairly obscure and there's no money in it.
It's not a tracking database, it's just a database of locations of WiFi accesspoints and towers. It LOOKS like a tracking database because it grabs a few MAC addresses and tower IDs and sends them to Apple, who then sends you back a list of lat/long coordinates of those MACs and towers and a bunch more of nearby ones so you can triangulate your location.
If it tracked your actual locatoin, the database will be far simpler since it can just record your lat/long and be done with that.
But it's most similar to a cache as it's far more complex and many reports of inaccuracy in the location information.
Apple's wifi-based location maps are quite good - there were videos of people claiming "GPS over Wifi" when they tethered their iPad to an iPhone and getting very good location information. Just turns out it's doing wifi-triangulation - the tethering gave the iPad an opportunity to ask Apple where those WiFi APs were and derive good location data from it.
Of course, the cache can be misused to figuring out your general area since the locations are retrieved on demand, but it won't be an exact track.
Sony is understandable - their TVs (and most "smart TVs" for that matter) run Linux. Heck, my not-so-smart TV (it does have an Ethernet port though) run Linux on an ARM11 with 128MB RAM and 128MB flash to power its web browser and other features.
Sony's also one of the companies responsible for rewriting Busybox.
Linux is used in a lot of places these days- it even powers appliances like camcorders, Blu-Ray players and such - stuff where an RTOS would've been used, but RAM and flash are cheap that they can save more money by investing in hardware rather than paying for the software license. If you look closely at the manuals, there is often an "Open Source Licenses" section that details all the open-source stuff and where to get the source code. If you dig around the websites, you'll find the repositories as well (though some really are well buried as they're on some obscure server somewhere).
If only ePub used HTML... then we could write a trivial converter that took HTML pages and zipped them up and call it an ePub.
Oh wait, that's what ePubs are!
Though, ePub uses a restricted subset of HTML - but it does support stuff like CSS. Heck, i think the Kindle format is also the same - restricted HTML.
Actually, you're right AND wrong.
On the X scale, X1 is least and X5 is worst. However, an X5 corresponds to something like a 30mT change in 3 hours of Earth's magnetic field.
The problem is, X5 is where it stops. Storms of intensity of 300mT/sec have been recorded, and they too would be marked as an X5 (I believe that was the 187x "big one"). The Quebec one was of lower magnitude, but still X5.
That's been the problem with the scale - it's like measuring hurricanes with a scale that would stop at F2. It doesn't really tell you a whole lot since it can encompass "little damage" to "major flooding, destruction and deaths".
Or like the bars on a cellphone where it stays at 5 bars until you're at the edge, and then drops to 0 bars over the course of a few feet. Like say, the iPhone 4.
I do it in degrees. If it's a casual group of my friends, I will excuse myself and leave the group to take the call outside, so I don't subject them to my conversation, then return back when I'm done.
If it's a more formal event, phone's on vibrate and only in dire emergencies would I answer. And even then I'd politely excuse myself from the group.
And texting/emailing is a no-no unless there's a very good reason - all live conversations have priority over a texted one except in emergencies. Surfing the web is limited to only if it's something the group requires (e.g., resolving an argument or looking something up).
And no, I don't have voicemail.
Anyhow, yes it's illegal, but if you do it right, it can be hard to detect (the only way to track a jammer is to triangulate its position - there's no magic CSI GPS beacon). Perhaps when the bus reaches a certain intersection implying a dead spot for signals, and never more than neessary to break the connection (should just be a few seconds).
I suppose the bigger question is - why have manners deteriorated to the point that the general public feels it's necessary to take technological measures to fix social problems? The purchase and use of jammers is just a symptom of an underlying societal problem
Actually, if you're a grocery store, you can milk extra money from insurance companies to help offset the cost of shipping.
Think of all the health insurance companies who will kill for information on their clients? And the onine grocery stores will have your name, address, AND what you buy every month from them! (Plus a credit card with billing address if they need to ensure proper correllation).
"Sorry, we see you've purchased nothing but hot dogs, chips and burgers, and no fruits and veggies. We're going to add a unhealthy diet surcharge to your health insurance premium".
It's effectively a super-loyalty card - one that you can't pass around to a friend (or swap with a group) and corrupt the marketing/tracking data for. Unless you're in the habit of having to order for your friend and then running around to pick up the groceries.
I'm sure there will be more than a few insurance companies willing to pay for such information. Heck, it will probably pay for the "free shipping"!
And you won't.
Because Intel needs AMD just like Microsoft needs Apple. If Intel wanted, they could crush AMD in a heartbeat, but they won't because once AMD dies, Intel's going to get a lot of scrutiny, even if the sole reason AMD died was their CEO did something stupid and it wasn't Intel's fault.
So AMD keeps the regulators off Intel's back, just like Apple keeps regulators off Microsoft's back. (And how Apple keeps regulators of Google's back - if it wasn't for iAds, Google would be blocked from acquiring AdMob, the largest mobile advertising nework). Sure they all compete, but everyone knows that competition keeps the government at bay. The worst thing in the world for Android would be for Apple to abandon iOS, for example (which won't happen in the short term, given how much money Apple makes from iOS).
So with everyone's fortunes tied up in everyone else, it wouldn't surprise me if Intel offered foundry services to AMD (in secret with no direct contact), or if Intel had plans that amounted to buying up piles of AMD chips and burying them, just to keep AMD afloat.
The Intel-AMD situation is probably ideal for Intel - AMD's just that yappy little dog trying to get at your ankles that has some marketshare that doesn't really threaten Intel's, but offers just enough competition to ward off the big dogs of government.
Apple-Microsoft, not so much - Microsoft probably wanted to keep Apple small and yappy like AMD, except that yappy little dog decided to attack some other ankles and grew bigger.
Sure, the public PR has them attacking each other, but you can bet behind closed doors everyone's far more chummy. Heck, I don't think there's as much anti-Microsoft rhetoric from the Apple fanbois these days
Well, there are several problems - in a production environment, you're looking at a possible DoS issue for this. If it happens in the kernel, it can BSoD or kernel panic - putting the whole system offline. Or even worse, it'll continue for a little while and corrupt data in weird and wonderful ways before the misaligned stack finally causes the CPU to walk off the plank.
If it's an application, having some Line of Business app continually crashing causes its own share of problems. Especially since developers may not realize it's a CPU issue and spend weeks debugging lines of code "that should work". And probably not found if you single-step.
Even worse, it happens during heavy load. I'm sure if Anonymous decides to DDoS you, having your server crash just adds icing to the cake. Or if it experiences heavy load during some of the bigger shopping days.
On the bright side, it probably happens very rarely so most production servers probably WON'T see it.
First, most studio masters are 48kHz. Finding 96kHz or even 192kHz mastered audio is HARD. The range and selection of media capable of those sample rates is extremely low. Maybe under 100 Blu-Rays have 96kHz audio tracks, and far fewer have 192kHz tracks. And 96kHz has been around since the DVD days, and we still get audio mixed at 48kHz.
They do, however use 24bit sampling.
As for why go 96kHz or 192kHz, it's quite minor. For this, we need to explore sampling theory.
First, you have an analog signal. Then you MUST pass it through a low-pass filter (called an anti-aliasing filter) that bandlimits the input signal so it doesn't exceed the Nyquist limit (which will cause aliasing in the sampled waveform).
The trouble spot is the analog filter. If we assume that human hearing stops precisely at 20kHz, at 44.1kHz, we have to have a filter that basically has a stop band from 20kHz to 22.05kHz. It takes a lot of work to do this and the filters tend to be pretty big if you want to achieve filters that have flat passbands and low phase-distortion.
At 48kHz, you have a stop band of 20kHz through 24kHz, which makes for a much easier design. At 96kHz, you have a LOT of stop band. Enough so that you can perhaps set the passband higher (you have to block frequencies above 48kHz, so you can start your stop band somewhere between 24-25kHz which should cover the majority of people's hearing. And you'll have a whopping 24kHz or so for the stop band, making for a very clean filter with gentle rolloff (which generally gives you better passband performance - flatter response on the pass band, and very low phase distortion).
At 192kHz, that's really getting excessive - even if you set the pass band at a ridiculous 48kHz to cover every possible human and dog, there's a pile of bandwidth available for the stop band.
96kHz audio may sound better if you're young (or a dog), but a good chunk of the older population has hearing that rolls off starting around 16kHz or so.
Hence why the vast majority of works are sampled at 48kHz - it really is good enough and those that can hear ultrasonic will lose the ability in a few years.
Nah, he's going to bring down the WaPo to the likes of the /. crowd. You know, the poor editing, poor grammar, incorrect summaries, that sort of thing. And lets's not forget about repeating yesterday's stories again (hey, it makes it look thicker!)
Oh yeah, and the April 1 edition of this year's WaPo will be in Klingon. Or feature ponies. Or have dupes.
Yes, it is. In fact, most of the Canadian labels LEFT CRIA! They had serious disagreements over suing those who pirated (like the RIAA labels did) and most left. What's left are the big three, and it's not really representing Canadian music at all.
As an aside, who wants to bet that this is the REAL reason why that spy bill was introduced? Not for the police, but for the music and movie industry?
If Stuxnet could get in, it could leak data out (It just wasn't designed to). The fact it got in meant people with thumbdrives were regularly plugging stuff into airgapped computers, and that's your method out.
So you have an infected PC - that infected PC grabs interesting files and copies them to the thumbdrive. It also bundles in a way to infect the next PC.
The next infection, the virus determines if it can access the 'net. If it can, it transmits the secret data. If not, it assumes it's still on a secret network and goes hunting around for information to steal, waiting for someone else to plug in another thumbdrive. Maybe it also caches the previous stolen data just in case it's a mobile device that doesn't temporarily have internet connectivity.
Stuff got in and infected the secure network. Unless everything is wiped, there's no way you can assume stuff can't get back out. It'll be slow and tedious, but I'm sure Stuxnet went through a long period of debugging like that.
I use mine for product research.
In case you didn't know, Canadian retail shopping is normally best done in the store - online shopping in Canada is typically just terrible - it costs more (you pay shipping and taxes) or wait for the item (if shipping is free). Unlike Amazon.com, Amazon.ca is barely more than a book/movie/music store (and their prices aren't terribly hot either - it's just they have a good selection).
So yes, I get surprised when I see something in store that I assumed was only available online, and then use my smartphone to look up reviews I may have skimmed to see if it was a good product, and look up what it should cost (sometimes it's cheaper to just buy it from the US and pay shipping+taxes+customs).
And other times, it's just to do quick price comparisons - is that other store really cheaper, or just a few cents cheaper?
So yeah, I could do it all online, if I wanted ot put up with it costing more and getting less service out of it (it costs to return stuff online since you're forced to pay return shipping, and many don't refund shipping).
Just demand, really. And no, it doesn't have to be the providers doing it.
What happens is simple - malware authors look through say, the popular torrents and grab the filenames fro mthem. Then they make a plausible-looking file of the same that's around the right size but has something like "This file requires additional software to play. Please visit hxxp://malware-r-us.com/codecpack to download".
And yes, people will install it.
It seems people wanting porn are particularly vulnerable to the Dancing Pigs issue. They'll even disable firewalls for you if you ask nicely.
Actually, this is truer than you think. Not only is there no profit in a well educated population, a well-educated population costs companies a lot of money. It's far better that they have a legion of uneducated people who'll become wage slaves (i.e., cheap labor) than a swath of well-educated workers who will start demanding higher pay.
Also, the less educated are easier to swindle and get them to become mindless consumers to buy the next hot product.
Above that, the next goal is to swindle smart workers into thinking "it's always been that way> Like IT for example. The concept of "intern" meaning "unpaid intern" is pretty much confined to IT professionals - heck, even Foxconn pays their interns (not well, mind you, but still more than unpaid interns). Or exploitation of IT workers to work lots of unpaid overtime without much compensation (e.g., time off in lieu). Other industries either pay overtime, or when exempt, often give time off in lieu at a multiple (say, 1.5 to 2). That and 40 hour work weeks - I've seen people do 37.5 (7.5 hrs/day) or 35 (7 hrs/day), in North America as regular hours.
I've seen this - companies have started instituting policies on use of open-source. It basically said if you wish to use (or to add) an open-source project, you must not only submit for approval, it has to be reviewed by the lawyers, who can then dictate what you're actually allowed to do with it.
Think spanish inquisition - what you plan to do with the software, how it fits in with the larger work, how you plan on complying with the license, etc.
Instituted for ALL open-source projects - just as tough as incorporating third-party commercially licensed code.
It's scared them enough that companies are reimplementing projects. Apple's been on a GPL eviscerating spree in OS X - they stopped using Samba when it went GPLv3 (in lieu of their own SMB implementation - it's why Snow Leopard (10.5) lost some Windows networking features). They migrated completely to LLVM/Clang - the last commit to GCC was to add Grand Central Dispatch support to it. I suspect other companies are doing the same - the BSD version of BusyBox probably started under fear of GPL violation lawsuits, but you can't dismiss the other fear that it may go GPLv3 at some point in the future.
The good news though is that even though the GPLv3 is what most people nowadays mean by "GPL", you can still release under the old GPLv2 - that license will not cease to exist. Though some may steadfastly insist on being GPLv2-only to avoid their project inadverntently being made GPLv3+ due to incorporation of GPLv3 code (GPLv2-only is NOT compatible iwth GPLv3, even the FSF maintains this. But a GPLv2+ project with GPLv3+ code turns the project into GPLv3+).
Actually they don't. You're free to shout "FIRE" in a crowded theatre even if there isn't one.
However, rights do not trump responsibilities. Your right to shout fire in a theatre must be balanced against the possible consequences - if someone gets trampled to death, you're responsible for manslaughter, possibly murder.
Likewise all the libel and slander laws - you're free to say what you want, but you're also responsible for that same speech should someone be hurt over it. Of course, this also has the reverse that those with means can use these laws to "shut up" people, hence Anti-SLAPP laws to enable those with something to say can say their piece responsibly without being muzzled.
Unfortunately, these days with the Internet, people don't realize that their speech lasts a LOT longer than the moment it was uttered - it effectively lasts forever, and what was said decades ago can come back to bite you. (This is in contrast with shouting at the street corner - for the audience is only those within earshot and the moment you stop, it's basically gone unless someone posts it online.)