What this means is that someone had to plan the calls, get the party affiliation information on these 18 ridings (at least), hire RackNine, hire a bilingual voice actor, and see everything through. The likelihood of one person pulling all this off is next to nil, and it doesn't help that the Conservative party has a (rightly deserved) reputation for bullying and playing dirty pool with the rules.
And honestly, it really does point to Harper.
*EVERYTHING* the Conservative party does is directed by Harper. If you want to know why the Conservatives run elections so smoothly, while every other party starts tripping over themselves, that's why. Basically every candidate in the Conservative party is given a list of points they can talk about. Deviating from the list is verboten. This way, no candidate can go and say something stupid (though there have been occasional errors that caused mild controversy). "Muzzled" is probably the right term for it.
The other parties are free to speak about themselves and they trip up and make controversial comments.
That's why they run the slickest election campaigns. This continues into government as well - everyone pretty much knows that everything the government says comes from Harper - everything is sanitized. The opposition parties don't. Heck, even their election ads are driven from the top.
In fact, the election scandals they have have pointed to coming straight from the top.
And anyone that doesn't believe it - look at what happens when someone from the government opens their mouth. Like Vic Toews and his spy bill - "if you oppose it, you're supporting child pornographers". The number of screwups the government makes is far lower than any other party.
Something like this has to come from the top - it's too well organized not to. And no, your Conservative party member will not speak with you unless Harper has pre-approved it.
The reason why games can`t be played online between multiple platforms is difference in controls (Ex.: A FPS player in a computer has an advantage against console players). In a turn-based game this should be no problem, so it can be done. In consoles there are issues with communication middleware (VOIP capabilities, text messages inside games), witch is different for each platform too.
The other reason is capability. Each platform has strengths and limitations that are completely different. If we take two levels in an FPS, and two console players play it, it's possible the PS3 starts to stutter or have framerate issues at a different place than the Xbox360. Knowledge of this spreads and all the Xbox360 players clump where the PS3 players suffer, and PS3 players do likewise.
Or perhaps there's a bug in the video rendering that gives one group of players a slight advantage over the other (e.g., ability to see more of the map).
As for the story - why not put it up on the web and make it a web app? iOS users can turn it into an icon (it's Apple's original method of having "apps" after all), it's DRM free (you can distribute the source to the website and server code, if you wish), etc. A little Javascript and such. You'll probably have to do everything on the server, which is good (trusting the client is bad, and users if they have the ability to cheat, they would).
And by cheating, I mean they'll have bots helping them figure out the ways to score high.
Most end users never noticed. People that needed the storage paid the higher price. People that didn't actually need it just held off until prices went down.
I'm trying to hold off, but damn if drives aren't dying left and right around me right now.
Week before Christmas 2011, the main disk in my Windows Home Server died. Had to buy a replacement (but managed to Ghost it and reset the registry so it recognizes the new drive).
Now my NAS appliance died, looks like I have to go buy a new one.
The first 1MB to any IP address in a 1-hour period gets throttled to a medium speed, say, 100KB/sec, and the rest gets throttled more. Throttle anything over 10MB per hour to painfully slow speeds.
This way, people just grabbing one small (under 1MB) file in a 1-hour period don't suffer too much.
I've had people send me legit RapidShare links to stuff like data files and such. Explaining to my boss that I'd need to pay $1 or whatever the daily fee is to download this file from the customer just because it happened to be 100MB isn't really an option. (Perhaps it's a Linux kernel tarball they're sending me for their product).
Or I can charge the day it took to download to the project. Most bosses would prefer I did that than try to authorize paying for faster downloads.
And yes, a lot of companies do it in lieu of having other mechanisms of providing the file for downloads.
And honestly, until we actually can get at the data to scrutinize it, we can't determine what we SHOULD be measuring.
Back just a few decades, we measured programmer productivity in lines of code. We still do today for some things, but we've also realized that it's an inaccurate measure - it's something we couldn't see if we didn't use it and realize there wasn't a good correlation between what we wanted (productivity information) and what we measured.
There's the old Dilbert of Walling "writing himself a new minivan" indicating bug count isn't a metric either.
Then there's teachers who love to trot out metrics on how education is underfunded and classes are way too big and such (even though they have little to do with a student's performance), but refuse to be subjevted to any metrics or measurements themselves. (Does class size really affect student learning? Maybe, But without metrics on how students and teachers perform, I can't even begin to analyze it. All I can do is intuit something, but as science has taught us, intuition and actual results can be surprisingly different).
The only way to see wrong metrics is to show them and prove they are measurihg the wrong thing, as several people have shown. Test scores going down? Tell us why you think the test is invalid and perhaps evidence showing us we're really measuring the wrong thing because the test only tests for X, when in reality, we need to test for X Y and Z to get a better correllation.
They can't, but that's the second line of defense. The first line of defense is denying prosecutors the ability to ask you to decrypt it in the first place. After all, saying "I can't remember the password" might be good enough for the court because they can't prove otherwise, but it's going to raise red flags with any jury.
Also gives justification to simply erasing your hard drive (if you can't access it, then you obviously don't need it), or monitoring of your actions after your equipment is returned. After all, if you claim you forgot your password,and police catch you using your computer after it's been returned, that alone can overturn the "I forgot" defense and probably get you indicted for perjury.
It's one thing to say "I forgot" and another to say you refuse on grounds of self-incrimination.
will ALWAYS outperform any other player. people can continue to ignore it, but xbmc running on any device is better than anything else out there imo.
xbmc on a device boxed up and sold at Best Buy is the Boxee Box. Boxee is a fork of xbmc from way back when (and you could use the Boxee software when they had it).
Of course, assuming you want to go after the "I want to go to Best Buy, and buy a box that connects to the TV" market, rahter than the "I want to go after anyone who's willing to put up with a fugly PC next to their TV (or pay $$$ for a nice case that looks like it belongs in the living room) or hack something to run xbmc".
Good sci-fi creates truly novel, yet believable, situations that plumb the depths of what it means to be human.
Exactky, It's why Star Trek was popular and many other Sci-Fi TV series and movies seem very real.
The "technology" behind it only exists to lend background. E.g., GATTACA explores what it means to be human in a world where genetic testing is so cheap and easy it's done religiously - the technology enables exploration and thinking on the human condition.
Ditto BSG - the technology exists merely to explore humanity in situations that may not exist now, later, or ever, but to see what reasonable actions may occur and draw parallels to normal life.
Good sci-fi is really just a form of social and political commentary, often re-imagined to make it easier to see it "from the outside". It's often easier to tackle difficult subjects if the situation is reframed (especially if the subject is controversial and can lead to people digging in their heels).
Heck, one of Star Trek's recurring themes (back in the Roddenberry days) was to explore how the Prime Directive conflicts with basic human responses to help and provide for the less fortunate.
Programmers back then knew how to right optimized and reliable code that took full advantage of the hardware. Also many programmers knew assembly language for extra optimization. If the programmers from back then were writing for the hardware we have now software would be much more efficient.
Not quite true.
In fact, "clever" optimizations done back then can often come to bite you back in the ass.years later. Heavily optimized code can also be a pain to maintain - it's great back then when we usually threw away programs after a year or two but stuff like Y2K illustrated that a lot of software is starting to be used far longer than ever imagined (decades, or half a century).
And the mess of certain optimizations can restrict maintainability in the future. Hell you still run into minor Y2K bugs now and again (Years reading out as 19112 for example).
Heck, here's an optimization done way back in the Windows 3.1 days that persisted until Vista. It's clever and it optimized memory use (back when you had 4MB of RAM, using 64K of RAM for an API call was gratuitious), but really pointless now as it's much faster ot just always take 64K of RAM rather than try to save it. (And 64K out of 4MB was much bigger than 64K is out of 4+GB)
These days, the goal is to write maintainable code first, then optimize that. Otherwise you'll end up having to refactor and rewrite chunks later as performance tweak after undocumented performance tweak leads to a huge mess of spaghetti code that's indecipherable.
Or writing huge chunks of code in assembly that aren't performance critical (i.e., non-kernel codec/dsp stuff). ("kernel" in the codec/dsp world is the chunk of code that's doing the actual processing - e.g., the multiply-accumulate of FIR/IIR filters, completely unrelated to the OS kernel).
Tuning for performance is fine, but trying to do all the nasty tricks you had to do a decade and a half ago leads to an awful mess of code that some poor schmuck has to maintain later. And general trends indicate that the optimizations work then, but then become irrelevant and possible even slower than the straightforward implementation.
downloading 'cookie maker' or whatever game the 6yo is asking for also requires the password, and once daddy's entered it, it's valid for 15 minutes of all-you-can-eat smurfberries
Not since 4.x, which all iPads are compatible with. Since 4.x, there's been a separation between the timer used for purchases done at the App Store and in-app purchases. Just because you downloaded an app and entered the password there, doesn't mean the in-app purchase can use the cached credential - you have to re-enter your password again to use in-app purchases (they're on separate timers).
And hey, you can also enable it to always require a password on anything (ignoring the timer). It's hidden under a setting for authority figures . What was it, Children Restrictions? Authority Control Panel? Parental controls?
They'll be subject to huge FUD and smear campaigns from the get go, have supply and distribution channels blocked, approvals refused and so on ad nauseum.
It's a shame, but efforts like this to open up our society scare the hell out of governemnt and business interests.
If it's truly "open" as they say, it won't stop it. There's plenty of things people believe in today that won't die out, and plenty of stuff that doctors keep insisting won't work, and do.
You know, alternative medicine (acupuncture, mostly), homeopathy, vaccines and autism, disease-curing chiropractors, etc. There's even approved drugs that don't have much effect over placebo like ColdFX and such.
If they really found a miracle cure for cancer, and the pharmaceutical industry tries to keep it quiet, it'll just explode over the internet.
Conspiracy theories, etc., flourish on the internet, and there's enough desperate people to try anything.
Honestly? The LEOs of today, based off of what limited information I have gathered, pale somewhat in comparison with the LEOs of yesteryear. That is to say the quality has dropped a fair amount with regards to the new recruits. Now, it's possible that the quality has remained the same, and it's only with the advent of new technology (cellphone cameras) are we finding out just how poor that quality has been all along...however, there are some limited indicators which suggest it may have been, on average, better at some point in the past.
Very likely, actually.
In the past, policing was considered a noble profession and being a policeman was considered an honor. Of course, the few very public police mistreatment cases has made the public very skeptical (and the war on drugs hasn't really helped), and the end result is ever-tightening police budgets and such.
In the end, the good officers wonder why they're bothering to risk their lives for a position that gets little respect and they leave. And there's literally no one to replace them (most police departments actually have openings for new officers, but the number of recruits coming out never meet the required number).
The sad end to this is well, the people who would be good officers end up getting other jobs (not necessarily out of pay either - respect and other factors often come into play), while those on power trips end up being the ones departments hire, simply because they need more officers and that's the lot they get to pick from.
In short, it's doesn't pay to be a police officer, unless you just want to go on power trips, and with that mentality, it's just a self-reinforcing cycle. It's a tough job, and departments really only have bottom-of-the-barrel type people to choose from.
Personally I think the License Fees days are number, maybe not the next review, prehaps the one after that, because the number of ways of accessing the data is expanding so much that it becomes impossible to police.
I was really surprised how easy it was when I canceled my license so I guess licenseless homes are becoming more common. Although I did cancel when the Analogue signal in my area was turned off so maybe they were just expecting a lot of cancellations at that time.
I'm under the understanding that the BBC is funded by this, so the government is simply allowing the BBC to wither on the vine, so more "reputable" broadcasters like Sky and whatever Rupert Murdoch owns can present proper "un"biased news and insightful TV programming without having to compete against the heavily biased and uninstructive BBC. You know, bring TV back to its American roots.
The BBC makes life hard on everyone - competing TV stations, politicians, corporate interests and many other things.
You should disable JS for google, clean your cookies, refuse cookies, use a proxy. Or just get in the mood to use an other search engine.
Funny thing - because of NoScript, many websites break if you disallow google-analytics from running scripts - these sites purposely redirect through Google Analytics in order to track you. It's so bad that NoScript has surrogate scripts that run in place of Google's.
And there's others - I've seen websites break because they load through doubleclick (the main content doesn't show unless doubleclick (a Google company) is enabled).
Finally, if Google vanished completely off the 'net, the whole Internet would literally break - they're deeply embedded in everything and host a surprisingly large amount of essential pieces for websites.
Even if you Bing, Hotmail, etc., you're bound to hit something owned by Google within a few clicks.
And smartphones like iOS and Android have ads provided by AdMob, owned by Google.
Say my team has developed a more or less feature-complete prototype of a video game, and I want to distribute it on an open platform. To which open handheld device with a directional pad and physical buttons, sold in stores in the United States, do you recommend that I port the game?
At which point you slap yourself on the forehead and ask "why didn't I see what was available when I started?"
If you're a seasoned game developer, you can buy a Vita dev kit and get on with life. Or you can go buy a 3DS dev kit. Probably cost around the same, and both have very similar security and approval requirements.
If you're a new developer, you're SOL. If you've not got money, you'd buy an Android device and pay the $35 and live with what you can do with touchscreens.
If you've got some money and want to go after the market of people with money to spend, you'd go iOS, and treat the whole Apple experience as a grand introduction to the world of console development, simplified (basically Apple doesn't put up security requirements unless you get preproduction hardware).
In the old days, if you wanted to write a game, you were forced to do it on a PC (or Mac). These days it's a lot better - you also have Android and iOS devices to do your game on, as well as Xbox360 (Indie Arcade).
Now, you can possibly try the DS - Datel made basically a R4 card and sold it at Best Buy for playing indie games...
Why is everything always different on the internet? If you rant somewhere else in public, do you then get dragged into *having* to apologize?
Easy - exposure and duration.
Rant in public - the moment you shut up, unless someone happened to tape it, it's gone. Also, even if you're a loudmouth, only the people a block away can hear you.
Rant on the internet - well, now the whole world can read it, and people archive stuff all the time, so what you say can hang around for years and decades.
That's the difference. That childish rant on USENET you had 10 years ago? Probably shows up in a Google search today available to everyone. That childish tantrum you threw, only the few who heard it know.
Basically the internet, for better or worse, records down everything for posterity forever.
OTOH, it makes no sense for Intel to go after AMD, as someone above mentioned. They own them in architecture and process.
I don't understand why would they offer their process to others when it is their biggest advantage.
Intel offering fabs to AMD would benefit Intel greatly. Sure they're manufacturing their competitor's product, but that's the key - "competitor". There's no real competition in the x86 space - you have a few other x86 compatibles, but nothing matches the desktop line, except AMD.
And Intel needs AMD to survive because it keeps government off their backs. Just like Microsoft needs Apple around, and Google needs Apple as well (Apple offering competition has allowed Google to do stuff like acquire AdMob). If AMD dies and goes out of business, Intel will be a monopoly - nothing wrong, but you can bet there'll be increased scrutiny - did Intel contribute somehow to AMD's demise? Past actions with OEMs will come back to haunt Intel as well.
As for offering others access to high end processes - it's easy. Money.
A fab is horrendously expensive, and to get any form of ROI, it basically has to run continually. If you can't keep a fab working, it starts losing money. It appears that possibly Intel might not be able to keep their fabs under full utilization (probably due to the economy), so best to open it to competition and get back money building the fab than to let it sit idle and costing money while your competition is upgrading their fabs.
Apple would be a prime contender - and probably one of the main customers.
As far as usability, I've had no issues with ICS on the Touchpad. If anything, Apps are more usable, despite being less similar to one another. Touchpad apps are noticeably slower, and use that funky draggable panel thing that makes no sense whatsoever. I also appreciate the launcher, which seems a lot easier to use than webOS' app drawer.
Well, that's more ICS than anything - ICS fixes a LOT of Android flaws. As an iOS user, I like ICS. All other Android versions are garbage, but ICS is very usable. ICS is so nice that yes, switching is an option now.
Of course, the fact that there's only one phone running ICS out there, and everyone else is now selling outdated 2.3 or even 2.2 phones makes the whole Android device ecosystem a bit of a mess. Yes, I know people are promising updates, but with Android, if it doesn't run it now, there's a good chance it may never without rooting and installing a community ROM. Well that and the crap that is Sense, TouchWiz and Motoblur.
Only real issue about the only good Android phone out there is it's only 16GB (the 32GB is the LTE/CDMA version, which isn't available outside the US, not that I want that). and no card slot. The 32GB GSM/UMTS one is cancelled.
Nobody cares about the money. Can Android be stopped because of this?
No, because Oracle's not that stupid, and Android is too far entrenched.
Remember, Java's main revenue stream is all the J2ME licenses that everyone pays. Given that most phones sold today are non-smartphones, that means every phone sold that way pays Oracle for the J2ME runtime.
All Oracle is seeing here that Android should pay up as well, and to negotiate with Google on what rates it should be.
Though, there may soon be an Android LA (similar to MPEG-LA) to handle all the patent licensing stuff - pay a per-unit royalty to A-LA and get access to Microsoft's, Apple's, Oracle's, and the rest of the ETSI's patents.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no ETSI-LA for handling all the FRAND patent licensing stuff instead of having to negotiate individually with Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, and all the other patent licenseholders.
Why not do what EVERYONE ELSE in the industry does?
Put some watermarks in!
In your "not for commercial use" versoin, you put a watermark that says "XXX SOFTWARE - NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE" over the active area that's rendered into the final video.
Don't bother with the spyware crap. If it's a good piece of software, treat the user's video as a billboard you can advertise on with the watermark. No commercial venture would dare use it, and editing out the watermark is a pointless effort.
If you really want to do some outsourced license manager, just license FlexLM and leave it at that - most expensive packages use that.
If you want to be tricky, if your app determines it's cracked, it can put up random watermarks throughout the final video (just reuse the "not for commercial use" one) - perhaps after the first 5 minute or so of clean video, then flash it somewhere in the next 5 minutes (randomly between 5:01 and 10:00 so people can't just seek and see if it's there, but must wait around 2 1/2 minutes to determine if it's "cracked properly").
Are any of the patents on PostScript even still in force?
Probably not. Because you can pick up a Brother printer that supports Br-Script, which is Brother's implementation of PostScript (BR-Script3 is their PostScript3 compatible language). And yes, they even provide PPDs for the OS generic PostScript driver.
The licensing fees go to Adobe are to license the trademarks. Which is why it's always advertised as Br-Script and unless you know, you may not realize it's PostScript-compatible.
So if you want a PostScript compatible printer cheaply, look at Brother. Other manufacturers may have compatible implementations as well. (Though, I have to admit, Brother networked printers seem to support EVERY protocol out there. IPP, LPR/LPD, JetDirect, Bonjour/ZeroConf)
Oil ISN'T going any anytime soon. Oil is created as a biological process of decomposition of organic matter.
What's ending is the era of CHEAP, EASILY ACCESSIBLE oil. There's lot of oil, but it's going to get increasingly expensive to get at.
In fact, we should get used to gas prices. Just 15 years ago oil prices bottomed out and we enjoyed $1/gallon gas. Now it's over $3 a gallon. Prior to the economic meltdown (which is responsible for keeping gas and oil prices low) we're seeing $4 a gallon. When the economic slump ends, I wouldn't be surprised if we start topping $5.
Europeans already know the feeling.
The goal is - what do you do? Do you just continue to hide and hope nothing goes wrong? Or do you start investing in cars and minicars with larger fuel economies instead of gas-guzzling SUVs? Hybrids? Electric vehicles (saving the gas car for long trips)?
In fact, I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing societal changes - the critical factor determining how willing society is willing to change. Are people willing to start doing things that use less oil - give up their gas guzzling SUVs, going for smart cars and little electric runabouts? Or just go "screw it, I can pay it, so I DESERVE to drive this 10mpg beast!".
Gas won't run out suddenly. It'll just increase in price, putting economic pressure on people to change. Those who refuse, if there is a lot of them, will end up finding society becomes an "us vs them" scenario and falls apart. Those that adapt - more compact cities, less urban sprawl, electric and alternately fueled vehicles, find life stays the same.
And yes, while electric cars may not be practical for long trips, given study after study saying a significant majority of them can be handled with the range of current electric vehicles, they're probably practical. Save the gas car for those long family trips you do a few times a year.
And there are also natural gas fueled vehicles - lots of natural gas out there (and fracking for oil has found even more).
We're going to see more of these alternately fueled vehicles on the road soon enough - perhaps as soon as 10-15 years. Electric cars for the commute and errands, gas/propane/natural gas for the longer trips, and life will probably just be a tad cozier than it is now.
Same here, except for mine being a 19" SB930. Same resolution, so higher DPI, so even better image. Displays have gone downhill, resolution-wise, after LCDs became the norm. 1920x1080 is the standard for desktops now, and 1366x768 for 16:9 laptops, where old laptops were 1280x1024.
That's because HDTVs are really cheap. 1920x1080 displays re-use the same cheap video ICs used for 1080p TVs, and 1366x768 ones are the same for 720p+ displays. Because HDTVs sell by the millions, the display electronics are really cheap, and when your monitors are pushing "free" and sub-$100, it's what happens.
And yes, CRTs had this problem too - the crappy ass blurry-as-hell ones were what you got.
I love my CRT monitor more than my LCDs, and really wish that companies could go back to producing high end CRTs too. Samsung, alas, is unlikely to do so.
They still do. But you're looking at really expensive ones these days - they're now very niche products.
Displays are a commodity item. Hell, half os/. gets confused everytime Apple releases a 30" display, calling it overpriced at $1000 when you can pick up a 30" HDTV for under $200 (forgetting that the Dells and such with greater than 1080p resolutoin are also that high).
Very little profit is made from monitors - it's why if you want better than 720p or 1080p displays they cost way more - a 24" 1080p can be had for under $200, but a 24" 1920x1200 costs $400+. Of course, these displays are also better ones since there's less pricing pressure on them.
People want the cheap crap, so manufacturers deliver. It's why Apple only produces nicer displays at non-HDTV resolutions because there's money to be made that way, rather than fight with everyone else in the crowded 1080p/720p cutthroat market.
Franklin did not have a license from Apple for anything at all. They just copied Apple's ROMs and OS on the theory that copyright would not apply, and they lost that gamble in court.
The only licensed use was Bell and Howell's Apple II clone. You can find them around (they're in black cases).
Franklin's case is a bit muddy since Franklin claimed that since Apple published the schematics and ROM listing, they were free to take it and build their own. Which of course isn't true (otherwise it would doom Open Source as well - publishing the source code allows anyone to take it? No GPL advocate would go for that)
Well, if Psystar had sold "OS X ready" machines with instructions on how to get OS X installed and running, they might have been OK. But instead they modified OS X and sold the modified versions. Regardless of whether or not you think this should be legal, it clearly is not.
The other thing is the whole Hackintosh community was also against Psystar - they had to change their licensing of all the tools required from some freeware to explicitly "no commercial use allowed".
Anyhow, back on topic - the ProView "iPad" was actually an iMac-styled (this was back in 2000, remember, so it was the bulbuous one) appliance computer. Not even a tablet - just an iMac ripoff design for an internet appliance.
Second, the average person who knows braille probably doesn't do too much driving in the first place.
I can think of several reasons why someone might know Braille and be sighted. And no, it doesn't mean they read Braille with their finger - you can read Braille with sight in most cases. The easiest reason would be someone transcribing something into Braille, and someone editing transcripted text (to ensure no mistakes/typos were made). Perhaps someone making their website accessible might also want to check out a Braille TTY to ensure output is correct.
Anyhow, the best way to text is Morse code. Only reqiures one finger, and the phone's vibrator can be used on replies. No need to look at the screen to type OR read.
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And honestly, it really does point to Harper.
*EVERYTHING* the Conservative party does is directed by Harper. If you want to know why the Conservatives run elections so smoothly, while every other party starts tripping over themselves, that's why. Basically every candidate in the Conservative party is given a list of points they can talk about. Deviating from the list is verboten. This way, no candidate can go and say something stupid (though there have been occasional errors that caused mild controversy). "Muzzled" is probably the right term for it.
The other parties are free to speak about themselves and they trip up and make controversial comments.
That's why they run the slickest election campaigns. This continues into government as well - everyone pretty much knows that everything the government says comes from Harper - everything is sanitized. The opposition parties don't. Heck, even their election ads are driven from the top.
In fact, the election scandals they have have pointed to coming straight from the top.
And anyone that doesn't believe it - look at what happens when someone from the government opens their mouth. Like Vic Toews and his spy bill - "if you oppose it, you're supporting child pornographers". The number of screwups the government makes is far lower than any other party.
Something like this has to come from the top - it's too well organized not to. And no, your Conservative party member will not speak with you unless Harper has pre-approved it.
The other reason is capability. Each platform has strengths and limitations that are completely different. If we take two levels in an FPS, and two console players play it, it's possible the PS3 starts to stutter or have framerate issues at a different place than the Xbox360. Knowledge of this spreads and all the Xbox360 players clump where the PS3 players suffer, and PS3 players do likewise.
Or perhaps there's a bug in the video rendering that gives one group of players a slight advantage over the other (e.g., ability to see more of the map).
As for the story - why not put it up on the web and make it a web app? iOS users can turn it into an icon (it's Apple's original method of having "apps" after all), it's DRM free (you can distribute the source to the website and server code, if you wish), etc. A little Javascript and such. You'll probably have to do everything on the server, which is good (trusting the client is bad, and users if they have the ability to cheat, they would).
And by cheating, I mean they'll have bots helping them figure out the ways to score high.
I'm trying to hold off, but damn if drives aren't dying left and right around me right now.
Week before Christmas 2011, the main disk in my Windows Home Server died. Had to buy a replacement (but managed to Ghost it and reset the registry so it recognizes the new drive).
Now my NAS appliance died, looks like I have to go buy a new one.
Damn unlucky, it looks like.
I've had people send me legit RapidShare links to stuff like data files and such. Explaining to my boss that I'd need to pay $1 or whatever the daily fee is to download this file from the customer just because it happened to be 100MB isn't really an option. (Perhaps it's a Linux kernel tarball they're sending me for their product).
Or I can charge the day it took to download to the project. Most bosses would prefer I did that than try to authorize paying for faster downloads.
And yes, a lot of companies do it in lieu of having other mechanisms of providing the file for downloads.
And honestly, until we actually can get at the data to scrutinize it, we can't determine what we SHOULD be measuring.
Back just a few decades, we measured programmer productivity in lines of code. We still do today for some things, but we've also realized that it's an inaccurate measure - it's something we couldn't see if we didn't use it and realize there wasn't a good correlation between what we wanted (productivity information) and what we measured.
There's the old Dilbert of Walling "writing himself a new minivan" indicating bug count isn't a metric either.
Then there's teachers who love to trot out metrics on how education is underfunded and classes are way too big and such (even though they have little to do with a student's performance), but refuse to be subjevted to any metrics or measurements themselves. (Does class size really affect student learning? Maybe, But without metrics on how students and teachers perform, I can't even begin to analyze it. All I can do is intuit something, but as science has taught us, intuition and actual results can be surprisingly different).
The only way to see wrong metrics is to show them and prove they are measurihg the wrong thing, as several people have shown. Test scores going down? Tell us why you think the test is invalid and perhaps evidence showing us we're really measuring the wrong thing because the test only tests for X, when in reality, we need to test for X Y and Z to get a better correllation.
Also gives justification to simply erasing your hard drive (if you can't access it, then you obviously don't need it), or monitoring of your actions after your equipment is returned. After all, if you claim you forgot your password ,and police catch you using your computer after it's been returned, that alone can overturn the "I forgot" defense and probably get you indicted for perjury.
It's one thing to say "I forgot" and another to say you refuse on grounds of self-incrimination.
xbmc on a device boxed up and sold at Best Buy is the Boxee Box. Boxee is a fork of xbmc from way back when (and you could use the Boxee software when they had it).
Of course, assuming you want to go after the "I want to go to Best Buy, and buy a box that connects to the TV" market, rahter than the "I want to go after anyone who's willing to put up with a fugly PC next to their TV (or pay $$$ for a nice case that looks like it belongs in the living room) or hack something to run xbmc".
Exactky, It's why Star Trek was popular and many other Sci-Fi TV series and movies seem very real.
The "technology" behind it only exists to lend background. E.g., GATTACA explores what it means to be human in a world where genetic testing is so cheap and easy it's done religiously - the technology enables exploration and thinking on the human condition.
Ditto BSG - the technology exists merely to explore humanity in situations that may not exist now, later, or ever, but to see what reasonable actions may occur and draw parallels to normal life.
Good sci-fi is really just a form of social and political commentary, often re-imagined to make it easier to see it "from the outside". It's often easier to tackle difficult subjects if the situation is reframed (especially if the subject is controversial and can lead to people digging in their heels).
Heck, one of Star Trek's recurring themes (back in the Roddenberry days) was to explore how the Prime Directive conflicts with basic human responses to help and provide for the less fortunate.
Not quite true.
In fact, "clever" optimizations done back then can often come to bite you back in the ass.years later. Heavily optimized code can also be a pain to maintain - it's great back then when we usually threw away programs after a year or two but stuff like Y2K illustrated that a lot of software is starting to be used far longer than ever imagined (decades, or half a century).
And the mess of certain optimizations can restrict maintainability in the future. Hell you still run into minor Y2K bugs now and again (Years reading out as 19112 for example).
Heck, here's an optimization done way back in the Windows 3.1 days that persisted until Vista. It's clever and it optimized memory use (back when you had 4MB of RAM, using 64K of RAM for an API call was gratuitious), but really pointless now as it's much faster ot just always take 64K of RAM rather than try to save it. (And 64K out of 4MB was much bigger than 64K is out of 4+GB)
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/02/10/10266256.aspx
These days, the goal is to write maintainable code first, then optimize that. Otherwise you'll end up having to refactor and rewrite chunks later as performance tweak after undocumented performance tweak leads to a huge mess of spaghetti code that's indecipherable.
Or writing huge chunks of code in assembly that aren't performance critical (i.e., non-kernel codec/dsp stuff). ("kernel" in the codec/dsp world is the chunk of code that's doing the actual processing - e.g., the multiply-accumulate of FIR/IIR filters, completely unrelated to the OS kernel).
Tuning for performance is fine, but trying to do all the nasty tricks you had to do a decade and a half ago leads to an awful mess of code that some poor schmuck has to maintain later. And general trends indicate that the optimizations work then, but then become irrelevant and possible even slower than the straightforward implementation.
Not since 4.x, which all iPads are compatible with. Since 4.x, there's been a separation between the timer used for purchases done at the App Store and in-app purchases. Just because you downloaded an app and entered the password there, doesn't mean the in-app purchase can use the cached credential - you have to re-enter your password again to use in-app purchases (they're on separate timers).
And hey, you can also enable it to always require a password on anything (ignoring the timer). It's hidden under a setting for authority figures . What was it, Children Restrictions? Authority Control Panel? Parental controls?
If it's truly "open" as they say, it won't stop it. There's plenty of things people believe in today that won't die out, and plenty of stuff that doctors keep insisting won't work, and do.
You know, alternative medicine (acupuncture, mostly), homeopathy, vaccines and autism, disease-curing chiropractors, etc. There's even approved drugs that don't have much effect over placebo like ColdFX and such.
If they really found a miracle cure for cancer, and the pharmaceutical industry tries to keep it quiet, it'll just explode over the internet.
Conspiracy theories, etc., flourish on the internet, and there's enough desperate people to try anything.
Very likely, actually.
In the past, policing was considered a noble profession and being a policeman was considered an honor. Of course, the few very public police mistreatment cases has made the public very skeptical (and the war on drugs hasn't really helped), and the end result is ever-tightening police budgets and such.
In the end, the good officers wonder why they're bothering to risk their lives for a position that gets little respect and they leave. And there's literally no one to replace them (most police departments actually have openings for new officers, but the number of recruits coming out never meet the required number).
The sad end to this is well, the people who would be good officers end up getting other jobs (not necessarily out of pay either - respect and other factors often come into play), while those on power trips end up being the ones departments hire, simply because they need more officers and that's the lot they get to pick from.
In short, it's doesn't pay to be a police officer, unless you just want to go on power trips, and with that mentality, it's just a self-reinforcing cycle. It's a tough job, and departments really only have bottom-of-the-barrel type people to choose from.
I'm under the understanding that the BBC is funded by this, so the government is simply allowing the BBC to wither on the vine, so more "reputable" broadcasters like Sky and whatever Rupert Murdoch owns can present proper "un"biased news and insightful TV programming without having to compete against the heavily biased and uninstructive BBC. You know, bring TV back to its American roots.
The BBC makes life hard on everyone - competing TV stations, politicians, corporate interests and many other things.
(and yes, I'm jesting.)
Funny thing - because of NoScript, many websites break if you disallow google-analytics from running scripts - these sites purposely redirect through Google Analytics in order to track you. It's so bad that NoScript has surrogate scripts that run in place of Google's.
And there's others - I've seen websites break because they load through doubleclick (the main content doesn't show unless doubleclick (a Google company) is enabled).
Finally, if Google vanished completely off the 'net, the whole Internet would literally break - they're deeply embedded in everything and host a surprisingly large amount of essential pieces for websites.
Even if you Bing, Hotmail, etc., you're bound to hit something owned by Google within a few clicks.
And smartphones like iOS and Android have ads provided by AdMob, owned by Google.
At which point you slap yourself on the forehead and ask "why didn't I see what was available when I started?"
If you're a seasoned game developer, you can buy a Vita dev kit and get on with life. Or you can go buy a 3DS dev kit. Probably cost around the same, and both have very similar security and approval requirements.
If you're a new developer, you're SOL. If you've not got money, you'd buy an Android device and pay the $35 and live with what you can do with touchscreens.
If you've got some money and want to go after the market of people with money to spend, you'd go iOS, and treat the whole Apple experience as a grand introduction to the world of console development, simplified (basically Apple doesn't put up security requirements unless you get preproduction hardware).
In the old days, if you wanted to write a game, you were forced to do it on a PC (or Mac). These days it's a lot better - you also have Android and iOS devices to do your game on, as well as Xbox360 (Indie Arcade).
Now, you can possibly try the DS - Datel made basically a R4 card and sold it at Best Buy for playing indie games...
Easy - exposure and duration.
Rant in public - the moment you shut up, unless someone happened to tape it, it's gone. Also, even if you're a loudmouth, only the people a block away can hear you.
Rant on the internet - well, now the whole world can read it, and people archive stuff all the time, so what you say can hang around for years and decades.
That's the difference. That childish rant on USENET you had 10 years ago? Probably shows up in a Google search today available to everyone. That childish tantrum you threw, only the few who heard it know.
Basically the internet, for better or worse, records down everything for posterity forever.
Intel offering fabs to AMD would benefit Intel greatly. Sure they're manufacturing their competitor's product, but that's the key - "competitor". There's no real competition in the x86 space - you have a few other x86 compatibles, but nothing matches the desktop line, except AMD.
And Intel needs AMD to survive because it keeps government off their backs. Just like Microsoft needs Apple around, and Google needs Apple as well (Apple offering competition has allowed Google to do stuff like acquire AdMob). If AMD dies and goes out of business, Intel will be a monopoly - nothing wrong, but you can bet there'll be increased scrutiny - did Intel contribute somehow to AMD's demise? Past actions with OEMs will come back to haunt Intel as well.
As for offering others access to high end processes - it's easy. Money.
A fab is horrendously expensive, and to get any form of ROI, it basically has to run continually. If you can't keep a fab working, it starts losing money. It appears that possibly Intel might not be able to keep their fabs under full utilization (probably due to the economy), so best to open it to competition and get back money building the fab than to let it sit idle and costing money while your competition is upgrading their fabs.
Apple would be a prime contender - and probably one of the main customers.
Well, that's more ICS than anything - ICS fixes a LOT of Android flaws. As an iOS user, I like ICS. All other Android versions are garbage, but ICS is very usable. ICS is so nice that yes, switching is an option now.
Of course, the fact that there's only one phone running ICS out there, and everyone else is now selling outdated 2.3 or even 2.2 phones makes the whole Android device ecosystem a bit of a mess. Yes, I know people are promising updates, but with Android, if it doesn't run it now, there's a good chance it may never without rooting and installing a community ROM. Well that and the crap that is Sense, TouchWiz and Motoblur.
Only real issue about the only good Android phone out there is it's only 16GB (the 32GB is the LTE/CDMA version, which isn't available outside the US, not that I want that). and no card slot. The 32GB GSM/UMTS one is cancelled.
No, because Oracle's not that stupid, and Android is too far entrenched.
Remember, Java's main revenue stream is all the J2ME licenses that everyone pays. Given that most phones sold today are non-smartphones, that means every phone sold that way pays Oracle for the J2ME runtime.
All Oracle is seeing here that Android should pay up as well, and to negotiate with Google on what rates it should be.
Though, there may soon be an Android LA (similar to MPEG-LA) to handle all the patent licensing stuff - pay a per-unit royalty to A-LA and get access to Microsoft's, Apple's, Oracle's, and the rest of the ETSI's patents.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no ETSI-LA for handling all the FRAND patent licensing stuff instead of having to negotiate individually with Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, and all the other patent licenseholders.
Why not do what EVERYONE ELSE in the industry does?
Put some watermarks in!
In your "not for commercial use" versoin, you put a watermark that says "XXX SOFTWARE - NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE" over the active area that's rendered into the final video.
Don't bother with the spyware crap. If it's a good piece of software, treat the user's video as a billboard you can advertise on with the watermark. No commercial venture would dare use it, and editing out the watermark is a pointless effort.
If you really want to do some outsourced license manager, just license FlexLM and leave it at that - most expensive packages use that.
If you want to be tricky, if your app determines it's cracked, it can put up random watermarks throughout the final video (just reuse the "not for commercial use" one) - perhaps after the first 5 minute or so of clean video, then flash it somewhere in the next 5 minutes (randomly between 5:01 and 10:00 so people can't just seek and see if it's there, but must wait around 2 1/2 minutes to determine if it's "cracked properly").
Probably not. Because you can pick up a Brother printer that supports Br-Script, which is Brother's implementation of PostScript (BR-Script3 is their PostScript3 compatible language). And yes, they even provide PPDs for the OS generic PostScript driver.
The licensing fees go to Adobe are to license the trademarks. Which is why it's always advertised as Br-Script and unless you know, you may not realize it's PostScript-compatible.
So if you want a PostScript compatible printer cheaply, look at Brother. Other manufacturers may have compatible implementations as well. (Though, I have to admit, Brother networked printers seem to support EVERY protocol out there. IPP, LPR/LPD, JetDirect, Bonjour/ZeroConf)
Oil ISN'T going any anytime soon. Oil is created as a biological process of decomposition of organic matter.
What's ending is the era of CHEAP, EASILY ACCESSIBLE oil. There's lot of oil, but it's going to get increasingly expensive to get at.
In fact, we should get used to gas prices. Just 15 years ago oil prices bottomed out and we enjoyed $1/gallon gas. Now it's over $3 a gallon. Prior to the economic meltdown (which is responsible for keeping gas and oil prices low) we're seeing $4 a gallon. When the economic slump ends, I wouldn't be surprised if we start topping $5.
Europeans already know the feeling.
The goal is - what do you do? Do you just continue to hide and hope nothing goes wrong? Or do you start investing in cars and minicars with larger fuel economies instead of gas-guzzling SUVs? Hybrids? Electric vehicles (saving the gas car for long trips)?
In fact, I'm pretty sure we'll start seeing societal changes - the critical factor determining how willing society is willing to change. Are people willing to start doing things that use less oil - give up their gas guzzling SUVs, going for smart cars and little electric runabouts? Or just go "screw it, I can pay it, so I DESERVE to drive this 10mpg beast!".
Gas won't run out suddenly. It'll just increase in price, putting economic pressure on people to change. Those who refuse, if there is a lot of them, will end up finding society becomes an "us vs them" scenario and falls apart. Those that adapt - more compact cities, less urban sprawl, electric and alternately fueled vehicles, find life stays the same.
And yes, while electric cars may not be practical for long trips, given study after study saying a significant majority of them can be handled with the range of current electric vehicles, they're probably practical. Save the gas car for those long family trips you do a few times a year.
And there are also natural gas fueled vehicles - lots of natural gas out there (and fracking for oil has found even more).
We're going to see more of these alternately fueled vehicles on the road soon enough - perhaps as soon as 10-15 years. Electric cars for the commute and errands, gas/propane/natural gas for the longer trips, and life will probably just be a tad cozier than it is now.
That's because HDTVs are really cheap. 1920x1080 displays re-use the same cheap video ICs used for 1080p TVs, and 1366x768 ones are the same for 720p+ displays. Because HDTVs sell by the millions, the display electronics are really cheap, and when your monitors are pushing "free" and sub-$100, it's what happens.
And yes, CRTs had this problem too - the crappy ass blurry-as-hell ones were what you got.
They still do. But you're looking at really expensive ones these days - they're now very niche products.
Displays are a commodity item. Hell, half os /. gets confused everytime Apple releases a 30" display, calling it overpriced at $1000 when you can pick up a 30" HDTV for under $200 (forgetting that the Dells and such with greater than 1080p resolutoin are also that high).
Very little profit is made from monitors - it's why if you want better than 720p or 1080p displays they cost way more - a 24" 1080p can be had for under $200, but a 24" 1920x1200 costs $400+. Of course, these displays are also better ones since there's less pricing pressure on them.
People want the cheap crap, so manufacturers deliver. It's why Apple only produces nicer displays at non-HDTV resolutions because there's money to be made that way, rather than fight with everyone else in the crowded 1080p/720p cutthroat market.
The only licensed use was Bell and Howell's Apple II clone. You can find them around (they're in black cases).
Franklin's case is a bit muddy since Franklin claimed that since Apple published the schematics and ROM listing, they were free to take it and build their own. Which of course isn't true (otherwise it would doom Open Source as well - publishing the source code allows anyone to take it? No GPL advocate would go for that)
The other thing is the whole Hackintosh community was also against Psystar - they had to change their licensing of all the tools required from some freeware to explicitly "no commercial use allowed".
Anyhow, back on topic - the ProView "iPad" was actually an iMac-styled (this was back in 2000, remember, so it was the bulbuous one) appliance computer. Not even a tablet - just an iMac ripoff design for an internet appliance.
(Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/02/18/proviews-ipad-was-it-an-imac-or-an-ipaq/ images (marketing materials from Proview): http://micgadget.com/22151/proview-has-manufactured-20000-%E2%80%98ipad%E2%80%99-devices-this-is-what-it-looks-like/ ). Funny, apparently Compaq would have a much better claim against Apple with the iPaq...
I can think of several reasons why someone might know Braille and be sighted. And no, it doesn't mean they read Braille with their finger - you can read Braille with sight in most cases. The easiest reason would be someone transcribing something into Braille, and someone editing transcripted text (to ensure no mistakes/typos were made). Perhaps someone making their website accessible might also want to check out a Braille TTY to ensure output is correct.
Anyhow, the best way to text is Morse code. Only reqiures one finger, and the phone's vibrator can be used on replies. No need to look at the screen to type OR read.