Digital wristwatches, which are rarely stylish, are being replaced by cell phones and the litany of other devices with clocks built into them. I don't wear a watch namely because I have no need. If I need to know the time I look at my phone. Analog watches are used for stylistic purposes nowadays, thats pretty much it.
I've wondered about that - because it seems checking my watch is far quicker (under a second) than reaching for my phone, hitting a button and then parsing the screen for the time.
Yeah, I have the time in a million places, but it just seems more convenient and faster to check my watch than to check it on my computer (whose screen is right in front of me, too!), nevermind my cellphone or ipod or other thing.
So the home router manufacturers could have the exact same configs as today (with IPv4) with IPv6. With all the same benefits and problems that we have today. And that people are familiar with. And familiarity is the important thing here.
Bingo, you've just hit the major problem with IPv6. Despite NATv6 being proposed, no one really wants to implement it even though it would basically mean a plug-and-play installation - remove your IPv4 only router, put in your new NATv4/v6 router, and be done with it. Bonus points for implementing NAT-PT as well.
After all, one of the nice things with NAT is it means my internal network addresses don't change on the whim of my ISP. They give me a 24.x.x.x today and a 70.x.x.x tomorrow? Nothing changes. But if full IPv6 is used, then when my ISP decides they need to do their prefixes, everything in my house gets a new IP as they inherit the new prefix. That's a huge PITA.
Sure the nice thing is having end-to-end connectivity (only to have firewalls break it), but why can't there be a choice? Those who want full end to end connectivity can have it, those who want to put up with the issues with NAT but have their internal network addressing remain stable, can have it too. We have that choice with IPv4 these days - if we want NAT, we get a router, else we get a switch and get issued a new IP for the other device.
Besides, the same NAT traversal tricks already exist, so even existing software doesn't have to care. Then there's always port forwarding which is well understood.
something they could use on xbox? I guess texture packing is relevant on the xbox thanks to it's ridiculously low memory
The original xbox is deprecated, and the Xbox360 has an extremely low 512MB of shared (system+GPU) RAM. The PS3 at least has a whopping 256MB of RAM for the Cell, and 256MB GDDR RAM for the RSX. Yes, the Xbox360 really needs texture compression much more than the PS3.
Mobile 3D could make sure of texture compression, then again, with high end phones having 1GB of shared memory, it too isn't as important. Maybe just a couple of years ago when RAM was a bit more limited on mobile.
Anyhow, Via could very well use stuff like the PowerVR chipsets which are designed for mobile, but do have a surprising amount of graphics power behind it (Intel GMA500 is based on it, which is at least halfway decent...)
It's basically where if the CPU cooling degrades, the CPU runs slower. Which is exactly how the Pentium 4's thermal protection system works. It's a bit more dynamic than the patent (which has 3 clocks - normal and two divided ones), in that the Pentium 4's uses a clock-skipping mechanism controlled by the thermal diode. If it's too hot, the the clock is gated. It's un-gated when the processor cools down.
There is an old video on Tom's Hardware where the guy has a running PC and shows what happens when the heatsink is removed. The Pentium 3 processor merely locked up. The Pentium 4 ran noticably slower, and the AMD chips burned up and smoked.
And for notebooks? There were a few that put Pentium 4 *desktop* processors in notebooks!
The real privacy control is "don't post it on the Internet in the first place".
Privacy controls, even if they were strong, don't exist. If even one other person can see it, they can easily turn "friends only" into "everyone". (Google+ illustrated this perfectly by letting friends repost indefinitely).
Facebook's privacy controls are privacy theatre. Facebook wants you to spill your guts on it. The only reason these controls exist is a significant percentage of the population won't spill their guts if they didn't think they had some control over it.
Try limiting news to friends only and you'll find out everyone else knows pretty damn quick.
And this extends to real life too - with friends asked not to facebook or twitter things like marriages, birth of a child, etc.
For me, I'm careful what I post on Facebook and who my friends are. Some of them I've never accepted as friends because I'm not sure how I can limit their access, so they live in friend-to-be purgatory.
And yes, it's privacy theatre just like the security theatre that goes on at airports now. And enough people will kick and scream and complain if you try to ask them to simply withold information they don't want the entire world to see.
But what happens when you try to sue a large company, and they win because of their superior, and extremely expensive lawyers?
Make the "loser pays" amount take into consideration the resources of the loser. If a rich guy (or corporation) sues some poor sap and the poor sap loses because he only got a "free" lawyer, then the rich guy gets basically nothing because the loser has no resources to pay.
But if the poor guy wins, the poor guy's lawyer gets probably way more than their standard legal fees because the rich guy has the resources to pay for expensive lawyers, and yet still lost.
Maybe that'll balance things out. If you sue Sony and your $10K lawyer is battling Sony's million dollar lawyers and you win, Sony has to fork over millions in legal fees to your lawyer because they have resources you don't.
Not a perfect system, but I suppose having an army of "poor" lawyers nipping at the heels of those with resources might encourage more lawful behavior...
What technology has apple gotten ahead of everyone else? They've combined some things, sure, but I don't know of anything single component that was exclusively theirs (their own ARM cores don't really count as they don't do anything uniquely innovative even though they're an exclusive part).
Not really exclusive tech, but more like "we can get them and you can't".
Which makes sense. Let's say you make NAND flash, or hard drives. Would you want to sell to Apple who wants to buy several million of them a month, or 100 different customers who want 10,000 each? You can bet Apple with it's order in the tens of millions of parts will get the best pricing and first delivery over smaller customers.
And competitors are complaining because Apple can soak up so much production that they're paying through the nose for parts. The price of NAND flash goes up during the summer and fall seasons as Apple gears up the holiday season and suppliers are simply too busy fulfilling Apple's order to fill in anyone else's.
Apple buys chips in such huge quantities that it's no wonder vendors give them exclusivity and all that. Apple will buy up entire production lines (original iPod - Apple bought Toshiba's entire production for 3 years), and vendors will open up Apple-exclusive production lines just to fulfill Apple's orders.
Ditto everything else - and hell, if you make something cutting edge, Apple will even pay you to make a new factory or R&D or whatever, in return for some exclusivity (which doesn't matter too much since your production will be 100% going to Apple to fulfill their orders anyhow). Apple's done this with NAND flash manufacturers (wasn't it like $6B?) and LCD (Sharp reportedly got a huge investment for a new LCD factory from Apple).
Suppliers will also take margin cuts if it means a big run of continuous business - a year of guaranteed output for Apple versus having to deal with all the smaller customers who come and go like the wind?
As for competitors, the Blackberry Playbook was delayed simply because the touchscreen manufacturer was busy making iPad/iPad2 touchscreens (by the millions) that it really didn't have time to deal with dinky customers wanting just 100,000 or less per production run.
And hell, Apple's now Samsung's #1 customer, ousting out Sony.
Other customers may buy more of a product (e.g., Dell with Intel processors), but Apple tends to buy a very limited range of product so runs are huge. Dell may make 10 times more PCs than Apple, but I'm sure Apple only orders maybe 20 different CPUs at most from Intel, while Dell orders whatever's cheapest at the time (probably Apple leftovers), so for any one processor model, Apple probably outbuys Dell, even though as an aggregate, Dell buys more.
Hell, on the retail side, we see this as Wal-mart, Sam's Club, Costco and others - buy a huge quantitiy, get a discount. They buy so much suppliers give them all sorts of discounts and concessions.
That's why I think Apple's (Steve Jobs' et al.) use of presentation software is ideal - there's an image and a little text at most per slide. I try to keep that philosophy in mind when I give presentations - little text, lots of pictures, and me filling in the rest verbally. That minimalism doesn't always work in academic settings but I've had reasonable success in emulating the Apple style (I'm not saying they created that idea, Apple presenters just do a good job at using presentation software).
The Apple style (I think it was Guy Kawasaki who started it - something along the lines of 10 slides, 10 words/slide, 10 minutes) is one where the slides merely augment, while the presenter (Jobs, etc.) is the primary focus. If you'll see how Apple keynotes are done, the slides appear behind the speaker - they are the background.
And you'll see that Jobs uses it only as a background - to add punch to his statements. And that's probably how slides should be - they are background to the speaker. Even the few times they should be in the foreground (a chart, for example), they're still background, with the speaker reading the chart - ensuring those who can't see the chart clearly can still grasp the gist.
The best professors I've ever had didn't use PowerPoint, but rather wrote things on the board. It was great because they would only write down the critical information, rather than the glut you usually get with PP presentations. I've had good professors that use PowerPoint have their slides only show a general overview, while they went over stuff in more detail--on the board.
Probably the reason why is the professors are now forced to pace themselves.
The problem with powerpoint is that everyone thinks they can present, but few actually can. So you end up with slides crammed with information that's hard to see, and the speaker just runs through at speaking speed, which is a lot faster than note-taking or reading and comprehending.
Look at how people like Steve Jobs do their presentations - the slides merely highlight the topic being talked about, while the speaker is elucidating. This can play out in the academic world when the prof puts the topic up and brief points, then runs through the details on the board.
That way, the slide deck doesn't become the textbook and the presenter merely reading from it. Problem is, it takes knowledge, skill and practice to properly pace oneself and not simply present slide after slide of dense text.
The keys to a successful and effective presentation haven't changed, just the tools have given the plebes the impression that giving a presentation is a no-skill task that anyone can.
The act of forcing the speaker to write slows them down, often enough that the audience who would've been overwhelmed before actually has time to process the information and ask questions.
Android and TiVo demonstrate why Stallman is right on this issue. Nobody can deny that Android and TiVo are using Linux as a kernel, but the userland is completely different and certainly isn't GNU. Gone are the days when you could assume that any computer running Linux would also be running GNU.
Actually, TiVo uses the GNU userland - it's all standard GNU with proprietary addons. Of course, it's *old* GNU (pre-GPLv3), but it's still GNU. http://www.tivo.com/linux/
Heck, they use glibc. Granted though, they do have DRM and other stuff, and the vast majority of stuff they use is proprietary and written by TiVo, but everything in it works the same way any regular GNU/Linux system works.
It's Android that's the odd one, being a completely new userland - the only thing GPL is the kernel itself. The rest of it is Apache, including the C library (Bionic). Heck, it has a completely rewritten version of BusyBox as well. Though, other than the kernel running init, that's where the similarities end - the startup system is different as is everything else. I'm sure Bionic isn't a full C library either - just enough to kickstart the Android environment and support the tools Android uses.
If someone was daring enough, they could implement the necessary services and such on BSD and make a completely compatible, but closed, version of Android.
Exactly. These are two important points. Canada is also adopting the roundabout in some areas and the size is a real issue as many are so small that you might as well just put a 4-way stop or traffic lights in because the traffic just backs up in all four directions anyway -- the roundabout is too small to allow the traffic to keep flowing and merging.
The roundabouts in Canada are tiny ones (fit inside a normal 4 way intersection), whilst the Euro/Asian ones can be fairly large (think highway onramp size or larger).
Right now, they're meant for intersectoins where the traffic flow isn't large enough to justify a full fledged traffic light, but is somewhere around more-than-2-way-stop and just above 4-way stop traffic. Typically inside residential areas because they slow traffic down without making it come to a complete halt (like a stop sign, or a speed bump).
Problem is, traffic varies widely - road closures and construction can turn a formerly quiet residential street to a busy thoroughfare. Ditto city planners that don't really consider side effects when planning new routes and lane restrictions
OS X itself handles PDF just fine (Quick Look, Preview, Safari, print directly to PDF from any application that can print, etc).
That's because OS X's underlying display API is... display PDF! Similar to ye olde Solaris Display PostScript. As a side effect, display and generation of PDFs is trivial - you're outputting to a file rather than to the rasterizer.
It's also the reason why PDFs are trivially displayed in iOS as well - again, being based on OS X means it also inherits display PDF.
But, if you're not always listening to the medium, you're bound to miss some opportunity to receive data. The paper seems to say with some methods, the AP wakes the client, and then transfers to it, possibly queuing multiple packets before waking up the client. I'd expect there to be an increase in latency with a scheme like that, and indeed the article seems to mention that. (But, for what one is doing on a mobile device, it probably won't matter.)
You only miss data if you don't wake up in time. The AP periodically (typically every 10ms) sends out a beacon frame, which not only tells about it's presence, but also contains a traffic bitmap that says "I have traffic for these adapters". An adapter can work in two modes - always on (or always receiving) so it can get data the fastest, or in a store-and-forward type mode where the AP can buffer.
When a client associates with an AP, it negotiates with the AP on a parameter that basically says "I will wake up ever N beacons to retrieve my traffic". Yes, it's a balancing act - a larger N means the client can turn off the radios more (more power savings), but at the cost of increased latency and consumed AP resources (the AP has to buffer packets for the client in the meantime).
Depending on the application, this increase in latency may have little effect (does it matter if your email client gets the IMAP notification delayed by a second?). It should be noted that it's possible to go between modes so if you're surfing the web, during the data transfer it remains on as it's being actively used and going into sleep states just doesn't make sense (the network connection is active), then when the transfers stop, it goes back into the sleep state.
As a side effect, if the wifi adapter can go into sleep more often and check traffic less frequently, it's also generating less CPU interrupts, letting *it* go into low power states as well, which saves power.
No. the entire idea behind ebay is to bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay. If you do that there is NEVER a reason to make a 2nd bid. Someone else snipes your $20 bid and you get upset, then you didn't bid your maximum from the start. If you follow the idea and always give the highest amount you are willing to pay then there should never be any hurt feelings, and sniping can't hurt you because the sniper bid more than you were willing to pay.
THe problem is, you give away your maximum bid information to everyone.
Say you bid $21 as your max when the auction starts at $1. The current bid is $1. Someone bids $2, and it jumps to $3 as your bid has outbid the guy.
Then some idiot comes along, bids $15 as that's all he'll pay. He gets outbid, no big deal. However, since he can't get it, he tries bidding it up for fun/amusement/etc, completely intending to pay for it, but if he's good, he can make your life miserable by forcing you to pay your max.
So he bids $17, 19, and the current bid is $20. He bids $21, and sees that he lost (because your $21 bid came earlier), but also knows that your maximum has been reached. So he stops bidding. (He only intended to pay $15, but has now decided to play with you and reveal your max bid). Even more fun is if he bids $21.50, in which case you still win at $21, and he also knows you've hit your max.
I've done it - it's a bit of a dangerous game, but can be fun. Extra thrills go for holding the winning bid hoping for someone to outsnipe you. (I've been the recipient of several 2nd chance offers because of this). And yes it's legal - as long as you pay up.
Now a sniper sees that hey, he can get it for $22, 10% more than the $20 he was going to snipe at, and decides to go for it.
Your maximum bid information is valuable to people. Sniping simply keeps it covered until the reveal at the end.
Uhhh...I take it you haven't seen this video it may be a parody but sadly anyone who has held MSFT packaging in their hands knows it is sadly funny because it is true. I swear their marketing guys must be paid by the bullet point or something.
That video was produced by Microsoft's packaging design team, actually. It's a parody yes, but the reason it works so well is because it literally is what they go through doing the box designs.
That's the reason why the design in the end was very Microsoft-ish - because if they had to do the iPod packaging, that would be how they would be commanded to do it!
The summary says it's currently being used for RAID configurations. That's a sensible use. But I doubt it will make much headway with consumers.
How about some high-bandwidth situations? Like perhaps having a nice mobile device with Thunderbolt with long battery life, then plug it into your Thunderbolt dock and you suddenly have kickass gaming graphics and all that fun stuff?
Hell, perhaps we'd see stuff like GigE network dongles and stuff - if you're mobile and using WiFI all day, then plug it in at home and you have gigabit connectivity.
Right now, people use it because it's crazy fast for drives. But it's likely Intel sees it as the future of mobile devices - optimized highly for mobile use with long battery life by keeping all the power hungry stuff in a dock - high-end graphics, wired networking, etc.
Lack of support for 20 year-old standard is usually just annoying as hell, but in this case it's actually caused the summary to be wrong.
It did, at one point. The problem was the trolls went and ruined it for all of us by embedding all sorts of control characters in post that ended up destroying the flow of a web page and making the text unreadable.
Hell, I think most blogs probably aren't immune to the problem. There used to be one common indication of this because people would force 4 or 5 unicode control characters together followed with a normal character (some strange millions-comma thing).
And it's a pain in the butt, too - you can't search for it, certain operations destroy the characters, so you get very strange behavior.
Samsung sells everything to everyone. I'm sure they'd happily take a small profit hit now in order to force Apple to pay them royalties on every device they have sold and will sell. It might not work out in their favor, but it's probably worth a shot.
Good point. Apple takes 57% of mobile industry profits, selling just the iPhone which has only 4% of the entire mobile marketshare. Everyone else, including the likes of Nokia, RIM, LG, Samsung, ZTC, etc. who sell the rest of the phones, gobble up the remaining share of the profit.
So even though Android phones outside the iPhone probably by 3:1 or more (half a million activations/day), Android phones don't make very much money at all. On the other hand, Apple just rakes in the cash.
This would help Samsung avoid falling into the trap of selling phones and making barely any money off them.
Hell, Apple might just go and cross-license, and use that to squeeze Samsung on parts as well. The net effect for Apple would be they pay the same amount to Samsung collectively as they had before. And Apple probably will get those concessions because as the #1 customer, they also have options
Same goes with ebay. As a seller, I can't leave negative feedback for buyers, so I figure I can't really leave positive feedback either since it's positive or nothing. Their feedback system is now fundamentally broken and any use of it is just furthering their fraudulent assertion of usefulness.
You do realize there's only one thing for a buyer to do, right? They bid, they win, they pay.
After the auction ends, all the buyer has to do is pay for the item. If they pay - positive feedback. If they don't pay, you report non-paying bidder to eBay and eBay does all the sanctions and lets you relist for free.
Why would you leave a negative feedback to a buyer? The only reason is they don't pay, and reporting them really nullifies this.
If you're holding it back because they may give you negative feedback over something, that's an invalid reason in my book - the buyer has fulfilled all their obligations on their side of the transaction.
If you're a seller, there are many ways you can get negative feedback - you can decide to take forever to ship, the item arrives broken, you send them the wrong item, etc.
Ebay sellers were trying to game the system - if a buyer received the wrong item, the seller could simply cut all communications, knowing they could leave retaliatory feedback to the buyer who did nothing wrong other than buy from a scammer, thus devaluing the feedback system since scammers getting negatives was quite rare.
It's positive or nothing because... the buyer only has one obligation, and they either fulfill it (positive), or they don't (report to eBay - which goes on the buyer's record).
It's just like idiot sellers who really don't leave feedback to buyers first - after all, once I paid, there's nothing else for me to do for you, so why shouldn't you leave feedback already?
Lets see some data for such a claim. If they really were such a big buyer they would be stuck with buying from samsung since they produce most of the flash.
Apple just overtook Sony as Samsung's largest customer (before that Apple was #2).
And Apple's already investigating TSMC and Intel for foundry services (for their A5/A6 parts). And Intel/Toshiba would love to sell Apple tons of flash memory (Toshiba already does). Intel's probably already got the capacity to ramp up production for Apple, and can always grease the wheels with some money from Apple to build whole new fabs just for Apple.
Apple's such a huge player in the chip business, they can really distort the market if they wanted to. NAND flash prices will start to rise on the largest devices soon as Apple gears up production for the holiday season. And Samsung might be left with a bunch of underutilized fabs and production lines that were happily occupied selling Apple chips that everyone else can't make up for.
No, it won't kill Samsung, but it'll affect their bottom line hard enough with underutilized (expensive!) fabs and production lines plus loss of sales to put a dent in their financials. Plus nevermind the whole "you pissed off your #1 customer" thing that shareholders might not be very happy about.
Then again, Samsung is a huge conglomerate. Their mobile division is happy to piss off Apple - it means more sales for them. But their semiconductor division will not be so happy to lose such lucrative business and have to idle billion-dollar fabs.
You'll get a personal and evaluation license only for the interesting bits which are inside the "Expansion pack" : USB-2 support etc.
Also is the community version lacking some features like remote display (regardless of OS) etc.
Otherwise then money - I can imagine that VirtualBox is also a strategic project. The reason why Sun bought it firsthand...
VirtualBox OSE *ALWAYS* had those limitations.
The thing is, Oracle stopped providing two different versions - the GPL'd source version (VirtualBox OSE) and VirtualBox (commercial license). Vbox OSE never had USB 2, Remote Desktop, etc. Ubuntu etc. provided Vbox OSE with didn't have those functions.
Now Oracle just provides the GPL'd version and the GPL'd sources for it. If you want the features that were in the commercially-licensed version of Vbox, you use the expansion pack. This had the advantage that all the distros had an official binary from Oracle, and it oculd be easily upgaded to the commercial one without breaking your current OS's packaging conventions.
In a sense, Vbox 4 is much easier now than Vbox3 was.
Nothing really changed licensing-wise between 3 (Sun) and 4 (Oracle). All the stuff that was in commercially licensed 3 was moved to an expansion pack that was commercially licensed, so instead of having an OSE and commercial versions of Vbox, you just have one. Helps with code maintainance as well, which is always a plus.
And I suppose, if someone wanted to write their own versions of USB2 and RDP (yes, it used RDP, not VNC) server, they could, and it'll be easier on the new architecture.
The Russians already invented those so that they could have a writing instrument that would work in weightless environments.
Alas, too bad that story is false. Both space agencies initially used pencils.
Anyhow, one of the reasons for switching is the graphite dust that pencils emit - it could be troublesome since it hangs in the air - either fouling filters or could potentially short-circuit some of the electricals. And also the broken tips that happen annoyingly often - break the tip and it could send that piece of graphite flying until it lodges itself inside some panel.
That said, I wouldn't want anyone selling this kind of information to data miners for the pure purpose of stalking your online life. What's the point of privacy settings if they're just going ignore it and sell all your data to any company that shows up on the front door with cash? And, if they were to sell it after you gave them permission to, you should also be notified when and to whom your information was sold to.
The obvious answer - to get you to give up that information to begin with!
Facebook knows that probably a good majority of people don't bother with privacy settings - they want the shiny. But they also know a good chunk of people are savvy enough to realize that what they post is public. So give them the illusion of privacy and they'll freely post information up, when in normal circumstances they would've just avoided it. The clueless may also realize that hey could post more sensitive stuff up online and "protect" it, leading to even more valuable data.
It's all theatre - the old adage of "don't post anything online you don't want the world to know" is as valid today as when it was concocted way back in the 70s.
Hell, just ask a good chunk of the flying population and they'd probably think those TSA checkpoints really did prevent another 9/11, and that if they loosen the liquid restrictions there owuld be planes blowing up from binary bombs, etc.
For an alarming percentage, security theatre is the same as real security.
Most retailers don't sell them to minors... but what about third party sellers? Small game shops? Ebayers?
It's the third party shops and Craigslisters. Ebayers already pay by Paypal, so you can be reasonably assured they've reached the age of majority if they've paid by credit card.
In fact, I believe that the voluntary enforcement is reported to be better by the game industry than the other media industries. So even though I believe that violent games help desensitize and dehumanize the player (there's a reason why military uses these kinds of games), I still agree with the ruling.
It's really that videogames are the rock and roll music or TV of the present day. Then again, today's parental non-responsibility may also be an issue as well. Alas, there's very little each of us can do about that
The problem was the crap that is Firefox development.
Going from 3.5 to 3.6 broke a number of plugins - sure there are replacements, but damn it was a pain for a supposed update.
Going from 3.6 to 4 introduced a bunch of crappy UI mods (no status bar, really? Must Firefox emulate Chrome?), requiring more plugins to get a browser that at least resembles what I had before.
Going from 4 to 5 broke what now? Oh, it broke the tab bar behavior to emulate Chrome again (great if you read tabs left-to-right, but if you go right-to-left, it's an annoying pain, and this time I can't find the option to disable it).
Oh yeah, it also means Google Apps lose support very quickly. Google said they're supported the last 3 major versions. Until 5 came out, that was 3.5, 3.6 and 4. Now with 5, it'll be 3.6, 4 and 5, despite 4 being dead.
Notice that 3.6 still receivs updates from Mozilla. Hell, even Ubuntu still keeps an LTS release every couple of years, good for 3 years since release.
Perhaps it wouldn't be such a pain if Mozilla quits screwing around with the UI so much. 3.5 to 3.6? Well, 3.6 should be 4, really since it broke a bunch of stuff (a number of plugins broke and I had to find new ones that did equivalent). Then 4 could be called 5 and we'd be at 5.0.2 or something because of the new UI.
Some of us like reasonable expectations of when plugins and such might break - going from 2 to 3 is obvious, as owuld 3 to 4 and the like. 3.5 to 3.6? I'd have expected all my plugins to work.
Hell, it's enough to drive me to IE 9 with all the UI messing around. Saving an extra 16 pixels just means I see an extra half a line of text.
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I've wondered about that - because it seems checking my watch is far quicker (under a second) than reaching for my phone, hitting a button and then parsing the screen for the time.
Yeah, I have the time in a million places, but it just seems more convenient and faster to check my watch than to check it on my computer (whose screen is right in front of me, too!), nevermind my cellphone or ipod or other thing.
Bingo, you've just hit the major problem with IPv6. Despite NATv6 being proposed, no one really wants to implement it even though it would basically mean a plug-and-play installation - remove your IPv4 only router, put in your new NATv4/v6 router, and be done with it. Bonus points for implementing NAT-PT as well.
After all, one of the nice things with NAT is it means my internal network addresses don't change on the whim of my ISP. They give me a 24.x.x.x today and a 70.x.x.x tomorrow? Nothing changes. But if full IPv6 is used, then when my ISP decides they need to do their prefixes, everything in my house gets a new IP as they inherit the new prefix. That's a huge PITA.
Sure the nice thing is having end-to-end connectivity (only to have firewalls break it), but why can't there be a choice? Those who want full end to end connectivity can have it, those who want to put up with the issues with NAT but have their internal network addressing remain stable, can have it too. We have that choice with IPv4 these days - if we want NAT, we get a router, else we get a switch and get issued a new IP for the other device.
Besides, the same NAT traversal tricks already exist, so even existing software doesn't have to care. Then there's always port forwarding which is well understood.
The original xbox is deprecated, and the Xbox360 has an extremely low 512MB of shared (system+GPU) RAM. The PS3 at least has a whopping 256MB of RAM for the Cell, and 256MB GDDR RAM for the RSX. Yes, the Xbox360 really needs texture compression much more than the PS3.
Mobile 3D could make sure of texture compression, then again, with high end phones having 1GB of shared memory, it too isn't as important. Maybe just a couple of years ago when RAM was a bit more limited on mobile.
Anyhow, Via could very well use stuff like the PowerVR chipsets which are designed for mobile, but do have a surprising amount of graphics power behind it (Intel GMA500 is based on it, which is at least halfway decent...)
Actually, I'd go with the Pentium 4.
It's basically where if the CPU cooling degrades, the CPU runs slower. Which is exactly how the Pentium 4's thermal protection system works. It's a bit more dynamic than the patent (which has 3 clocks - normal and two divided ones), in that the Pentium 4's uses a clock-skipping mechanism controlled by the thermal diode. If it's too hot, the the clock is gated. It's un-gated when the processor cools down.
There is an old video on Tom's Hardware where the guy has a running PC and shows what happens when the heatsink is removed. The Pentium 3 processor merely locked up. The Pentium 4 ran noticably slower, and the AMD chips burned up and smoked.
And for notebooks? There were a few that put Pentium 4 *desktop* processors in notebooks!
The real privacy control is "don't post it on the Internet in the first place".
Privacy controls, even if they were strong, don't exist. If even one other person can see it, they can easily turn "friends only" into "everyone". (Google+ illustrated this perfectly by letting friends repost indefinitely).
Facebook's privacy controls are privacy theatre. Facebook wants you to spill your guts on it. The only reason these controls exist is a significant percentage of the population won't spill their guts if they didn't think they had some control over it.
Try limiting news to friends only and you'll find out everyone else knows pretty damn quick.
And this extends to real life too - with friends asked not to facebook or twitter things like marriages, birth of a child, etc.
For me, I'm careful what I post on Facebook and who my friends are. Some of them I've never accepted as friends because I'm not sure how I can limit their access, so they live in friend-to-be purgatory.
And yes, it's privacy theatre just like the security theatre that goes on at airports now. And enough people will kick and scream and complain if you try to ask them to simply withold information they don't want the entire world to see.
Make the "loser pays" amount take into consideration the resources of the loser. If a rich guy (or corporation) sues some poor sap and the poor sap loses because he only got a "free" lawyer, then the rich guy gets basically nothing because the loser has no resources to pay.
But if the poor guy wins, the poor guy's lawyer gets probably way more than their standard legal fees because the rich guy has the resources to pay for expensive lawyers, and yet still lost.
Maybe that'll balance things out. If you sue Sony and your $10K lawyer is battling Sony's million dollar lawyers and you win, Sony has to fork over millions in legal fees to your lawyer because they have resources you don't.
Not a perfect system, but I suppose having an army of "poor" lawyers nipping at the heels of those with resources might encourage more lawful behavior...
Not really exclusive tech, but more like "we can get them and you can't".
Which makes sense. Let's say you make NAND flash, or hard drives. Would you want to sell to Apple who wants to buy several million of them a month, or 100 different customers who want 10,000 each? You can bet Apple with it's order in the tens of millions of parts will get the best pricing and first delivery over smaller customers.
And competitors are complaining because Apple can soak up so much production that they're paying through the nose for parts. The price of NAND flash goes up during the summer and fall seasons as Apple gears up the holiday season and suppliers are simply too busy fulfilling Apple's order to fill in anyone else's.
Apple buys chips in such huge quantities that it's no wonder vendors give them exclusivity and all that. Apple will buy up entire production lines (original iPod - Apple bought Toshiba's entire production for 3 years), and vendors will open up Apple-exclusive production lines just to fulfill Apple's orders.
Ditto everything else - and hell, if you make something cutting edge, Apple will even pay you to make a new factory or R&D or whatever, in return for some exclusivity (which doesn't matter too much since your production will be 100% going to Apple to fulfill their orders anyhow). Apple's done this with NAND flash manufacturers (wasn't it like $6B?) and LCD (Sharp reportedly got a huge investment for a new LCD factory from Apple).
Suppliers will also take margin cuts if it means a big run of continuous business - a year of guaranteed output for Apple versus having to deal with all the smaller customers who come and go like the wind?
As for competitors, the Blackberry Playbook was delayed simply because the touchscreen manufacturer was busy making iPad/iPad2 touchscreens (by the millions) that it really didn't have time to deal with dinky customers wanting just 100,000 or less per production run.
And hell, Apple's now Samsung's #1 customer, ousting out Sony.
Other customers may buy more of a product (e.g., Dell with Intel processors), but Apple tends to buy a very limited range of product so runs are huge. Dell may make 10 times more PCs than Apple, but I'm sure Apple only orders maybe 20 different CPUs at most from Intel, while Dell orders whatever's cheapest at the time (probably Apple leftovers), so for any one processor model, Apple probably outbuys Dell, even though as an aggregate, Dell buys more.
Hell, on the retail side, we see this as Wal-mart, Sam's Club, Costco and others - buy a huge quantitiy, get a discount. They buy so much suppliers give them all sorts of discounts and concessions.
The Apple style (I think it was Guy Kawasaki who started it - something along the lines of 10 slides, 10 words/slide, 10 minutes) is one where the slides merely augment, while the presenter (Jobs, etc.) is the primary focus. If you'll see how Apple keynotes are done, the slides appear behind the speaker - they are the background.
And you'll see that Jobs uses it only as a background - to add punch to his statements. And that's probably how slides should be - they are background to the speaker. Even the few times they should be in the foreground (a chart, for example), they're still background, with the speaker reading the chart - ensuring those who can't see the chart clearly can still grasp the gist.
Probably the reason why is the professors are now forced to pace themselves.
The problem with powerpoint is that everyone thinks they can present, but few actually can. So you end up with slides crammed with information that's hard to see, and the speaker just runs through at speaking speed, which is a lot faster than note-taking or reading and comprehending.
Look at how people like Steve Jobs do their presentations - the slides merely highlight the topic being talked about, while the speaker is elucidating. This can play out in the academic world when the prof puts the topic up and brief points, then runs through the details on the board.
That way, the slide deck doesn't become the textbook and the presenter merely reading from it. Problem is, it takes knowledge, skill and practice to properly pace oneself and not simply present slide after slide of dense text.
The keys to a successful and effective presentation haven't changed, just the tools have given the plebes the impression that giving a presentation is a no-skill task that anyone can.
The act of forcing the speaker to write slows them down, often enough that the audience who would've been overwhelmed before actually has time to process the information and ask questions.
Actually, TiVo uses the GNU userland - it's all standard GNU with proprietary addons. Of course, it's *old* GNU (pre-GPLv3), but it's still GNU.
http://www.tivo.com/linux/
Heck, they use glibc. Granted though, they do have DRM and other stuff, and the vast majority of stuff they use is proprietary and written by TiVo, but everything in it works the same way any regular GNU/Linux system works.
It's Android that's the odd one, being a completely new userland - the only thing GPL is the kernel itself. The rest of it is Apache, including the C library (Bionic). Heck, it has a completely rewritten version of BusyBox as well. Though, other than the kernel running init, that's where the similarities end - the startup system is different as is everything else. I'm sure Bionic isn't a full C library either - just enough to kickstart the Android environment and support the tools Android uses.
If someone was daring enough, they could implement the necessary services and such on BSD and make a completely compatible, but closed, version of Android.
The roundabouts in Canada are tiny ones (fit inside a normal 4 way intersection), whilst the Euro/Asian ones can be fairly large (think highway onramp size or larger).
Right now, they're meant for intersectoins where the traffic flow isn't large enough to justify a full fledged traffic light, but is somewhere around more-than-2-way-stop and just above 4-way stop traffic. Typically inside residential areas because they slow traffic down without making it come to a complete halt (like a stop sign, or a speed bump).
Problem is, traffic varies widely - road closures and construction can turn a formerly quiet residential street to a busy thoroughfare. Ditto city planners that don't really consider side effects when planning new routes and lane restrictions
That's because OS X's underlying display API is... display PDF! Similar to ye olde Solaris Display PostScript. As a side effect, display and generation of PDFs is trivial - you're outputting to a file rather than to the rasterizer.
It's also the reason why PDFs are trivially displayed in iOS as well - again, being based on OS X means it also inherits display PDF.
You only miss data if you don't wake up in time. The AP periodically (typically every 10ms) sends out a beacon frame, which not only tells about it's presence, but also contains a traffic bitmap that says "I have traffic for these adapters". An adapter can work in two modes - always on (or always receiving) so it can get data the fastest, or in a store-and-forward type mode where the AP can buffer.
When a client associates with an AP, it negotiates with the AP on a parameter that basically says "I will wake up ever N beacons to retrieve my traffic". Yes, it's a balancing act - a larger N means the client can turn off the radios more (more power savings), but at the cost of increased latency and consumed AP resources (the AP has to buffer packets for the client in the meantime).
Depending on the application, this increase in latency may have little effect (does it matter if your email client gets the IMAP notification delayed by a second?). It should be noted that it's possible to go between modes so if you're surfing the web, during the data transfer it remains on as it's being actively used and going into sleep states just doesn't make sense (the network connection is active), then when the transfers stop, it goes back into the sleep state.
As a side effect, if the wifi adapter can go into sleep more often and check traffic less frequently, it's also generating less CPU interrupts, letting *it* go into low power states as well, which saves power.
THe problem is, you give away your maximum bid information to everyone.
Say you bid $21 as your max when the auction starts at $1. The current bid is $1. Someone bids $2, and it jumps to $3 as your bid has outbid the guy.
Then some idiot comes along, bids $15 as that's all he'll pay. He gets outbid, no big deal. However, since he can't get it, he tries bidding it up for fun/amusement/etc, completely intending to pay for it, but if he's good, he can make your life miserable by forcing you to pay your max.
So he bids $17, 19, and the current bid is $20. He bids $21, and sees that he lost (because your $21 bid came earlier), but also knows that your maximum has been reached. So he stops bidding. (He only intended to pay $15, but has now decided to play with you and reveal your max bid). Even more fun is if he bids $21.50, in which case you still win at $21, and he also knows you've hit your max.
I've done it - it's a bit of a dangerous game, but can be fun. Extra thrills go for holding the winning bid hoping for someone to outsnipe you. (I've been the recipient of several 2nd chance offers because of this). And yes it's legal - as long as you pay up.
Now a sniper sees that hey, he can get it for $22, 10% more than the $20 he was going to snipe at, and decides to go for it.
Your maximum bid information is valuable to people. Sniping simply keeps it covered until the reveal at the end.
That video was produced by Microsoft's packaging design team, actually. It's a parody yes, but the reason it works so well is because it literally is what they go through doing the box designs.
That's the reason why the design in the end was very Microsoft-ish - because if they had to do the iPod packaging, that would be how they would be commanded to do it!
How about some high-bandwidth situations? Like perhaps having a nice mobile device with Thunderbolt with long battery life, then plug it into your Thunderbolt dock and you suddenly have kickass gaming graphics and all that fun stuff?
Hell, perhaps we'd see stuff like GigE network dongles and stuff - if you're mobile and using WiFI all day, then plug it in at home and you have gigabit connectivity.
Right now, people use it because it's crazy fast for drives. But it's likely Intel sees it as the future of mobile devices - optimized highly for mobile use with long battery life by keeping all the power hungry stuff in a dock - high-end graphics, wired networking, etc.
It's basically a cable-ized version of PCIe.
It did, at one point. The problem was the trolls went and ruined it for all of us by embedding all sorts of control characters in post that ended up destroying the flow of a web page and making the text unreadable.
Hell, I think most blogs probably aren't immune to the problem. There used to be one common indication of this because people would force 4 or 5 unicode control characters together followed with a normal character (some strange millions-comma thing).
And it's a pain in the butt, too - you can't search for it, certain operations destroy the characters, so you get very strange behavior.
Good point. Apple takes 57% of mobile industry profits, selling just the iPhone which has only 4% of the entire mobile marketshare. Everyone else, including the likes of Nokia, RIM, LG, Samsung, ZTC, etc. who sell the rest of the phones, gobble up the remaining share of the profit.
So even though Android phones outside the iPhone probably by 3:1 or more (half a million activations/day), Android phones don't make very much money at all. On the other hand, Apple just rakes in the cash.
This would help Samsung avoid falling into the trap of selling phones and making barely any money off them.
Hell, Apple might just go and cross-license, and use that to squeeze Samsung on parts as well. The net effect for Apple would be they pay the same amount to Samsung collectively as they had before. And Apple probably will get those concessions because as the #1 customer, they also have options
You do realize there's only one thing for a buyer to do, right? They bid, they win, they pay.
After the auction ends, all the buyer has to do is pay for the item. If they pay - positive feedback. If they don't pay, you report non-paying bidder to eBay and eBay does all the sanctions and lets you relist for free.
Why would you leave a negative feedback to a buyer? The only reason is they don't pay, and reporting them really nullifies this.
If you're holding it back because they may give you negative feedback over something, that's an invalid reason in my book - the buyer has fulfilled all their obligations on their side of the transaction.
If you're a seller, there are many ways you can get negative feedback - you can decide to take forever to ship, the item arrives broken, you send them the wrong item, etc.
Ebay sellers were trying to game the system - if a buyer received the wrong item, the seller could simply cut all communications, knowing they could leave retaliatory feedback to the buyer who did nothing wrong other than buy from a scammer, thus devaluing the feedback system since scammers getting negatives was quite rare.
It's positive or nothing because... the buyer only has one obligation, and they either fulfill it (positive), or they don't (report to eBay - which goes on the buyer's record).
It's just like idiot sellers who really don't leave feedback to buyers first - after all, once I paid, there's nothing else for me to do for you, so why shouldn't you leave feedback already?
Apple just overtook Sony as Samsung's largest customer (before that Apple was #2).
And Apple's already investigating TSMC and Intel for foundry services (for their A5/A6 parts). And Intel/Toshiba would love to sell Apple tons of flash memory (Toshiba already does). Intel's probably already got the capacity to ramp up production for Apple, and can always grease the wheels with some money from Apple to build whole new fabs just for Apple.
Apple's such a huge player in the chip business, they can really distort the market if they wanted to. NAND flash prices will start to rise on the largest devices soon as Apple gears up production for the holiday season. And Samsung might be left with a bunch of underutilized fabs and production lines that were happily occupied selling Apple chips that everyone else can't make up for.
No, it won't kill Samsung, but it'll affect their bottom line hard enough with underutilized (expensive!) fabs and production lines plus loss of sales to put a dent in their financials. Plus nevermind the whole "you pissed off your #1 customer" thing that shareholders might not be very happy about.
Then again, Samsung is a huge conglomerate. Their mobile division is happy to piss off Apple - it means more sales for them. But their semiconductor division will not be so happy to lose such lucrative business and have to idle billion-dollar fabs.
VirtualBox OSE *ALWAYS* had those limitations.
The thing is, Oracle stopped providing two different versions - the GPL'd source version (VirtualBox OSE) and VirtualBox (commercial license). Vbox OSE never had USB 2, Remote Desktop, etc. Ubuntu etc. provided Vbox OSE with didn't have those functions.
Now Oracle just provides the GPL'd version and the GPL'd sources for it. If you want the features that were in the commercially-licensed version of Vbox, you use the expansion pack. This had the advantage that all the distros had an official binary from Oracle, and it oculd be easily upgaded to the commercial one without breaking your current OS's packaging conventions.
In a sense, Vbox 4 is much easier now than Vbox3 was.
Nothing really changed licensing-wise between 3 (Sun) and 4 (Oracle). All the stuff that was in commercially licensed 3 was moved to an expansion pack that was commercially licensed, so instead of having an OSE and commercial versions of Vbox, you just have one. Helps with code maintainance as well, which is always a plus.
And I suppose, if someone wanted to write their own versions of USB2 and RDP (yes, it used RDP, not VNC) server, they could, and it'll be easier on the new architecture.
Alas, too bad that story is false. Both space agencies initially used pencils.
Anyhow, one of the reasons for switching is the graphite dust that pencils emit - it could be troublesome since it hangs in the air - either fouling filters or could potentially short-circuit some of the electricals. And also the broken tips that happen annoyingly often - break the tip and it could send that piece of graphite flying until it lodges itself inside some panel.
The obvious answer - to get you to give up that information to begin with!
Facebook knows that probably a good majority of people don't bother with privacy settings - they want the shiny. But they also know a good chunk of people are savvy enough to realize that what they post is public. So give them the illusion of privacy and they'll freely post information up, when in normal circumstances they would've just avoided it. The clueless may also realize that hey could post more sensitive stuff up online and "protect" it, leading to even more valuable data.
It's all theatre - the old adage of "don't post anything online you don't want the world to know" is as valid today as when it was concocted way back in the 70s.
Hell, just ask a good chunk of the flying population and they'd probably think those TSA checkpoints really did prevent another 9/11, and that if they loosen the liquid restrictions there owuld be planes blowing up from binary bombs, etc.
For an alarming percentage, security theatre is the same as real security.
It's the third party shops and Craigslisters. Ebayers already pay by Paypal, so you can be reasonably assured they've reached the age of majority if they've paid by credit card.
In fact, I believe that the voluntary enforcement is reported to be better by the game industry than the other media industries. So even though I believe that violent games help desensitize and dehumanize the player (there's a reason why military uses these kinds of games), I still agree with the ruling.
It's really that videogames are the rock and roll music or TV of the present day. Then again, today's parental non-responsibility may also be an issue as well. Alas, there's very little each of us can do about that
The problem was the crap that is Firefox development.
Going from 3.5 to 3.6 broke a number of plugins - sure there are replacements, but damn it was a pain for a supposed update.
Going from 3.6 to 4 introduced a bunch of crappy UI mods (no status bar, really? Must Firefox emulate Chrome?), requiring more plugins to get a browser that at least resembles what I had before.
Going from 4 to 5 broke what now? Oh, it broke the tab bar behavior to emulate Chrome again (great if you read tabs left-to-right, but if you go right-to-left, it's an annoying pain, and this time I can't find the option to disable it).
Oh yeah, it also means Google Apps lose support very quickly. Google said they're supported the last 3 major versions. Until 5 came out, that was 3.5, 3.6 and 4. Now with 5, it'll be 3.6, 4 and 5, despite 4 being dead.
Notice that 3.6 still receivs updates from Mozilla. Hell, even Ubuntu still keeps an LTS release every couple of years, good for 3 years since release.
Perhaps it wouldn't be such a pain if Mozilla quits screwing around with the UI so much. 3.5 to 3.6? Well, 3.6 should be 4, really since it broke a bunch of stuff (a number of plugins broke and I had to find new ones that did equivalent). Then 4 could be called 5 and we'd be at 5.0.2 or something because of the new UI.
Some of us like reasonable expectations of when plugins and such might break - going from 2 to 3 is obvious, as owuld 3 to 4 and the like. 3.5 to 3.6? I'd have expected all my plugins to work.
Hell, it's enough to drive me to IE 9 with all the UI messing around. Saving an extra 16 pixels just means I see an extra half a line of text.