but atleast it shows the viability of solid-state memory
I believe most modern aircraft have been using some form of solid-state memory since the 90s. Probably one of the very first uses of higher-density flash storage media, since the only way to break it is you literally break the silicon inside, especially once the board is built and tested and then potted inside which turns it into a really solid mass.
Cost isn't that big of an issue since these recorders already are pretty expensive to begin with, so even then spending tens of thousands of dollars on it wouldn't be unusual.
Their answer to the first and most important question, "why targeting little guys and not Apple?" is "it is only fair to get paid by the party that is accountable for the entire solution." When you are trying to forcibly take money from small fry who have no knowledge of your so called patent and you have to use the words "it is only fair," you know you don't have a case.
Not defending scumbag patent trolls, but they answer it in TFA:
Q: Lodsys is trying to force Apple to take a license by pressuring iOS developers.
05/15/2011 No, thatâ(TM)s not whatâ(TM)s happening. Apple is licensed for its nameplate products and services.
So Apple licensed the patent.
And not just that, but...
Q: What about other Operating Systems such as Android?
05/15/2011 So far no one has asked this, or speculated on it, but itâ(TM)s a logical question for a business that has created applications on multiple platforms. Google is licensed for its nameplate products and services. Also, Microsoft is licensed for their nameplate products and services.
A more interesting question would be why systems are still so shitty at even basic self verification. A Linux might verify a packages signature on install, but after that, there is absolutely no oversight about what is happening to that package. On a regular dist-upgrade it can't even properly tell apart which config files have been touched by the user and which have been automatically generated.
This is not even an especially hard problem to solve, instead of dumping everything into a single directory tree, dump all packages into a read-only tree and save all the changes to that tree into a completely separate directory tree that is mounted on top of the other one via some kind of unionfs. This wouldn't just be good for security, it would also make a users life much easier, as changes and hacks that divert from the vanilla system would be instantly visible.
And how do you propose that the "pristine" packages below it are updated without giving malware the same priviledges or ability to update those packages with infected versions?
Trusted binaries (which defeats the entire purpose and puts us back into Apple Jailbreaking)? Signed packages (ditto)? And if you propose having users manage the certificates by installing them, remember that malware can do the same to bypass any sort of signing mechanism.
The unfortunate truth is, the only way to ensure it is trusted boot and a trust chain, which was the whole point of TCPA, which was something people rallied against.
Sadly, the end result is there isn't any way to have the openness of a PC without having the dilligence of being able to maintain it properly. And Steve Jobs' truck analogy might be right - people will always need trucks (PCs), but sometimes, they just want a little runabout to do their things (post-PC devices - smartphones, tablets, etc. that are locked down and "just work"). Of course, there may be room for something in-between the walled garden of Apple and the wide-open free-for-all that is Android, but it's not quite there yet (even though Android makes it "hard", alternative app stores that serve up pirated apps and malware simultaneously are unfortunately, popular).
That would be the proper procedure that I would find perfectly acceptable, but all the present day USB sticks with write protect do it with software. It's not like the floppies that made it physically impossible to write by literally turning off the ability to write. It's one of the giant steps backwards that the industry has made.. intentionally? I don't know, but my suspicions run high.
A floppy drive is easy - a floppy drive is just some motors in a cage - the floppy controller resides o nthe motherboard and tells those motors how to operate. The write protect switch can easily disable the floppy drive's write amplifier.
Something like a hard drive is hard - you can't disable the read/write line to the (PATA) drive, because you have to write to the registers in order for it to work. It's why forensic labs have drive write blockers - they pass through everything except the write commands - these things require intelligence in order to perform their tasks.
Ditto USB drives - you can't disable writing to the NAND flash chips itself, because you have to write to them in order to read from them (as well as do things like identify the capacity and such), so the controller has to have intelligence to handle ignoring write commands from the USB host (and even then some drives still do wear levelling and garbage collection on the raw media - so you need lots of firmware hooks to disable that, too).
The problem is, there's no way to physically make it impossible to write. Some flash chips it was possible - you protected it by disabling the high-voltage programming power source - without that voltage, programming would be problematic. But these days, the charge circuits to do that are built into the silicon so the manufacturers don't have to spend the extra dollar on external power supply circuits and PCB routing, because the intent for writable nonvolatile memory was being able to write to them.
Making a write-protect switch these days is difficult and often requires extra circuits in order to have the necessary intelligence to block write commands and not all writes (which disables normal read operations as well).
Because then security leaks cant be fixed? I suggest at least some switch to update the software. On the other hand that could be achieved with any USB stick with a write protect switch.
If software can turn off "write protect" then you don't have anything. Period. Because anything legit software can do, malware can do. If it can do an update of the ROM image, then malware can as well (and there was a virus that overwrote or attempted to overwrite the BIOS).
If you make it harder by requiring the user flip a switch, you'll find after the first update that 75% of the people didn't bother updating. After the second, 95% of the switches will be in the "allow write" position as people get lazy. (It will asymptotically approach 100%). If you make it so they have to flip the switch back to write-protect mode in order to boot, well, you'll asymtotically reach 100% of people who don't bother updating because it's too troublesome.
And yet, I have yet to hear / read (until your comment) that is was OtherOS which caused this.
More like a *lack* of OtherOS.
Face it - was the PS3 the most secure console? After all, the Wii and Xbox360 have been "hacked" to some extent (piracy and/or homebrew), but the PS3 was "secure".
Then in 2009 Sony releases the Slim PS3. Sometime in 2010, the PS3 is completely hacked, which if you go by when the Slims without OtherOS get hacked, happened around 12 months later. And this is a complete pwnage - all security in the PS3, broken.
At 12 months to complete pwnage, it's probably close to the average for consoles. At close to 5 years to first pwnage, it's a record.
Now, did the PS3 simply escape all efforts to hack it for piracy or other purposes because it was secure, or was it because those with the skills to do it were busy writing their homebrew? After they couldn't run Linux or run their homebrew anymore, perhaps they also had the necessary skills to start picking at the locks?
Sony did the right thing at first - homebrewers don't want piracy, and keeping them happy ensured the pirates would have a tough time. Homebrewers are a skilled lot with lots of interesting tools at their disposal and the knowledge to use it.
And considering that OtherOS was removed because of a super theoretical hack that wasn't even used in the end to pwn the PS3...
120 and 240 FPS are invisible to the human eye. More importantly, the source material is either at 20, 24, 29.97, or 60 FPS, so either you have the extra frames showing the same frames again (thus being useless), or you generate extra frames which didn't previously exist and which look a bit plasticky and odd. In test after test, the "Motion Plus" and other BS upframing is rated as adding noise, because that's all it does to the signal.
Actually, the reason for the 120/240FPS is simple - once you disable the stupid frame interpolation and leave it in frame-repeat mode, 120/240 divide evenly into the common framerates that you'll encounter.
24 fps for movies (1080p24) 30 fps for TV (1080i60/1080p30) 60 fps for gaming (1080p60)
120Hz is enough for normal TV to do frame-repeat for all those rates. And 30fps, while really 29.97, the TV actually slows down its refresh rate to match it (the EDID will often report it as 24fps, 29fps, 30fps, 59fps, 60fps) so it can frame-repeat.
For 3DTVs, you need 240Hz so it evenly divides into 2 eyes at 120Hz each without frame repeat.
The whole point of the exercise is at 60fps, a 24fps movie has to be telecine'd (24fps to 30fps for interlaced TVs, or 24fps to 60fps for progressive displays). Modern TVs will actually try to detect this telecine effect and remove it so to avoid issues, but it's still more processing that goes on and increases input lag.
For a regular TV, 120Hz is plenty - it will handle all content fine. Spending money for 240Hz is just wasting it away. For 3DTVs, you need 240Hz because it has to display two images at once. As a side effect, 3DTVs tend to have slightly better display panels because the interleaved left-right images would become a mess.
Kind of makes me sad that HD is only 1080p. I just saw a 70 inch TV go on sale at my local electronics superstore. 1080p at that size isn't such good resolution.
Quit sitting so close to the TV, then. A 70" HDTV at 1080p lets you sit a nice distance away from the set before the pixels get too small to be resolved.
Play SD content on a 70" TV and you can probably be easily 20+' away from the set and it'll look good.
If you start playing 4K, the distance you have to sit gets a lot closer, and people don't like sitting 4' away from such a large screen. Any further and the extra resolution is wasted.
Why are they running windows in the first place and not a more appropriate embedded OS?
The actual controllers aren't. It's the management interface that is, and it's not unusual, especially when things like OPC (OLE for Process Control, yes, OLE, the daddy of COM and ActiveX) exist, so management of industrial process equipment from Windows has a very long history dating to Windows 3.x.
And back before things were networked heavily, it was OK so security was lax. These days though, even if you had separated industrial and corporate networks, some manager would want to pull up the stats in Excel and force a connection (COM, see?) so they can get actual data from the controller.
We don't need a newer, better kind of keyboard. We need an older, better kind of keyboard!
I've never understood the appeal of the Model M. Sure it's loud and clacky, but that seems to be a negative more than a positive.
After all, if you're in a cube farm, someone typing rapdily would sound like machinegun fire, making an already miserable work environment even worse.
And at home, well, using them at night discreetly is just as hard. Good perhaps for parents of kids to put on the kid's PC (and the shared one) so they can be alerted to stray typing, but still. Typing at night on a clacky keyboard slowed me down as I tried to type without waking everyone else up...
Newly uploaded videos and some of the videos most popular among the general public have been transcoded to WebM, but transcoding the "long tail" will have to wait.
Have multiple browsers then - the long tail is still served up as h.264 since the flash based player does h.264 for the higher qualities.
Though you raised an interesting question about that - since the majority of YouTube videos are still in h.264 format, and Chrome can't play them now since it dropped h.264 in favor of WebM...
Only one error in 100,000 miles -- I'll take that in a heartbeat over the thoughtless people I drive beside each day. I guarantee the best drivers have more than 1 bug in 100K miles.
The average mileage a car gets is around 20K miles a year, so it's 1 bug every 5 years. I'd guess there's a lot of drivers who probably don't get anything worse than a stone chip in their windshield (average 1 every 3 years so?).
No, the dangerous part is when you have automated vehicles mixed human controled vehicles. An earlier poster said that it's the idiots you have to worry about, and it's true. How your automated system reacts is very important because there is no way to account for every possible situation. Sometimes the best action is to crash your car in a controlled manner to avoid an even nastier accident, for example.
Doesn't matter. Once the official servers are shut down, the specs required to maintain the leftover group that wants to play on a private server would be so much smaller than even if it required high end hardware before, low end might work just fine still.
Even if EVE Online had a huge RAM disk, perhaps a modern SSD is needed if you reduce the number of players down to 1% or so.
And yes, a lot of it is in configuration, but mostly because it's easier to throw hardware at the problem - it's far easier to spinup a new server when required than it is to find the bottleneck in the code, so the server software has to be able to adapt to varying configurations as servers spin up and shut down.
Actually, if you played through with the director's commentary on, the reason they cut the hard stuff was negative feedback. People were thinking it would be super hard because very fine timing would be reqiured in order to speed up through the portal, place another one at the end while avoiding crushers.
For casual gamers, repeating the same level 10 times because it relies on a lot of coincidental timing is not just a turn off - it's a game killer.
It's the same reason the final level didn't have all the stuff they wanted as well (crushers and the like) - people would end up distracted trying to portal the bombs in the right place they'd miss the crusher.
There's a puzzle where Valve went for the fun solution rather than the proper one as well - it's where you have to put a portal on a wall and use the funnel to ride out and escape (it's nearly the end - Chapter 8 or Chapter 9, I can't remember which). Playtests reveal that players would often place the wrong portal and fall which hurt the gameplay moreso than having the game make it foolproof and let you put any portal there.
And I don't believe Portal originally had many tricky timing related puzzles, other than the flinging - heck I finished it (didn't do challenges though). There may have been a few more "think fast!" moments where the puzzle was to figure out the solution in a few seconds (last test chamber, for example) in the original Portal, but that was it...
Well, the problem is in Alaska and Northern Canada, communities are literally cut off for months at a time because the weather gets so bad it's impossible to get supplies in and out. And these communities may require assistance - e.g., their generator is broken and they're relying on a backup.
Even SAR can be aided since they can fly around without risking SAR flight crew's lives.
You mean like it is in Canada where they've avoided your horribly corrupt system through laws and their enforcement? Shocking!
Not for long. Harper's going to repeal the $2/vote thing that makes it valuable to seek actual votes. After that, it'll be "campaign contribution" time. Sure there are limits ($5000 or so) per *person*, but those are so easily circumvented it's silly by corporations.
Perhaps it's best if the parties were beholden to the voter - raise the per vote subsidy, and ban all contributions. Then it matters less if a party has 50% of the popular vote but cannot get many seats (as can happen in FPTP). There would be great incentive to get the vote out, and the parties would be beholden to the voter rather than corporate interests.
Even this system isn't perfect, for it rewards short term gain at the expense of long term foresight, and there can be silly situations where one party can command 80% of the vote.
Maybe spending limits? Each riding can only spend as much as the poorest candidate can spend?
And hell, at least your FCC has teeth. The CRTC is so lopsided it's silly. While your Comcast-NBC merger was going on, we've had our content producers get gobbled up by content distributors (Shaw and Bell mostly), and we've got crap like cableboxes that are useless outside the system (no CableCARD, and no one will activate someone else's box), etc.
The only thing is, it's really done for competitive purposes. OHA members don't really like AOSP because it means they release a product and some chinese OEM down the road gets to compete with them in a month's time.
The "With Google" advantage has narrowed because the "With Google" apps (which include the Market) are so widely pirated that every Android platform has it (without the Market, Android's pretty sparse as 99% of the apps on it aren't available outside the Market).
So I'd guess the code really isn't as bad as Google makes it seem, but it's being restricted more for competitive reasons - the Motorola/Samsung/LG/etc don't want to have their $500 tablets competing against the $100 crap tablets. Or to have a proper build so the $250 Nook Color won't become a serious competitor. Sure a hacked version of 3.0 is out for all sorts of platforms, but it's hacked together.
The real test will be to see if Ice Cream will be released on the same day.
But with Amazon's recent downtime, they won't be able to lay claim to 99.99% up-time for at least 5 years, assuming they have no more down time. But yes, theeir data is still there.
Actually, the 4 9's and 11 9's refer to Amazon S3 service, which is basically cloud storage. The sites that went down were using Amazon EC2 cloud server. The former is pure disk storage, the latter provides computation. You can link S3 to EC2 for permanent storage (ECB?), as otherwise it's upload your files, do your processing, get your results, and shut down, losing everything.
S3 didn't go down, and I don't think EC2 did either, but the ECB service for the two did so websites hosted purely on Amazon died, while services using one or the other didn't (e.g., Dropbox uses S3 only).
I think the claim that the PS3 version would be best was entirely based on it coming with a free copy of the PC version of the game, which is certainly the best playing option.
Yeah, but to get that PC version required using the PS3 version of Steam. Which you can't right now because PSN is down.
I know a few people who preordered the PS3 versoin purely for the PC version at first, then the PS3 play later (not sure if they followed through if they didn't realize you need a PS3 to et the PC version).
Those with PS3s who bought it to play the PC versoin (it is only $10 more, after all) also are stuck playing the PS3 version.
Me personally, I bought it only because I had a $20 off 2 games coupon I wanted to use. Bought PC version as I didn't want to buy something I can't use (refuse to update firmware, and thus, no PSN. And if you must know - no OtherOS, and I lose support for my Xbox360-to-PS3 controller adapter). And no, I didn't realize you need Steam for PS3 to redeem the PC version. Hell, I wasn't even going to buy Portal 2 at all. Just I got the coupon a few days before release and decided if I could find another, it would be a good use.
You're impressed that a person can live in a giant live in cupboard? Really? I think after a very short time I'd be looking for a padded cell. Maybe he could incorporate that too.
Where is the space to store stuff? Or work bench or gadget room? They'd all be crushed.
Cultural issue, really. Some people aren't so materialistic and can get by quite happily without a lot of stuff. One computer (laptop), a TV is all they need to be happy. If they want to read books, they visit their library. If they want to work on things they gather at friend's places. Of course, they probably work on small art pieces to fit in places like this, and do things outside the house.
Of course, I would go nuts in a place that small - but that's just me. Other people I Know use their houses just to eat and sleep - they go out and do other things.
How do you make one that is not influenced by ground effect?
Easy, fly higher.
Ground effect only happens when you're close to the ground. A rule of thumb is that it's effect is negligble after you reach a height equal to half the wingspan.
So a rotor blade (or wing) of 3m length (6m rotor disc/wingspan), once above 3m in height, would have to be flying out of ground effect.
And yes, ground effect is a big deal - it lowers the amount of lift you actually need by quite a bit. Student pilots find this out on landing when all of a sudden the airplane floats down the runway. Experienced pilots find it when their plane seems to take off, but only bobs above the ground without really gaining altitude.
he biggest thing I'd want feedback for is knowing where to put my finger, and that doesn't get helped at all with this, because it happens when the finger's already touching it, and in fact only when it's moving. Aside from that, help moving a text carat would be great, I suppose, but I don't see most of the rest being useful.
It's useful for text entry actually. If you tap the wrong key you just shift left or right and the feedback tells you when you can lift your finger - after a few times you'll probalby do this automatically. It beats the current method where you have make sure the finger has rolled enough, though the enlarged popups help (on iOS) since it's easier ot see. Also on iOS, you can touch the punctuation shift, drag over to the character you want, then lift which types that character and resets back to alphas.
If you just use hunt and peck on a touch screen, then yes its utility is limited. But if you try to use the assistance the OS is giving for onscreen keyboards, it can help out a lot.
I buy points cards and prepaid cards for one simple reason - they go on SALE.
When I can get a "free" 25% discount by buying a $20 points card for $15, it's a net win to me. Ditto Xbox Live Gold membership - regular price $60, discounted price $50 without looking too hard. Hell, Microsoft even runs Live Gold specials from time to time. But Dell, Amazon, etc., they often have tons of sales on the stuff.
Also, I don't see leftovers being a huge win for Microsoft in the end - firstly, getting stuck with over 100 points will be hard since there's enough crap to easily put you under it, and if you have 400 points or so, that's enough for many XBLA games, especially those on sale. And since they don't expire, big whoop.
And for the more expensive things like movie rentals and 360 games (yes, you can buy Xbox360 games through Xbox Live - though they typically take a few months after release), you can choose to pay either by points or the real dollar amount. For me, it's points since those are on sale often enough.
It might take a while to get 1Gbs+ Internet to most homes, but for LAN i feel GbE as a bottleneck today. When I use DLNA to stream HD content to 3 TV's (one in kitchen, one in living room and 1 or 2 in kids rooms) and use N spec wifi at the same time, the DLNA lags sometimes. By calculations there should be some bandwith left over but not much. The lagging is probably caused by unexpected overheads and GbE switches preforming at "GbE in theory" speeds, but with the world moving towards a phase where every single gadget/device is connected to LAN/Internet this will become a large problem shortly.
Or it might just be your server.
Uncompressed OTA HD is 20Mbps tops (per ATSC spec). 3 HD streams would consume a good chunk of Fast Ethernet, but there's still enough leftover. And if you go Blu-Ray, it also tops out around 15-20Mbps or so. If it's cable HD, you're lucky to get 6Mbps per channel.
The N wifi is probably the biggest consumer of bandwidth, but my general experience is it offers maybe just a bit faster performance than Fast Ethernet.
Now, if your DLNA server is serving up 3 HDTV streams and you're busy copying files to it over WiFi, it's probably your server and I/O throughput (those streams are causing the heads to skitter across the platters, and the fastest spinning rust can do is around 100 seeks/second).
Also, if your router is the one doing DLNA/file serving/packet routing (WiFi-wired), there's 95% of your problem right there.
Yeah, Activision has pretty much screwed up Blizzard.
I got SC2, and it's nice, but Bnet 2.0 pretty much soured me off it trying to get a really idiotic issue resolved (the name you enter in the dialog is permanent and unchangable - this was fixed a month later with an announcement of paid name changes - WTF? Fine print does not constitute adequate warning and reeks of nickel and diming).
The scary part is, they'e snagged Bungie with a 10-year deal as well, so there goes yet another good developer;
I wanted to preorder Diablo 3 when I picked up my SC2 preorder. Something said I should wait, and I heeded that. Given my Bnet 2.0 experience, I think I'll pass. The game will be good (courtesy Blizzard), but the business side of it leaves a lot to be desired. I only ever got the impression that what you get is a subscription-fee free version of WoW, made that way by simply charging you extra in every other area.
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I believe most modern aircraft have been using some form of solid-state memory since the 90s. Probably one of the very first uses of higher-density flash storage media, since the only way to break it is you literally break the silicon inside, especially once the board is built and tested and then potted inside which turns it into a really solid mass.
Cost isn't that big of an issue since these recorders already are pretty expensive to begin with, so even then spending tens of thousands of dollars on it wouldn't be unusual.
Not defending scumbag patent trolls, but they answer it in TFA:
So Apple licensed the patent.
And not just that, but...
So did Google and Microsoft.
And how do you propose that the "pristine" packages below it are updated without giving malware the same priviledges or ability to update those packages with infected versions?
Trusted binaries (which defeats the entire purpose and puts us back into Apple Jailbreaking)? Signed packages (ditto)? And if you propose having users manage the certificates by installing them, remember that malware can do the same to bypass any sort of signing mechanism.
The unfortunate truth is, the only way to ensure it is trusted boot and a trust chain, which was the whole point of TCPA, which was something people rallied against.
Sadly, the end result is there isn't any way to have the openness of a PC without having the dilligence of being able to maintain it properly. And Steve Jobs' truck analogy might be right - people will always need trucks (PCs), but sometimes, they just want a little runabout to do their things (post-PC devices - smartphones, tablets, etc. that are locked down and "just work"). Of course, there may be room for something in-between the walled garden of Apple and the wide-open free-for-all that is Android, but it's not quite there yet (even though Android makes it "hard", alternative app stores that serve up pirated apps and malware simultaneously are unfortunately, popular).
A floppy drive is easy - a floppy drive is just some motors in a cage - the floppy controller resides o nthe motherboard and tells those motors how to operate. The write protect switch can easily disable the floppy drive's write amplifier.
Something like a hard drive is hard - you can't disable the read/write line to the (PATA) drive, because you have to write to the registers in order for it to work. It's why forensic labs have drive write blockers - they pass through everything except the write commands - these things require intelligence in order to perform their tasks.
Ditto USB drives - you can't disable writing to the NAND flash chips itself, because you have to write to them in order to read from them (as well as do things like identify the capacity and such), so the controller has to have intelligence to handle ignoring write commands from the USB host (and even then some drives still do wear levelling and garbage collection on the raw media - so you need lots of firmware hooks to disable that, too).
The problem is, there's no way to physically make it impossible to write. Some flash chips it was possible - you protected it by disabling the high-voltage programming power source - without that voltage, programming would be problematic. But these days, the charge circuits to do that are built into the silicon so the manufacturers don't have to spend the extra dollar on external power supply circuits and PCB routing, because the intent for writable nonvolatile memory was being able to write to them.
Making a write-protect switch these days is difficult and often requires extra circuits in order to have the necessary intelligence to block write commands and not all writes (which disables normal read operations as well).
If software can turn off "write protect" then you don't have anything. Period. Because anything legit software can do, malware can do. If it can do an update of the ROM image, then malware can as well (and there was a virus that overwrote or attempted to overwrite the BIOS).
If you make it harder by requiring the user flip a switch, you'll find after the first update that 75% of the people didn't bother updating. After the second, 95% of the switches will be in the "allow write" position as people get lazy. (It will asymptotically approach 100%). If you make it so they have to flip the switch back to write-protect mode in order to boot, well, you'll asymtotically reach 100% of people who don't bother updating because it's too troublesome.
More like a *lack* of OtherOS.
Face it - was the PS3 the most secure console? After all, the Wii and Xbox360 have been "hacked" to some extent (piracy and/or homebrew), but the PS3 was "secure".
Then in 2009 Sony releases the Slim PS3. Sometime in 2010, the PS3 is completely hacked, which if you go by when the Slims without OtherOS get hacked, happened around 12 months later. And this is a complete pwnage - all security in the PS3, broken.
At 12 months to complete pwnage, it's probably close to the average for consoles. At close to 5 years to first pwnage, it's a record.
Now, did the PS3 simply escape all efforts to hack it for piracy or other purposes because it was secure, or was it because those with the skills to do it were busy writing their homebrew? After they couldn't run Linux or run their homebrew anymore, perhaps they also had the necessary skills to start picking at the locks?
Sony did the right thing at first - homebrewers don't want piracy, and keeping them happy ensured the pirates would have a tough time. Homebrewers are a skilled lot with lots of interesting tools at their disposal and the knowledge to use it.
And considering that OtherOS was removed because of a super theoretical hack that wasn't even used in the end to pwn the PS3...
Actually, the reason for the 120/240FPS is simple - once you disable the stupid frame interpolation and leave it in frame-repeat mode, 120/240 divide evenly into the common framerates that you'll encounter.
24 fps for movies (1080p24)
30 fps for TV (1080i60/1080p30)
60 fps for gaming (1080p60)
120Hz is enough for normal TV to do frame-repeat for all those rates. And 30fps, while really 29.97, the TV actually slows down its refresh rate to match it (the EDID will often report it as 24fps, 29fps, 30fps, 59fps, 60fps) so it can frame-repeat.
For 3DTVs, you need 240Hz so it evenly divides into 2 eyes at 120Hz each without frame repeat.
The whole point of the exercise is at 60fps, a 24fps movie has to be telecine'd (24fps to 30fps for interlaced TVs, or 24fps to 60fps for progressive displays). Modern TVs will actually try to detect this telecine effect and remove it so to avoid issues, but it's still more processing that goes on and increases input lag.
For a regular TV, 120Hz is plenty - it will handle all content fine. Spending money for 240Hz is just wasting it away. For 3DTVs, you need 240Hz because it has to display two images at once. As a side effect, 3DTVs tend to have slightly better display panels because the interleaved left-right images would become a mess.
Quit sitting so close to the TV, then. A 70" HDTV at 1080p lets you sit a nice distance away from the set before the pixels get too small to be resolved.
Play SD content on a 70" TV and you can probably be easily 20+' away from the set and it'll look good.
If you start playing 4K, the distance you have to sit gets a lot closer, and people don't like sitting 4' away from such a large screen. Any further and the extra resolution is wasted.
The actual controllers aren't. It's the management interface that is, and it's not unusual, especially when things like OPC (OLE for Process Control, yes, OLE, the daddy of COM and ActiveX) exist, so management of industrial process equipment from Windows has a very long history dating to Windows 3.x.
And back before things were networked heavily, it was OK so security was lax. These days though, even if you had separated industrial and corporate networks, some manager would want to pull up the stats in Excel and force a connection (COM, see?) so they can get actual data from the controller.
I've never understood the appeal of the Model M. Sure it's loud and clacky, but that seems to be a negative more than a positive.
After all, if you're in a cube farm, someone typing rapdily would sound like machinegun fire, making an already miserable work environment even worse.
And at home, well, using them at night discreetly is just as hard. Good perhaps for parents of kids to put on the kid's PC (and the shared one) so they can be alerted to stray typing, but still. Typing at night on a clacky keyboard slowed me down as I tried to type without waking everyone else up...
Have multiple browsers then - the long tail is still served up as h.264 since the flash based player does h.264 for the higher qualities.
Though you raised an interesting question about that - since the majority of YouTube videos are still in h.264 format, and Chrome can't play them now since it dropped h.264 in favor of WebM...
The average mileage a car gets is around 20K miles a year, so it's 1 bug every 5 years. I'd guess there's a lot of drivers who probably don't get anything worse than a stone chip in their windshield (average 1 every 3 years so?).
No, the dangerous part is when you have automated vehicles mixed human controled vehicles. An earlier poster said that it's the idiots you have to worry about, and it's true. How your automated system reacts is very important because there is no way to account for every possible situation. Sometimes the best action is to crash your car in a controlled manner to avoid an even nastier accident, for example.
Doesn't matter. Once the official servers are shut down, the specs required to maintain the leftover group that wants to play on a private server would be so much smaller than even if it required high end hardware before, low end might work just fine still.
Even if EVE Online had a huge RAM disk, perhaps a modern SSD is needed if you reduce the number of players down to 1% or so.
And yes, a lot of it is in configuration, but mostly because it's easier to throw hardware at the problem - it's far easier to spinup a new server when required than it is to find the bottleneck in the code, so the server software has to be able to adapt to varying configurations as servers spin up and shut down.
Actually, if you played through with the director's commentary on, the reason they cut the hard stuff was negative feedback. People were thinking it would be super hard because very fine timing would be reqiured in order to speed up through the portal, place another one at the end while avoiding crushers.
For casual gamers, repeating the same level 10 times because it relies on a lot of coincidental timing is not just a turn off - it's a game killer.
It's the same reason the final level didn't have all the stuff they wanted as well (crushers and the like) - people would end up distracted trying to portal the bombs in the right place they'd miss the crusher.
There's a puzzle where Valve went for the fun solution rather than the proper one as well - it's where you have to put a portal on a wall and use the funnel to ride out and escape (it's nearly the end - Chapter 8 or Chapter 9, I can't remember which). Playtests reveal that players would often place the wrong portal and fall which hurt the gameplay moreso than having the game make it foolproof and let you put any portal there.
And I don't believe Portal originally had many tricky timing related puzzles, other than the flinging - heck I finished it (didn't do challenges though). There may have been a few more "think fast!" moments where the puzzle was to figure out the solution in a few seconds (last test chamber, for example) in the original Portal, but that was it...
Well, the problem is in Alaska and Northern Canada, communities are literally cut off for months at a time because the weather gets so bad it's impossible to get supplies in and out. And these communities may require assistance - e.g., their generator is broken and they're relying on a backup.
Even SAR can be aided since they can fly around without risking SAR flight crew's lives.
Not for long. Harper's going to repeal the $2/vote thing that makes it valuable to seek actual votes. After that, it'll be "campaign contribution" time. Sure there are limits ($5000 or so) per *person*, but those are so easily circumvented it's silly by corporations.
Perhaps it's best if the parties were beholden to the voter - raise the per vote subsidy, and ban all contributions. Then it matters less if a party has 50% of the popular vote but cannot get many seats (as can happen in FPTP). There would be great incentive to get the vote out, and the parties would be beholden to the voter rather than corporate interests.
Even this system isn't perfect, for it rewards short term gain at the expense of long term foresight, and there can be silly situations where one party can command 80% of the vote.
Maybe spending limits? Each riding can only spend as much as the poorest candidate can spend?
And hell, at least your FCC has teeth. The CRTC is so lopsided it's silly. While your Comcast-NBC merger was going on, we've had our content producers get gobbled up by content distributors (Shaw and Bell mostly), and we've got crap like cableboxes that are useless outside the system (no CableCARD, and no one will activate someone else's box), etc.
The only thing is, it's really done for competitive purposes. OHA members don't really like AOSP because it means they release a product and some chinese OEM down the road gets to compete with them in a month's time.
The "With Google" advantage has narrowed because the "With Google" apps (which include the Market) are so widely pirated that every Android platform has it (without the Market, Android's pretty sparse as 99% of the apps on it aren't available outside the Market).
So I'd guess the code really isn't as bad as Google makes it seem, but it's being restricted more for competitive reasons - the Motorola/Samsung/LG/etc don't want to have their $500 tablets competing against the $100 crap tablets. Or to have a proper build so the $250 Nook Color won't become a serious competitor. Sure a hacked version of 3.0 is out for all sorts of platforms, but it's hacked together.
The real test will be to see if Ice Cream will be released on the same day.
Actually, the 4 9's and 11 9's refer to Amazon S3 service, which is basically cloud storage. The sites that went down were using Amazon EC2 cloud server. The former is pure disk storage, the latter provides computation. You can link S3 to EC2 for permanent storage (ECB?), as otherwise it's upload your files, do your processing, get your results, and shut down, losing everything.
S3 didn't go down, and I don't think EC2 did either, but the ECB service for the two did so websites hosted purely on Amazon died, while services using one or the other didn't (e.g., Dropbox uses S3 only).
Yeah, but to get that PC version required using the PS3 version of Steam. Which you can't right now because PSN is down.
I know a few people who preordered the PS3 versoin purely for the PC version at first, then the PS3 play later (not sure if they followed through if they didn't realize you need a PS3 to et the PC version).
Those with PS3s who bought it to play the PC versoin (it is only $10 more, after all) also are stuck playing the PS3 version.
Me personally, I bought it only because I had a $20 off 2 games coupon I wanted to use. Bought PC version as I didn't want to buy something I can't use (refuse to update firmware, and thus, no PSN. And if you must know - no OtherOS, and I lose support for my Xbox360-to-PS3 controller adapter). And no, I didn't realize you need Steam for PS3 to redeem the PC version. Hell, I wasn't even going to buy Portal 2 at all. Just I got the coupon a few days before release and decided if I could find another, it would be a good use.
Cultural issue, really. Some people aren't so materialistic and can get by quite happily without a lot of stuff. One computer (laptop), a TV is all they need to be happy. If they want to read books, they visit their library. If they want to work on things they gather at friend's places. Of course, they probably work on small art pieces to fit in places like this, and do things outside the house.
Of course, I would go nuts in a place that small - but that's just me. Other people I Know use their houses just to eat and sleep - they go out and do other things.
Easy, fly higher.
Ground effect only happens when you're close to the ground. A rule of thumb is that it's effect is negligble after you reach a height equal to half the wingspan.
So a rotor blade (or wing) of 3m length (6m rotor disc/wingspan), once above 3m in height, would have to be flying out of ground effect.
And yes, ground effect is a big deal - it lowers the amount of lift you actually need by quite a bit. Student pilots find this out on landing when all of a sudden the airplane floats down the runway. Experienced pilots find it when their plane seems to take off, but only bobs above the ground without really gaining altitude.
It's useful for text entry actually. If you tap the wrong key you just shift left or right and the feedback tells you when you can lift your finger - after a few times you'll probalby do this automatically. It beats the current method where you have make sure the finger has rolled enough, though the enlarged popups help (on iOS) since it's easier ot see. Also on iOS, you can touch the punctuation shift, drag over to the character you want, then lift which types that character and resets back to alphas.
If you just use hunt and peck on a touch screen, then yes its utility is limited. But if you try to use the assistance the OS is giving for onscreen keyboards, it can help out a lot.
I buy points cards and prepaid cards for one simple reason - they go on SALE.
When I can get a "free" 25% discount by buying a $20 points card for $15, it's a net win to me. Ditto Xbox Live Gold membership - regular price $60, discounted price $50 without looking too hard. Hell, Microsoft even runs Live Gold specials from time to time. But Dell, Amazon, etc., they often have tons of sales on the stuff.
Also, I don't see leftovers being a huge win for Microsoft in the end - firstly, getting stuck with over 100 points will be hard since there's enough crap to easily put you under it, and if you have 400 points or so, that's enough for many XBLA games, especially those on sale. And since they don't expire, big whoop.
And for the more expensive things like movie rentals and 360 games (yes, you can buy Xbox360 games through Xbox Live - though they typically take a few months after release), you can choose to pay either by points or the real dollar amount. For me, it's points since those are on sale often enough.
Or it might just be your server.
Uncompressed OTA HD is 20Mbps tops (per ATSC spec). 3 HD streams would consume a good chunk of Fast Ethernet, but there's still enough leftover. And if you go Blu-Ray, it also tops out around 15-20Mbps or so. If it's cable HD, you're lucky to get 6Mbps per channel.
The N wifi is probably the biggest consumer of bandwidth, but my general experience is it offers maybe just a bit faster performance than Fast Ethernet.
Now, if your DLNA server is serving up 3 HDTV streams and you're busy copying files to it over WiFi, it's probably your server and I/O throughput (those streams are causing the heads to skitter across the platters, and the fastest spinning rust can do is around 100 seeks/second).
Also, if your router is the one doing DLNA/file serving/packet routing (WiFi-wired), there's 95% of your problem right there.
Yeah, Activision has pretty much screwed up Blizzard.
I got SC2, and it's nice, but Bnet 2.0 pretty much soured me off it trying to get a really idiotic issue resolved (the name you enter in the dialog is permanent and unchangable - this was fixed a month later with an announcement of paid name changes - WTF? Fine print does not constitute adequate warning and reeks of nickel and diming).
The scary part is, they'e snagged Bungie with a 10-year deal as well, so there goes yet another good developer;
I wanted to preorder Diablo 3 when I picked up my SC2 preorder. Something said I should wait, and I heeded that. Given my Bnet 2.0 experience, I think I'll pass. The game will be good (courtesy Blizzard), but the business side of it leaves a lot to be desired. I only ever got the impression that what you get is a subscription-fee free version of WoW, made that way by simply charging you extra in every other area.