Realistically here, the high end camera makers don't write plugins for the GIMP, so if one wants to make use of the RAW images from one's EOS-1 or other camera without losing data, they are either using Photoshop, or perhaps Lightroom.
Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
There's no need to reverse-engineer anything. Anyone involved with processing photos already knows about dcraw which is used to turn RAW files into something usable. In fact, Adobe uses it in Photoshop, as does practically everyone else except the camera manufacturers.
Now, they all modify the code as they think they have a better Bayer interpolation code than everyone else, but that's their perogative. (RAW images are just raw sensor data plus metadata).
Users were allowed to program the Osborne - it had a built-in programming language interpreter. iPad? Verboten.
*WAS* verboten. Apple recanted, which is why Adobe's Flash to iOS compiler is back on the table, game devs can embed Lua without worrying about a thing, Python interpreters, and even a BASIC interpreter.
I saw Tron: Legacy in theatres long before my current project which involves loading CPU images into an FPGA bank and running software on top of that.
Though I've always wondered how that would translate to the TRON world - after all, I can take down the soft-CPU (it's an ARM core) with a click of a button, reload it with another ARM code (and peripherals) with another click, etc.
Always wondered how that would translate. (And while I don't load Linux on them, others apparently do load Linux on them as well).
Yeah, it makes no sense, but sometimes it's fun to consider what happens.
Anyway, I had Pandora on it. I didn't reinstall Pandora right away on my replacement phone, but when I finally did (months later) and logged into my Pandora account, my stations had been replaced with a bunch of stuff I would never listen to. So explain to me how that happened, other than someone using the phone that was supposedly returned to Apple?
UUIDs are unique per phone hardware (I think they're derived from an internal serial number embedded either in flash, the CPU, or a mixture of all sorts of entropy (dual MACs from WiFi+BT, serial number, flash serial number, IMEI, etc).
When you exchanged your 3GS, Apple puts it in a pile to be refurbed and gives you one from the freshly refurbed (or brand new - they need seed stock and it's brand new, except sans accessories, etc). What that refurb pile gets big enough, they ship it back to Apple who then accumulates a big pile of those and they go and repair them all in one go. Those then get distributed back as units to replace other failed ones, and the cycle continues. Your broken unit ended up fixed and was used to replace another broken unit.
And Apple does have refurb sales too to sell the repaired units.
Of course, the developer is an idiot for using UUIDs to identify people, since there's no 1:1 relationship between phones and people. Some people own more than one phone. Some phones are owned by more than one person.
The iPhone 4 is using a backside illuminated sensor (from OmniVision, IIRC) - it was one of the big talking points from Job's keynote last year introducing the iPhone 4. It was the big change from the 3GS which also used a 5MP camera sensor, but wasn't backside illuminated.
Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.
Politics, really.
In an ideal world, we'd have all the planes beaming back CVR and FDR data (the black boxes) to ground stations and satellites, as well as the units themselves (should connections be lost).
However, there are some very powerful forces in the way.
First - where and who stores the data? The US government will rightly demand that it should, while other governments will object to this. Anywhere outside the US will be objected to by the US, and many countries will see the US attempt as a way for the US to get passenger manifests of all flights. (The US already demands it for flights that are transiting through its airspace, so many Canadian flights reroute to stay in Canadian airspace). And yes, anyone on the no-fly list isn't allowed in and the flight must make a stop. Thus, this is really a non-starter.
OK, so we let the airlines store the data. Can we really trust them to not screw this up? It's an IT-heavy issue, and given how bad a lot of airline IT systems are...
Third, we have the whole pilot thing. There's a reason why CVRs are only 30 minutes in recording time, even though they're all solid-state these days and we can record multi-channel full DVD-quality audio (96kHz/24bit) for hours on relatively cheap SSDs (multiple for redundancy, even) and flash storage media - it doesn't take a whole lot. The technology is capable, but we're still stuck at 30 minutes.
Finally - who pays? All the costs are going to be borne by passengers as another fee, and we all know how fun it is that our ticket price triples because of all the fees/taxes/etc that get added on. Plus, you have to equip every aircraft, which is a huge undertaking and very expensive - and the added weight for the short-haul flights may severely cut capacity especially on regional airlines.
The technology is there. The reason we haven't gone to transmitting all the data continually is mostly in the political and monetary side. Heck, the move to 406MHz ELTs has been underway for a decade now (the last satellites monitoring 121.5MHz were decomissioned in early 2010), and we're really only seeing slow conversion and takeup.
Give it 50 years and it'll probably be done in an ad-hoc manner, while in the meantime we can probabl find stopgap measures. Maybe secondary recorders mounted on the outside of the plane that eject when they hit water (and float) with GPS trackers. Because of the harsh environment they have to exist in operationally (standard recorders only have to survive harsh environments once), they can be set to record less so at least some data is availalble.
They would store "someone visited page X at date Y and time Z" and they may also be able to store "and they were referred in from page ABC", but they would have no way of seeing where you went from that page, even if it was to another page on the site, because all that page is going to store is the same non-identifiable information.
A cookie allows them to give you a unique identifier, which works for differentiation down to individual browsers on the same machine, and that allows them to get a good picture of your travel around their site (and their affiliate sites etc) - the DNT flag would remove that, only allowing them to track the number of hits on a page and where the visitor came from.
They don't know its "you" each time, because the DNT flag contains no identifiable information - to them, this is the equivilent of you clearing out your cookies after each individual page visit. No cookie, no ID, no tracking beyond the current page. Same deal.
Still, it may not be exactly *you*, but if your IP address shows up several times in the access log within a few minutes (and they're for different articles), you could guess that maybe it's the same person visiting several of the same stories.
Also, does the browser in DNT mode do header santization? After all, didn't the EFF prove that even without session cookies, you can still fingerprint the browser and track that way fairly reliably? (The few that are generic fall into the noise of those who want to screw with the data anyhow).
I don't see anything mentioning if setting the option santizes headers or not.
This is just another example of Google trying to keep control of an OSS project. Ultimately the truth is they cannot. If they comply with the OSS licenses in play they have to release it and this will allow ANYONE to use Android as a platform. With that said they can keep people from using the trademark "with Google" off such devices (who cares?). If Google wanted to keep things closed they should have forked something with a BSD style license, like Apple did.
Repeat after me, Android is not open-source. AOSP is not Android.
Motorola isn't the only company with Honeycomb. You can bet LG, Samsung and HTC have it too. It's just that Google has decided to not push the Honeycomb code to AOSP yet. Doesn't mean Honeycomb tablets aren't coming, it just means that tablets relying on AOSP code won't have access to the official code yet (they can do various hacks to get Honeycomb working though).
And "with Google" isn't just a brand. It's a collection of apps that people expect from Android devices, including... Google Marketplace. Without it, most Android devices won't have access to the vast majority of Android apps and have to resort to either pirating the Marketplace (Nook Color, Archos Tablets, others), or pirating apps (most free ones won't be there though). Other apps are YouTube, GMail, Goggles and Maps (and without Marketplace, it's impossible to update those, too).
Google has full control of the hardware platform. They can't control what people do with AOSP, but they can ensure the official Android devices meet a minimum spec and software release. So for example, if 3.1 comes out, Google can ensure every tablet released from that point must have 3.1, and not 3.0 "with future support for 3.1".
AOSP users like Archos and the like, they can release anything they want. Including crapping $100 tablets that run Android crappily. Google can't do a thing about those, other than ignore them, in the hopes customers do too so it doesn't sully the Android experience.
Problem is, in the ever-changing world, one of the thing is to accuse first and ask questoins later, in order to get those website hits and oh-so-sweet advertiser revenue.
The first ones to break the stories gets the hits and eyeballs. The ones to do the research get left by the wayside, mostly unread while everyone else spreads mistruths because they never saw the followup, read beyond the headline, etc. Hell, it happens on/. too.
Move is nothing more than a wand and a webcam. There's nothing in it that's really too much different than a Wii (if anything, it's an evolution of the Wiimote's IR camera sensor).
People have been doing image recognition prior to this for ages now, and any depth mapping via cameras has involved dual cameras for stereoscopic vision.
Sony's Move really doesn't offer researchers too much to play with that they don't already have - recognizing a glowing colored ball in 3D space? We can already do it (and it's even commercialized - "augmented reality").
Kinect though, gets you a slightly shifted image plus a 3D depth map, cheaply. Something that's usually cost a lot more is available to everyone.
Sure it's not LIDAR accurate, or time-of-flight precision, and there's interference if you want to up the resolution with two units (it is structured light fields, after all), but it's cheap enough that researchers are able to use it for things that they're working on to see what happens.
Quadcopters navigating was confined to LIDAR imagery or special rooms with high-framerate cameras doing mocap.
And no, Microsoft didn't encrypt it because they couldn't - the Xbox360 has a fundamental USB 2.0 throughput limit - the Kinect can easiy do VGA depth mapping, but the bandwidth constraint of the USB 2.0 on the 360 means it has to be VGA+QVGA+Audio only. If Microsoft can boost the USB throughput of the 360 to its theoretical hardware max (40MB/sec on the 360), then there's a possibility a firmware upgrade would bring it to VGA+VGA.
Kinect is a bandwidth hungry device, and the Xbox360's USB ports aren't all that fast. It's probably why Microsoft had to do all sorts of contortions to use the more reliable USB2.0 port in the back.
If the system or data is at all important, it should be virtually impossible to access it without real two-factor authentication. A CA is important. Financial systems are important. The Administrative interfaces to your company's core systems are important.
Ah, but two-factor is also expensive.
That's why banks and other financial institutions have rolled out two factor abortions that are really just more passwords.
Wish it was Two-Factor shows how pretty much most North American banks have things set up. It's just another password, really, and both are "something you know". (And not "something you have" or "something you are")
Which utterly fails to explain why they have the date of birth, much less social security number. If they can provide a valid photo ID with their name on it to prove their identity that ought to be good enough. You might argue for a masked SSN to differentiate Joe Smith #1 and Joe Smith #1, but name and address ought to be good enough for that; if they live at the same house you can probably treat them as part of the same household. And if not, take out a pen and paper and write a goddamned exception rather than trying to fit it into your database or whatever.
What if the field agent was going about collecting that data? Affected people come in, state your case and fill in the information, and done. For monetary compenation, I think SSN+DOB (the only way to ensure uniqueness) is required for tax purposes.
For mass disasters where the damage can be localized, it's often easier to just open a temporary office to collect all the information in person than try to handle some sort of mail in system. And human to human conversations add enough "je ne sais quoi" that people feel more comfortable that things are happening.
Or more likely, there was a bug in some change made, and it affected everyone. Just those in the affected countries had mass numbers of people trying to enable it for obvious reasons that it appeared to break there. The rest of the world either had it set or didn't know it existed.
After all, we don't know if it affected people in the US who set it, went "meh" and forgot all about it when it didn't appear to work (or they didn't notice). The folks in the middle east tried it en-masse and noticed it didn't work.
After all, if you get 100,000 reports of it not working in the middle east and maybe 10 of the same thing outside there, you'd think the 10 were doing it wrong and it wasn't working only in the middle east.
Plus the fact that it worked for those who has it set long before only made matters more confusing.
They really should try flash heavy sites like YouTube.
I can have my battery life cut in half when using Chrome 10 on YouTube; so much so that I actually have to switch back to Firefox for extended browsing when I'm on the road. It's pretty poor because even if the video has stopped and it becomes an idle page it can still sit at 10-15+% while doing absolutely nothing (so I don't see how they can claim rendering speed is the cause).
It's the plugin architecture, and Flash itself. Plugins get periodic callbacks from the browser to let them do something. Flash itself is probably polling something or other while it's waiting (and YouTube is fetching new recommendatoins and all that stuff in the background).
It's stuff outside of the browser's control (the only thing the browser can do is simply send these callbacks slower, but if it's playing video or animation this will cause it to stutter). It's one thing HTML5 can improve over Flash since the browser can determine if it's playing a video or idle waiting to play, or if the animation is running or stopped and other optimizations (e.g., if the animation isn't visible, stop animating but continue audio playback - you can't stop sending callbacks to plugins as many people background flash-based music streamers and video players).
Yes but LCDs actually require more energy to produce black than white. The reason is the LCD panel is a sandwich of a horizontal polariser, a liquid crystal, and a vertical polariser. The default state of the liquid crystal rotates the polarity angle to match the front polariser, when charge is applied to it the light passes through unaltered in which case it won't pass through the front polarising screen. e.g. apply charge to pixel to produce black. It's not a universal power draw regardless of what you display.
It only applies when changing the screen. Going from white->black or black->white requires power.
The LCD electrically appears a lot like DRAM memory - it needs to be refreshed otherwise the data is lost. The pixel itself is driven by a transistor to a huge capacitive spot (the LCD sandwich), akin to a DRAM cell. From there it'll hold its charge until it bleeds off. Some screens fade to white, others to black.
No, the biggest reason why LCDs can save power displaying black is more mundane - many/most monitors come today with a bug known as "dynamic contrast", "local dimming" and other such crap. What it does is if the screen is displaying black, the backlight automatically dims to make the blacks darker. With LED backlights, they can do better and do local dimming where black parts of the screen are dimmed. When you're displaying white, the backlight is pumped brighter, giving a brighter white.
That's how they accomplish those huge contrast ratios - it is, after all, a measure of black to white. Set the backlight at the middle setting (so it can go up or down equally), and measure an all-white picture (the monitor basically maxes the backlight) and an all-black picture (monitor turns backlight off), and boom, 30,000:1 or higher ratios. The backlight is still one of the largest consumers of power, so displaying white consumes more power by having the backlight cranked to max, while black consumes least by having it basically off.
The downside to this, of course, is lack of contrast in the dimmed areas. So that bright contrasty thing in the sea of darkness turns into a dim grey spot.
Problem with that is that our culture is gaining a sense of entitlement thanks to the "always connected" fad. How do you convince people that it's wrong to use tech in courtrooms when everything else is telling them that it's their God-given right to have 24-7 access to Twitter? I too believe in treating the disease before the symptoms, but this goes much deeper than - as one poster put it - jurors playing Angry Birds. People first need to realise that just because they can do something doesn't always mean they should, which may sound like common sense but seems to be lacking in the general population
Simple, we start by forcing everyone to re-learn basic manners and behaviours out in public. We don't need to go into the formalities of fork placement, but we can start with the simple and move up to expected behaviours in formal places, which a courtroom is. In formal places, there are set rules and procedures, and they're the same whether you're sitting in court (as a judge, jury, prosecutor, defense, witness or observer), attending a wedding ceremony, graduation, funerals, job interviews, etc.
Really, the rules of basic courtesy, behaviour, and manners haven't changed in a long time, and don't really need updating for technology either. Or maybe it's just the golden rule needs to be-drilled into people's heads - after all, how would said juror feel if they were on the defense and the jury were all twittering away?
They seem to be getting behind it. Reportedly they're going to have a regular Android App marketplace on the thing. There are rumors of an official full Android software update. Why fight it? The more people who buy it, the cheaper the economies of scale become for their reader.
It's a B&N alternative marketplace, it's not the Google Marketplace because the Nook Color doesn't qualify (no modem, no phone, no bluetooth, no camera, no GPS), and B&N isn't a member of the OHA, so "with Google" isn't possible, and that includes the Google Marketplace.
Instead, it'll be like the Amazon Marketplace, SlideMe, or one of the many others.
It's also why the first thing people do on non-Google Android devices is put in a pirated version of the Marketplace because that's where all the apps are - and the availability of apps outside the marketplace is tiny. Most people just put up a QR code and that's it, with the QR code being a marketplace link.
What impresses me the most about Google is that they, as a company, have consistently taken actions that demonstrate long-term thinking.
On the other hand, they passed up on buying Sun because it was a huge short-term cost, when a large portion or their internal code and android depends on Java and it would have given them a huge pool of real patents. There's a chance they could get away scot free on it, but it doesn't look all that likely.
That's because that's not the place they want to be in.
Android is just a mechanism to sell ads via Admob. Why do you think Android apps have no DRM on them (Amazon's probably one of the first) and thusly, quite high piracy rates? Or why the Android Marketplace has mostly free apps? Google Checkout being limited pretty much means either give up in places where there's no payment option, or go free. And since people have to eat, the easiest way to "sell" apps for free is to load them up with ads, like the old adware software you find on Windows and the like.
Google's income comes from selling ads. By making Android, they're in a good position to be the top seller of mobile ads, earning money from Android that way. I'm just surprised they haven't gone out of their way to make it trivially easy for devs to add ads to their apps - but maybe that's in the next release.
I plan to do the same. I think I'm even fortunate enough to have someone running in my riding, so they'll definitely get my vote. They'll never get elected, but I don't know if that's the point. If they can get enough votes that the other parties look at them and say "Hey, what are they doing to get all those votes? Maybe if we did what they do, we could take those votes back." And naturally, if suddenly the Liberal Party had the same policies as Pirate Party regarding Copyright, they'd have won my vote.
They get some money if they get enough votes - $1.25 per vote.
It's one of the few things that Harper wants to get rid that riles me - he wants to go to an all-bribery^W campaign contribution system (because he can raise the most money that way), when in fact, we should go the other way and have all the parties paid for by votes in the election.
That way they're more honest to the voters - perhaps make it in their tax returns or something as "political contributions" where that money goes straight to the government and divvied up based on the actual vote count - if no one contributed a cent, no party gets anything, etc. And because it's divvied up equally, if you donate $100, it goes to all parties.
The only problem is we need to hae a checks and balances system to prevent the lucky party that ends up getting 80% of the vote eventually to simply outspend everyone or voting out the law.
And companies will find they can't buy via campaign contributions anymore, either - the best they can do is influence their employees to vote a certain way. But secret ballots keep them from finding out who voted for whom.
If you want to know why smart phones are $600+ a pop, crap like this is why. The patent arsenals these companies amass are there to destroy competition and nothing else. It isn't like Apple or Nokia would stop innovating if suddenly they didn't have patent protection. What it would mean is that 600 Silicon Valley startups could also jump into the cell phone game and drive the price into the dirt and innovation through the roof.
You can buy phone modules from various companies (like Sierra Wireless) that are fully paid up on all the relevant telephony patents - they'[re roughly between $50 and $100 each in quantity. The patent license fees are built into the cost of the unit itself. You're free to integrate it into your smartphone project.
And no, smartphones do not cost $500 - the iPhone routinely costs about half what Apple is charging in parts, and the R&D work costs less and less as devices are sold. I'm sure they could cost $300 if Apple was willing to make very little money selling them. All it would take is Motorola or Samsung or LG to drop their contract-free Androids to such a price.
Cheap cellphones exist as well, many with a data connection that can be tied to a beefier processor to give you all the processing you need.
but it's very easy to avoid ! get a car with kilometers on the speed/odometer. HA.
You do realize a kilometre is shorter than a statute mile, right? So an odometer reading in kilometres will read *more* than a odometer reading in miles.
I'd be for this if they get rid of gas taxes altogether - that way all cars are taxed equallty. Otherwise the gas taxes are paying for cars that don't necessary take gas, either (EVs, for example)
Yeah, the OSS platform will always be one version behind the version they give to their top-tier partners, thus Motorola and Samsung get a head start selling the best devices, and then vendors who Google doesn't license Ice Cream to are stuck selling last year's commodity, in a market that is by then saturated.
Pretty cool, huh? Almost as if Google has created a perpetual motion machine that allows them to release their platform as open software, while simultaneously maintaining the power to decide which handset vendors will thrive.
There are two projects called Android. One is Android, which is distributed to all OHA partners. And since you have to be an OHA partner anyhow to get the "with Google" stuff (e.g,, Market, YouTube, Gmail, etc.), all the OHA members can get access to Honeycomb right now.
The other Android project is AOSP, which is the open-source version fo Android and distributed to the world. If you're not a member of the OHA (requirements include being sponsored by an OHA member, and some annual fee), you can only use AOSP. This is the rise of the cheap handsets and tablets that don't ship with the Google stuff (lots of handsets in China are built using AOSP and officially don't have "with Google", plus a lot of the cheap tablets you can find).
I think this policy came about because the OHA members were complaining they had to compete with the cheap tablets out there.
The other downside of this, that will bite the OHA's members in the ass is that silicon venders like Broadcom, TI, Marvell, Freescale, etc., rely on AOSP to provide Android packages so they can test their chips with Android. If they can't access the latest and greatest, then the chips that OHA members use may not have the Android support they need. Note that I excluded Samsung, and Qualcomm because they are OHA members.
h.264 is being cross licensed mostly due to patent AND compatibility issues. GPL isn't the core of this issue. Getting sued by the MPEG LA is.
MPEG-LA can't sue you. Individual patent holders can - they're a licensing authority - they offer a bunch of patent licenses for a set fee to everyone. You are free to implement your own h.264 stuff and not license the patents from MPEG-LA, instead opting to license the patents individually from all the patent holders. Of course, licensing that many patents is going to be difficult and there'll always be an idiot licensor that doesn't want to license to you, so most companies pay MPEG-LA to just get it over with because it's cheaper than doing it yourself.
I really wonder what the problem is though - why does Samba going GPLv3 affect OS X, especially since it included it as GPLv2 before? The only big difference is the anti-TiVoization thing, which isn't an issue since I don't think samba's a signed/encrypted binary anyhow. Or did samba also go Affero GPLv3 or one of the other alternative GPLv3 licenses?
There's got to be more to the story - what part of the GPLv3 now makes it incompatible? Was some of the Samba libraries LGPL'd before?
I guess they do that because they don't make any money from you selling your phone second hand. This is especially true for iPhones and Android. Are Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 really the only phones that have complete wipe feature built-in?
iPhones have wipe capability as well - there's a standard option in the settings menu for it. This I think was an option since iOS 3 which added Exchange support (where it also adds remote-wipe capability)
And yes, it takes that long because it's doing a full wipe. Which can leave your iPhone in a bad state, too, requiring an iTunes restore (which repartitions, reformats and installs the OS again).
I would assume Android devices have a similar feature, though I think it was limited to just a simple clear all data by reformatting the user disk.
The phones most likely to contain personal information would be the old dumbphones or featurephones which often don't have interfaces to do it other than manually going through and deleting one by one.
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Nikon and Canon don't write plugins for Adobe products, either. Adobe writes them, and they don't even have full access to RAW specs, as camera manufactures keep them proprietary and secret. Most of it is reverse-engineered, with some (unknown) data simple being unused by Adobe products.
If GIMP developers went through the same effort of reverse-engineering formats, they'd be able to support them, too. Although, I still don't see many serious professionals using GIMP -- the difference in other features and performance is just too great.
There's no need to reverse-engineer anything. Anyone involved with processing photos already knows about dcraw which is used to turn RAW files into something usable. In fact, Adobe uses it in Photoshop, as does practically everyone else except the camera manufacturers.
Now, they all modify the code as they think they have a better Bayer interpolation code than everyone else, but that's their perogative. (RAW images are just raw sensor data plus metadata).
*WAS* verboten. Apple recanted, which is why Adobe's Flash to iOS compiler is back on the table, game devs can embed Lua without worrying about a thing, Python interpreters, and even a BASIC interpreter.
I saw Tron: Legacy in theatres long before my current project which involves loading CPU images into an FPGA bank and running software on top of that.
Though I've always wondered how that would translate to the TRON world - after all, I can take down the soft-CPU (it's an ARM core) with a click of a button, reload it with another ARM code (and peripherals) with another click, etc.
Always wondered how that would translate. (And while I don't load Linux on them, others apparently do load Linux on them as well).
Yeah, it makes no sense, but sometimes it's fun to consider what happens.
UUIDs are unique per phone hardware (I think they're derived from an internal serial number embedded either in flash, the CPU, or a mixture of all sorts of entropy (dual MACs from WiFi+BT, serial number, flash serial number, IMEI, etc).
When you exchanged your 3GS, Apple puts it in a pile to be refurbed and gives you one from the freshly refurbed (or brand new - they need seed stock and it's brand new, except sans accessories, etc). What that refurb pile gets big enough, they ship it back to Apple who then accumulates a big pile of those and they go and repair them all in one go. Those then get distributed back as units to replace other failed ones, and the cycle continues. Your broken unit ended up fixed and was used to replace another broken unit.
And Apple does have refurb sales too to sell the repaired units.
Of course, the developer is an idiot for using UUIDs to identify people, since there's no 1:1 relationship between phones and people. Some people own more than one phone. Some phones are owned by more than one person.
Well, now everyone will copy and paste the output from the DVD, but I saw it in the theatre.
And I saw Flynn key in "uname -a" and I tried to parse the listing for interesthing things.
Alas, all I caught as the OS was named "SolarOS" and the arch was "sun4m". A tribute to ye olde SunOS, I guess (SunOS/sparc).
Though, I'd love that nice popup history window...
The iPhone 4 is using a backside illuminated sensor (from OmniVision, IIRC) - it was one of the big talking points from Job's keynote last year introducing the iPhone 4. It was the big change from the 3GS which also used a 5MP camera sensor, but wasn't backside illuminated.
Politics, really.
In an ideal world, we'd have all the planes beaming back CVR and FDR data (the black boxes) to ground stations and satellites, as well as the units themselves (should connections be lost).
However, there are some very powerful forces in the way.
First - where and who stores the data? The US government will rightly demand that it should, while other governments will object to this. Anywhere outside the US will be objected to by the US, and many countries will see the US attempt as a way for the US to get passenger manifests of all flights. (The US already demands it for flights that are transiting through its airspace, so many Canadian flights reroute to stay in Canadian airspace). And yes, anyone on the no-fly list isn't allowed in and the flight must make a stop. Thus, this is really a non-starter.
OK, so we let the airlines store the data. Can we really trust them to not screw this up? It's an IT-heavy issue, and given how bad a lot of airline IT systems are...
Third, we have the whole pilot thing. There's a reason why CVRs are only 30 minutes in recording time, even though they're all solid-state these days and we can record multi-channel full DVD-quality audio (96kHz/24bit) for hours on relatively cheap SSDs (multiple for redundancy, even) and flash storage media - it doesn't take a whole lot. The technology is capable, but we're still stuck at 30 minutes.
Finally - who pays? All the costs are going to be borne by passengers as another fee, and we all know how fun it is that our ticket price triples because of all the fees/taxes/etc that get added on. Plus, you have to equip every aircraft, which is a huge undertaking and very expensive - and the added weight for the short-haul flights may severely cut capacity especially on regional airlines.
The technology is there. The reason we haven't gone to transmitting all the data continually is mostly in the political and monetary side. Heck, the move to 406MHz ELTs has been underway for a decade now (the last satellites monitoring 121.5MHz were decomissioned in early 2010), and we're really only seeing slow conversion and takeup.
Give it 50 years and it'll probably be done in an ad-hoc manner, while in the meantime we can probabl find stopgap measures. Maybe secondary recorders mounted on the outside of the plane that eject when they hit water (and float) with GPS trackers. Because of the harsh environment they have to exist in operationally (standard recorders only have to survive harsh environments once), they can be set to record less so at least some data is availalble.
Still, it may not be exactly *you*, but if your IP address shows up several times in the access log within a few minutes (and they're for different articles), you could guess that maybe it's the same person visiting several of the same stories.
Also, does the browser in DNT mode do header santization? After all, didn't the EFF prove that even without session cookies, you can still fingerprint the browser and track that way fairly reliably? (The few that are generic fall into the noise of those who want to screw with the data anyhow).
I don't see anything mentioning if setting the option santizes headers or not.
http://panopticlick.eff.org/
Repeat after me, Android is not open-source. AOSP is not Android.
Motorola isn't the only company with Honeycomb. You can bet LG, Samsung and HTC have it too. It's just that Google has decided to not push the Honeycomb code to AOSP yet. Doesn't mean Honeycomb tablets aren't coming, it just means that tablets relying on AOSP code won't have access to the official code yet (they can do various hacks to get Honeycomb working though).
And "with Google" isn't just a brand. It's a collection of apps that people expect from Android devices, including ... Google Marketplace. Without it, most Android devices won't have access to the vast majority of Android apps and have to resort to either pirating the Marketplace (Nook Color, Archos Tablets, others), or pirating apps (most free ones won't be there though). Other apps are YouTube, GMail, Goggles and Maps (and without Marketplace, it's impossible to update those, too).
Google has full control of the hardware platform. They can't control what people do with AOSP, but they can ensure the official Android devices meet a minimum spec and software release. So for example, if 3.1 comes out, Google can ensure every tablet released from that point must have 3.1, and not 3.0 "with future support for 3.1".
AOSP users like Archos and the like, they can release anything they want. Including crapping $100 tablets that run Android crappily. Google can't do a thing about those, other than ignore them, in the hopes customers do too so it doesn't sully the Android experience.
Problem is, in the ever-changing world, one of the thing is to accuse first and ask questoins later, in order to get those website hits and oh-so-sweet advertiser revenue.
The first ones to break the stories gets the hits and eyeballs. The ones to do the research get left by the wayside, mostly unread while everyone else spreads mistruths because they never saw the followup, read beyond the headline, etc. Hell, it happens on /. too.
Move is nothing more than a wand and a webcam. There's nothing in it that's really too much different than a Wii (if anything, it's an evolution of the Wiimote's IR camera sensor).
People have been doing image recognition prior to this for ages now, and any depth mapping via cameras has involved dual cameras for stereoscopic vision.
Sony's Move really doesn't offer researchers too much to play with that they don't already have - recognizing a glowing colored ball in 3D space? We can already do it (and it's even commercialized - "augmented reality").
Kinect though, gets you a slightly shifted image plus a 3D depth map, cheaply. Something that's usually cost a lot more is available to everyone.
Sure it's not LIDAR accurate, or time-of-flight precision, and there's interference if you want to up the resolution with two units (it is structured light fields, after all), but it's cheap enough that researchers are able to use it for things that they're working on to see what happens.
Quadcopters navigating was confined to LIDAR imagery or special rooms with high-framerate cameras doing mocap.
And no, Microsoft didn't encrypt it because they couldn't - the Xbox360 has a fundamental USB 2.0 throughput limit - the Kinect can easiy do VGA depth mapping, but the bandwidth constraint of the USB 2.0 on the 360 means it has to be VGA+QVGA+Audio only. If Microsoft can boost the USB throughput of the 360 to its theoretical hardware max (40MB/sec on the 360), then there's a possibility a firmware upgrade would bring it to VGA+VGA.
Kinect is a bandwidth hungry device, and the Xbox360's USB ports aren't all that fast. It's probably why Microsoft had to do all sorts of contortions to use the more reliable USB2.0 port in the back.
Ah, but two-factor is also expensive.
That's why banks and other financial institutions have rolled out two factor abortions that are really just more passwords.
Wish it was Two-Factor shows how pretty much most North American banks have things set up. It's just another password, really, and both are "something you know". (And not "something you have" or "something you are")
What if the field agent was going about collecting that data? Affected people come in, state your case and fill in the information, and done. For monetary compenation, I think SSN+DOB (the only way to ensure uniqueness) is required for tax purposes.
For mass disasters where the damage can be localized, it's often easier to just open a temporary office to collect all the information in person than try to handle some sort of mail in system. And human to human conversations add enough "je ne sais quoi" that people feel more comfortable that things are happening.
Or more likely, there was a bug in some change made, and it affected everyone. Just those in the affected countries had mass numbers of people trying to enable it for obvious reasons that it appeared to break there. The rest of the world either had it set or didn't know it existed.
After all, we don't know if it affected people in the US who set it, went "meh" and forgot all about it when it didn't appear to work (or they didn't notice). The folks in the middle east tried it en-masse and noticed it didn't work.
After all, if you get 100,000 reports of it not working in the middle east and maybe 10 of the same thing outside there, you'd think the 10 were doing it wrong and it wasn't working only in the middle east.
Plus the fact that it worked for those who has it set long before only made matters more confusing.
It's the plugin architecture, and Flash itself. Plugins get periodic callbacks from the browser to let them do something. Flash itself is probably polling something or other while it's waiting (and YouTube is fetching new recommendatoins and all that stuff in the background).
It's stuff outside of the browser's control (the only thing the browser can do is simply send these callbacks slower, but if it's playing video or animation this will cause it to stutter). It's one thing HTML5 can improve over Flash since the browser can determine if it's playing a video or idle waiting to play, or if the animation is running or stopped and other optimizations (e.g., if the animation isn't visible, stop animating but continue audio playback - you can't stop sending callbacks to plugins as many people background flash-based music streamers and video players).
It only applies when changing the screen. Going from white->black or black->white requires power.
The LCD electrically appears a lot like DRAM memory - it needs to be refreshed otherwise the data is lost. The pixel itself is driven by a transistor to a huge capacitive spot (the LCD sandwich), akin to a DRAM cell. From there it'll hold its charge until it bleeds off. Some screens fade to white, others to black.
No, the biggest reason why LCDs can save power displaying black is more mundane - many/most monitors come today with a bug known as "dynamic contrast", "local dimming" and other such crap. What it does is if the screen is displaying black, the backlight automatically dims to make the blacks darker. With LED backlights, they can do better and do local dimming where black parts of the screen are dimmed. When you're displaying white, the backlight is pumped brighter, giving a brighter white.
That's how they accomplish those huge contrast ratios - it is, after all, a measure of black to white. Set the backlight at the middle setting (so it can go up or down equally), and measure an all-white picture (the monitor basically maxes the backlight) and an all-black picture (monitor turns backlight off), and boom, 30,000:1 or higher ratios. The backlight is still one of the largest consumers of power, so displaying white consumes more power by having the backlight cranked to max, while black consumes least by having it basically off.
The downside to this, of course, is lack of contrast in the dimmed areas. So that bright contrasty thing in the sea of darkness turns into a dim grey spot.
Simple, we start by forcing everyone to re-learn basic manners and behaviours out in public. We don't need to go into the formalities of fork placement, but we can start with the simple and move up to expected behaviours in formal places, which a courtroom is. In formal places, there are set rules and procedures, and they're the same whether you're sitting in court (as a judge, jury, prosecutor, defense, witness or observer), attending a wedding ceremony, graduation, funerals, job interviews, etc.
Really, the rules of basic courtesy, behaviour, and manners haven't changed in a long time, and don't really need updating for technology either. Or maybe it's just the golden rule needs to be-drilled into people's heads - after all, how would said juror feel if they were on the defense and the jury were all twittering away?
It's a B&N alternative marketplace, it's not the Google Marketplace because the Nook Color doesn't qualify (no modem, no phone, no bluetooth, no camera, no GPS), and B&N isn't a member of the OHA, so "with Google" isn't possible, and that includes the Google Marketplace.
Instead, it'll be like the Amazon Marketplace, SlideMe, or one of the many others.
It's also why the first thing people do on non-Google Android devices is put in a pirated version of the Marketplace because that's where all the apps are - and the availability of apps outside the marketplace is tiny. Most people just put up a QR code and that's it, with the QR code being a marketplace link.
That's because that's not the place they want to be in.
Android is just a mechanism to sell ads via Admob. Why do you think Android apps have no DRM on them (Amazon's probably one of the first) and thusly, quite high piracy rates? Or why the Android Marketplace has mostly free apps? Google Checkout being limited pretty much means either give up in places where there's no payment option, or go free. And since people have to eat, the easiest way to "sell" apps for free is to load them up with ads, like the old adware software you find on Windows and the like.
Google's income comes from selling ads. By making Android, they're in a good position to be the top seller of mobile ads, earning money from Android that way. I'm just surprised they haven't gone out of their way to make it trivially easy for devs to add ads to their apps - but maybe that's in the next release.
They get some money if they get enough votes - $1.25 per vote.
It's one of the few things that Harper wants to get rid that riles me - he wants to go to an all-bribery^W campaign contribution system (because he can raise the most money that way), when in fact, we should go the other way and have all the parties paid for by votes in the election.
That way they're more honest to the voters - perhaps make it in their tax returns or something as "political contributions" where that money goes straight to the government and divvied up based on the actual vote count - if no one contributed a cent, no party gets anything, etc. And because it's divvied up equally, if you donate $100, it goes to all parties.
The only problem is we need to hae a checks and balances system to prevent the lucky party that ends up getting 80% of the vote eventually to simply outspend everyone or voting out the law.
And companies will find they can't buy via campaign contributions anymore, either - the best they can do is influence their employees to vote a certain way. But secret ballots keep them from finding out who voted for whom.
You can buy phone modules from various companies (like Sierra Wireless) that are fully paid up on all the relevant telephony patents - they'[re roughly between $50 and $100 each in quantity. The patent license fees are built into the cost of the unit itself. You're free to integrate it into your smartphone project.
And no, smartphones do not cost $500 - the iPhone routinely costs about half what Apple is charging in parts, and the R&D work costs less and less as devices are sold. I'm sure they could cost $300 if Apple was willing to make very little money selling them. All it would take is Motorola or Samsung or LG to drop their contract-free Androids to such a price.
Cheap cellphones exist as well, many with a data connection that can be tied to a beefier processor to give you all the processing you need.
You do realize a kilometre is shorter than a statute mile, right? So an odometer reading in kilometres will read *more* than a odometer reading in miles.
I'd be for this if they get rid of gas taxes altogether - that way all cars are taxed equallty. Otherwise the gas taxes are paying for cars that don't necessary take gas, either (EVs, for example)
There are two projects called Android. One is Android, which is distributed to all OHA partners. And since you have to be an OHA partner anyhow to get the "with Google" stuff (e.g,, Market, YouTube, Gmail, etc.), all the OHA members can get access to Honeycomb right now.
The other Android project is AOSP, which is the open-source version fo Android and distributed to the world. If you're not a member of the OHA (requirements include being sponsored by an OHA member, and some annual fee), you can only use AOSP. This is the rise of the cheap handsets and tablets that don't ship with the Google stuff (lots of handsets in China are built using AOSP and officially don't have "with Google", plus a lot of the cheap tablets you can find).
I think this policy came about because the OHA members were complaining they had to compete with the cheap tablets out there.
The other downside of this, that will bite the OHA's members in the ass is that silicon venders like Broadcom, TI, Marvell, Freescale, etc., rely on AOSP to provide Android packages so they can test their chips with Android. If they can't access the latest and greatest, then the chips that OHA members use may not have the Android support they need. Note that I excluded Samsung, and Qualcomm because they are OHA members.
MPEG-LA can't sue you. Individual patent holders can - they're a licensing authority - they offer a bunch of patent licenses for a set fee to everyone. You are free to implement your own h.264 stuff and not license the patents from MPEG-LA, instead opting to license the patents individually from all the patent holders. Of course, licensing that many patents is going to be difficult and there'll always be an idiot licensor that doesn't want to license to you, so most companies pay MPEG-LA to just get it over with because it's cheaper than doing it yourself.
I really wonder what the problem is though - why does Samba going GPLv3 affect OS X, especially since it included it as GPLv2 before? The only big difference is the anti-TiVoization thing, which isn't an issue since I don't think samba's a signed/encrypted binary anyhow. Or did samba also go Affero GPLv3 or one of the other alternative GPLv3 licenses?
There's got to be more to the story - what part of the GPLv3 now makes it incompatible? Was some of the Samba libraries LGPL'd before?