45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Matter? Seriously, hardware is always getting faster. Why do we need a law that states this? Which is a more likely scenario for Intel: "Ok, we need to make our chips faster because of some ancient arbitrary rule of thumb for hardware speed.", or "Ok, we need to make our chips faster because if we don't, AMD will overtake us and we'll lose money."?
Actually, Moore's law does not imply anything about computing power. It says that the number of transistors doubles every 18 months or so. A billion transistors? That's not a lot - your 4GB MLC storage card has easily 2 billion transistors on it for the storage array.
Also, random logic blocks like that in a CPU are not the most transistor-dense things out there - memory is. Whether it's SRAM, DRAM, or flash, a memory device is always silicon-area limited. In fact, a majority of those transistors are probably used for memory blocks (caches etc).
The good thing with Moore's Law is that it means storage will double every 18 months or so, so cheaper SSDs for all.
I don't understand why the iPod ever got to the top. It was never the best player, never had the best features and the audio quality was never particularly great. Not that any iPod owner would know seeing as most of them seem to use the included ear buds.
As far as I can tell the only thing they did right was make it idiot proof with the lack of software to put music on and a huge marketing campaign.
Easy. Timing and It Just Works(tm).
First is because the whole "portable digital music" thing was in its infancy and just awaiting its exponential growth. Apple got there are the right time.
Second because they had a player that had the right formfactor, ample storage, and a usable UI. The iPod was the size of a deck of cards with 5GB of storage. Players that size had a whopping 128MB of storage! Expandable with 64MB expansion cards that cost an arm and a leg. And the scroll wheel was one of those "why didn't I think of that?" ways of navigating huge quantities of music. The competitor in storage would be the Creative Nomad, which had the bulk of a really old portable CD player, with a pile of heft. Creative included two sets of batteries because the battery life was fairly atrocious - a couple of hours-ish per set.
Then you had Firewire. Filling 6GB of Nomad storage at USB 1.1 speeds took forever. Filling 5GB of space at Firewire speed took an hour or less.
Finally, you have iTunes. In one app you can do your ripping, library management, and syncing.
And Apple had it in such a combination that when the whole digital music revolution took off around 2003-2004, Apple was right there with product in the store. (The iPod, which was the best selling MP3 player since it came out, only sold its 1 millionth unit 3 years later).
Next, Apple came out with the iTunes music store. Suddenly, a way to legally acquire music easily. Now Joe Q. Public had a stupid-simple way to rip their existing CD collection, to buy music, to manage their music, and to copy their music to their portable player.
And yes, it also helped that all the user had to do was plug the thing in and it would automatically sync and update and everything. Suddenly even tech newbies (e.g., your parents) could manage their iPods themselves and their music collections. And the marketing campaign helped spread the idea that MP3s weren't just a geek thing. Which meant the 99.9% of the non-geek population could suddenly have entire music libraries in their pocket.
And when the non-geek population started getting into this, music stores and DRM-free were the result because they cared. Otherwise who would bother serving the 0.1% geek market?
then why do so many android apps require internet access, and other information, even though they are just a simple game?, note pad, etc.
people are use to clicking on yes to continue because that's what they have to do to get it to work. 90% of the population also clicks through EULA's without reading the first sentence. I know I do. I can't be bothered to read it, it would take far longer to read and understand than the contents of the program are worth.,
That's why the Android system is a failure. UI researchers and UI developers already know this - if you put a dialog box in between the user clicking the button and accomplishing the task, the user ALWAYS dismisses it without reading. It's why UAC dialogs are a fail for general users. Every dialog and confirmation button click you impose gets dismissed without the user even clicking it. Users also don't read dialogs - error messages or anything.
The iPhone is similarly bad with push notifications - apps can produce way too many popups as well.
Users have never read a thing. Dialogs that get in the way especially.
as of recently. Bought a RAID setup with 1.5 TB drives about 1.5 years ago. The same drives are selling at the same retail for the same price last week. I think this part of our history in drives will be recognized as a major stall in product development, innovation and consumer needs.
I'd say the store you bought them from was overcharging.
I bought a 2TB (single-disk) USB drive last year for over $200 (on sale). This year, they were available for $100 also on sale. 3 years ago I bought a dual-drive 1TB (2x500 in a case that did concat) for $300, which back then was considered pretty good.
Heck, also in December I picked up 2 2TB bare drives for my Windows Home Server - for about $90 each. The 1.5TB drives were a waste - they weren't that much cheaper than 2TB ones, so I stuck with 2TB.
The price has gone down significantly - if only SSD prices would drop that quick (but they're bound by Moore's Law).
Bare drives aren't much cheaper than the USB ones I find - the USB ones can be had for a few more bucks than the bare drive, or on sale, can be cheaper. I would presume a large quantity of the large drives get redirected for external storage.
Even then, I also had to pay $80 each for 4 500GB PATA drives, and those were the cheapest and largest I found. Oddly, Best Buy had the best prices for me.
First off, I haven't seen the original TRON in over 20+ years, and I never saw it in the theatres. But I've got a copy on VHS I taped off TV sometime in tne 80s, and I've watched it many times in the 80s on TV.
It, like Starfighter, are mostly cult classics because us geeks saw how computer technology was going and we would flourish (and we have).
That said, I enjoyed TRON Legacy. It's not going to be a classic like Gone With the Wind or Sound of Music, just like the original TRON wouldn't either. But it doesn't mean it's not a film a geek shouldn't watch. It's effectively a geek blockbuster - it's not going to be cared for by many in a year.
In fact, I would classify this kind of movie as a "escapist movie" - we have classics, we have blockbusters. And we have movies that are simply a good way to spend a couple of hours but really don't do anything other than provide a distraction. It may be a bad movie, but it's entertaining. Just like I watched Transformers and Transformers 2 (also badly rated), they are great way to spend a few otherwise boring hours and get out and try to be social.
The visuals were great, the plot trite, and the soundtrack asesome. But I don't care, because I enjoyed it completely and find it was an excellent way to spend the three hours I went out a couple of days before Christmas. I escaped the hustle and bustle of christmas shoppers and got wowed by eye-candy. What more would I want?
(I personally hate classic movies - just like I hate all the English classes I had to take where I had to go identify hidden meanings in books and analyze every sentence. I don't care for subtext. I don't care for symbology or metaphors. I just want to enjoy the creative work that one or more people put in.)
Trusting facebook's privacy settings is like trusting your government to serve your best interests without representation.
More correctly, there are no privacy settings. Everything posted is best assumed to be "for everyone" even if the setting says "friends only". All it takes is one friend to re-post, re-twit, re-something that news and it'll explode, especially since you can't control their privacy settings.
Especially big things - a death, a birth, a wedding, a divorce, a job offer, a job loss, etc. The number of people who seem to find out about those thing via Facebook will be far larger than your friends list. It's gotten so bad that some places, weddings and the like often have "no facebook, no twitter,..." policies so the couple getting hitched keeps it nice and quiet rather than let the whole world know. And friends/family have been known to sternly warn other family members that births aren't to be posted at all either, again to preserve their privacy.
When the first iPhone was launched, one of the showcase apps was something where you could see where all your friends are. The first iPhone didn't have GPS, so it was WiFi and GSM triangulation and not very accurate, but my first thought was "do I want that?".
Shouldn't it have a toggle - a hardware one even, just like the mute one - where I can decide whether I want my location shared or not? It should be quick and easy to toggle between those states. I would be off most of the time, other people would be on most of the time, but everyone has reasons, times or places they don't want to be located.
But it is.
When an app wants to use your location, it has to open up CoreLocation. CoreLocation has two features - first, it has an app-unblockable popup asking if you really want the app to use your location (even GPS apps have to deal with this - and if you think there should be exceptions - guess what? Every app will use the exception). Second, there's a list of banned apps in CoreLocation (that Apple has not had to use yet) that either kill the app or disallow its use of CoreLocation (the famous Apple "kill switch").
And your idea is so wonderful, Apple did it! Since iOS 3.x, you can go to Settings..General and there's a toggle called "Location Services" that can be turned off to disable location. Isn't it wonderful?
Perhaps Android is better, though I wouldn't know. All I know is, while Apple has banned apps, removed apps, they haven't deleted apps from my iTunes or my iPhone (like Google has with several, and Amazon has with books). Yes, we are quick to condemn Apple, but they haven't force-deleted apps yet (you can still install all the removed apps you bought)
As long as they're applying this across the board and not playing favorites (at least not without a damn good in-writing reason), I'm okay with this. I fact, I don't really see IPv6 being adopted soonish absent measures like this.
Not really. It'll probably lead to NAT (v4/v6) being created as a stopgap, simply because transitioning is HARD. These companies want a simple box then can use to replace their current NATv4 router to give them both v4 and v6 compatibility with zero effort. (After all, why does every PC on my network need to know what my blasted IPv6 prefix is to get on the 'net? And unless I use DHCPv6, each PC on my network will have 3 IPs? link-local, local network (because I'm not typing out individual device IPs when FC00::/64 is available for private networking), and internet-routable). Why can't we have a box that replaces my current D-Link or Linksys? I have better things to do with my time than learn the intricacies of IPv6 (and I know IPv6 simply because I had to learn it, and I'm not looking forward to the migration))
It's doable, too, to give v4 only clients v6 access through protocol translation and a bit of DNS hackery to map v6 addresses to a v4 host temporarily like how NAT works).
We're down to 4 or 5 blocks. Let's make it happen people - a simple way to transition, and keep v4 networks internally while both supporting v4 and v6 externally. I don't care about external connectivity - I can port forward like I normally do.
This would require that the upstream providers perform deep packet inspection and look at HTTP payload data - which is an awkward and expensive thing for an upstream provider to have to do.
Really? I think the other day there was articles about charging per site based on DPI. And years ago ISPs ues DPI to throttle Bittorrent traffic. And others uses it to swap out ads and stuff.
No, it's not expensive, and most ISPs probably already have the equipment already. It's just that it's not making the ISP any potential profit.
The technology exists. It's in use right now. It could be used to do good, but so far, it's used to chase the almighty dollar instead.
Hrm, doesn't this cut both ways too? After all, one of the things police do is "live analysis" that requires a system be running (they use power bars, suicide power cables and UPSes to ensure a system stays on). Seems like if this is the case, the kill signal can be sent and live analysis prevented.
After all, analying a live system and yield evidence that a cold system can't...
After rooting your Android phone, you can block the advertisers with AdFree (which a simple black list for all ad sites), or go with a more complex solution like DroidWall and only allow apps you trust to access the net. And you can easily change Android ID with aptly named Android ID changer or simple db hack.
Not sure if something similar exists for iPhone (would never touch it anyway).
Yep, also for jailbroken ("rooted") iPhones. It's called Firewall IP and alerts you to all outgoing connections being made. Since ad servers are usually obvious, the ipfw rule is modified to block that connection.
The most annoying part is all these utilities seem to require rooting your phone in some way (rooting and jailbreaking are effectively equivalent operations in the end. We call it jailbreaking on iPhone because the original jailbreaks are used to break out of the chroot-like jail iOS runs apps in. And i guess we call Android "rooting" since "jailbreaking" implies something is closed ("Android is open!", no, it's open-source). Both get you root prompts in the end (iOS apps run under a user account as well)).
Is there sn Android equivalent to manipulating the firewall?
Whereas you can be sure no one at Microsoft or Apple is coding backdoors for a TLA ?
More like, you KNOW there are backdoors in Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and all the other products they have. But don't switch to open-source purely because it's open-source and therefore, backdoors can't be hidden in the code. Even very careful audits can still miss cleverly hidden backdoors.
The silly thing about this issue is that no one can confirm or deny it, short of a full on hard core code review. The people who did it certainly won't say either way (other than "it might"), the ones who know about it won't acknowledge it. And the backdoor doesn't have to be a shell-granting root access. It can a simple matter of key leakage through subtle means and the code looks otherwise innoculous.
But when more and more people are stuffed together into a small space you may end up in a situation where the ventilation of the building is insufficient and people will start to be less efficient due to high CO2 levels in the blood.
I don't think it's CO2 levels or lack of O2 that's the limiting factor in buildings. It's ventilation, which is HVAC. Cram in a lot of people and it's probably nice in the winter, but the A/C won't be able to keep up in the summer (and definitely a problem if the A/C has to run during the winter as there's more heat being produced by everyone than can be dissipated naturally to the outside). It contributes to the "stuffy" feeling.
And it seems, they cram the ones who feel hot the most in the hottest part of the office, and the ones that feel coldest in the coldest part which ends up with no one being happy about the office temperature. (I have a fan at my desk...). Add to that that some open their blinds, contributing to the heat dissipation issues of an office.
Yeah, it's really not that confusing. The first number is the generation. So a 6xxx card is newer than a 5xxxx card. But a new low-end card is not necessarily better than last year's high-end card.
Yeah, the first number is the generation - (HD) 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx. The second number is the relative performance within that generation - a 5950 will outperform a 5570, for example. The last two numbers are differeniators. The numbers only work within a generation - they do not tell you performance compared across generations.
The only way to compare cross-generation cards is to benchmark them, and then choose based on the merits - power consumption, cost, performance (which depends on the games), etc.
if anyone at Sony was even occasionally looking for this sort of thing
I'm sure you meant "Nintendo". It would be surprising for Sony to be safeguarding Nintendo's intellectual property.
I'm rather surprised Nintendo hasn't reacted. They have a reputation for kinder, gentler customer relations than Sony, but it was always my impression they would explode into a flurry of razor-sharp legal teeth if you intrude on their copyrights and trademarks.
This is an interesting question. Nintendo protects the Goldeneye game IP, but it's Sony that owns the Bond franchise (after all, they use Sony laptops, Sony-Ericsson phones, Sony Blu-Ray players, Sony TVs, etc everywhere). It'll probably get plastered by both companies - Nintendo for the game IP, Sony for misuse of its franchise IP. And since both are Japanese companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they launched a coordinated C&D - they may compete, but I'm sure they're also backroom buddies both united against the American latecomer (Microsoft).
If I understand correctly you have to pay to download the HIB. Event if it's 0.01$ you need to have a bank account or credit card. On the HIB2 you need to have Paypal, Amazon or GoogleCheckout which I for example have neither nor I want. That's the trouble for paying and obviously 25% don't want or can pay.
How many of this 25% are just some kids which just want to play a good game and know about Torrents&co. Do you think they will go to their parents and ask them to pay for the game? Even in the USA children don't have credit cards.
Children - easy - considering it's that time of year, it seems a perfect request for Santa. Or a prepaid credit card (Visa/MC gift card). Hell, I think Amazon even allows Amazon gift cards to be used as well. Plus, I'm sure at least two of the three, if not all three, take debit, which is available to anyone with a bank account.
And having a choice of Paypal, Amazon AND Google Checkout means you cover practically all the major payment processors right off the bat. People can hate Paypal all they want, but if a site offers alternatives, I find the excuses get weaker and weaker. Between Amazon, Google Checkout and Paypal, that covers practically everyone since the hate towards Google Checkout and Amazon tends to be significantly lower than Paypal. Hell, the only one they don't support is iTunes, for obvious reasons.
Don't we hear every so often about how the US government wants backdoors into otherwise secure systems and crypto algorithms for "national security" or "law enforcement" purposes? I suspect that the MSA2000 was required to have a backdoor to appease Uncle Sam, and somebody at HP decided that if Uncle Sam wanted a backdoor, Uncle Sam could damn well have a goate.cx-esque backdoor.
In this case, it's hoped that competitors to Uncle Sam's campaign contributors buy this storage array for cheap and easy industrial espionage. It's not about national security or law enforcement, it's ensuring US companies can exercise their right to make a profit. If it involves hacking into a competitor's system and downloading all their data, even better. No one would suspect their disk array!
People store information on facebook with the purpose of sharing it. Anyone using facebook for private storage does not understand the purpose of facebook.
You just stated a false dichotomy. There's a difference between sharing your information to the world, and sharing information with your friends. Most people use Facebook to share information with their friends and setup their profiles accordingly. The GP is referring to the fact that on more than one occasion Facebook has changed it's privacy policy and "accidently" set people's information to world viewable.
You just made a fatal mistake in assuming that sharing with friends/family is not sharing with the world. Unless you and your friends and family are so tightly knit that no outsiders are allowed, sharing antyhing is sharing with the world. IF you tell people you got married on FB, chances are long-distance relatives who are 3 links away by Facebook friends will know as everyone rebroadcasts it.
That's the thing - people don't seem to realize that Facebook is a really fast way to spread information around. All it takes is one of your friends or family to go announce it or repost the photo, etc. The grapevine is a lot slower in meatspace, but instanteous on FB.
No privacy setting online is immune from the 50+ year old rule that you never put online what you don't want everyone to read. Hell, we went through this with email, and no one believes that is private, even though it's got more "privacy" than FB. (Just like all the cockamanie schemes used to prevent emails from being read by anyone other than recipient, and not forwarding, etc.).
And why the hell one needs a password to comment? To me that was always an overkill.
Because it otherwises kill all benefit to commenting.
A passwordless comment system is like SMTP today. Registration and CAPTCHAs help reduce a good chunk of spam, and brings it to a level that can be manually managed.
And sometimes, having an account gives you benefits, like remembering personal preferences (Gawker has some preferences like an avatar and your default comment view). But losing my account there would be more of an inconvenience so I use a simple password. Oddly though, I couldn't find my account on that Google tables list.
Ideas are indeed a dime a dozen, but we're talking about already successful ideas with existing fan-bases.
Personally I think the problem is that people try to make a movie based on a video game, rather than making a movie based on characters, setting, and plot. There is often the same issue with games based on movies, and they usually suck just as much as the game-to-movie attempts.
Don't make a movie of a game, just make a movie. Don't make a game of a movie, just make a game.
Problem is exactly that. Movies, comic books, books, games are different media with different requirements. There are things you can do in books that you can't do in a movie, comic book or game. And things you have to do in a movie that cannot be done in another media format. Ditto games.
Take an existing universe, say the Halo one (which has comic books, books (NYT bestsellers), and games). If we take a book and game example (The Flood, Halo Combat Evolved), they're describing the same things, yet different. The game has to have action and expository detracts. Yet the book has to have expository because that's what books do. They also have to go deeper down - adding details that don't make sense in the game, and give the Master Chief actually some character.
Then take the comic book and books (The Fall of Reach, same title for both), and the book goes into more background and details that would turn a 20-page by 4 comic book series into a 200+ page series. And it's been set in stone, so Halo Reach couldn't even touch that storyline except at the end, and not directly.
Managing multiple media is extremely difficult - and you'll find the Halo series is probably not even the best example, yet it's one where an attempt has been made at multiple media formats. And probably why the Halo movie has been put off indefinitely. There have been several live-action shorts, but that's it - probably to get a feel for what the limitations are. And to grow a universe, multiple media formats is required - books can do things really well that a game or comic book cannot, and ditto the other formats. But it takes a lot of work.
I think the other problem with movies is the hollywood effect. Games and books tend to appeal to specific audiences (who can and do overlap). Movies have to appeal to everyone as their goal is asses in seats which means unfortunate compromises meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So you get crap subplots and false conflicts just to ensure it appeals to as many people as possible.
Actually, the best method would be to use a Black Fax rather than something like stick figures or Goatse. Better yet, not only a simple Black Fax, but one that is looped, so that it endlessly feeds itself through the fax - assuming the originator is a fax machine itself. Otherwise if the fax is originating from a computer or IP address of some sort, then multiple pages of plain monotone black - with the emphasis on MULTIPLE:)
That hurts, but is pretty juvenile and easily dealt with.
The best way to do it is if they faxed all those cables that Wikileaks has released. Black pages can be recycled easily. Sensitive data? That has to be shredded. And people who aren't supposed to be looking at these things may end up seeing them.
Imagine all the banks and Paypal and Amazon having to now deal with printouts of all the cables themselves - do they shred them? Recycle them without shredding? Also imagine people who shouldn't be looking at them looking at them accidentally (like all those trying to apply for federal jobs).
DDoS the fax? Doesn't do much. But use the fax to DDoS the company is more interesting because someone has to handle the document in the end, and they have to look at the incoming fax to determine routing. They may have to read the cables whether they want to or not to figure out if it's something to can or forward. Black pages - canned easily (and since it's all electronic these days, costs disk space). But pages and pages of readable material...
I believe that the finished dimensions for a "swedish" two-by-four are 50x100 mm before it's planed and approx. 45x95 mm after being planed. And according to wikipedia a "US" two-by-four is 38 x 89 mm which kind of makes me wonder why they call it a 2x4
A US 2x4 is 2"x4" before planing and finishing. Planing removes approximately 1/4" from each side, resulting in a final dimension of 1 1/2" by 3 1/2". Or about 38mm x 89mm.
Your Swedish 2x4 is probably the same dimensions after planing and finishing. It's just that the lengths are in metric (probably 2-3 metres, while US/Canadian lumber ends up around 10 feet, roughly. I don't know the exact values, but I do know it's still incompatible).
To study how random people choose their passwords. Bruce Schneier has a very interesting article about that. "How good are the passwords people are choosing to protect their computers and online accounts? It's a hard question to answer because data is scarce.
Which is kind of useless, because Gawker isn't a super-important website that people should put a really strong password on. Sure you'll find like 90% of the passwords are guessable because it's not a site that really matters if it's compromised. Perhaps some people should be worried if their bank password is "password" but that's a different issued.
Sure you'll glean that most people use stupid passwords, but does it correlate with passwords used for more important sites like banks and such.
The major force holding back IPv6 deployment is shitty consumer hardware that doesn't "do" IPv6, and shitty network hardware vendors who charge an arm and a leg for IPv6 capable routers etc. (coupled with the fact that people have already invested a lot of money on non-IPv6 hardware anyway). It's not like the ISPs are doing it just to piss you off.
Which is why we should just go and accept that NAT is here to stay, and design a NAT system that does v4/v6 protocol translations (you can easily design a system where a v4-only host can access v6-only hosts using clever DNS spoofs, V4 private address space DNS maps, etc). Consumers and companies swap their gateway router with this combined box, so their internal network remains unchanged (keeping their v4 investments) and not losing any bit of the 'net. ISPs can use it to keep v4-only connectivity to customers (albeit restricted since they can't port map) and equipment while they slowly acquire v6 equipment, etc. The vast majority of home users and companies, this is good enough. Thos who want real connectivity like they currently have can do it their own way.
And let's give up with the romanticized idea that every host will be reachable once we have IPv6 going strong like the early IPv4 days that nAT "broke". Because firewalls aren't going away and they purposely break connectivity. New protocols should be translation and firewall friendly.
The final thing? I don't know about you, but my ISP renumbers my IP every few months or so - with IPv6, all my IPv6 hosts have their IPv6 addresses change as the prefix changes. At least NAT allows me to number my hosts any way I choose independent of my real IP. Sure I can use link-local and additional private addresses to all the hosts, but it's an annoyance to deal with multiple IP addresses per host.
I think that those holding the reigns of the botnets doing the current DDOSing are making massive mistakes employing them at this time. Not only that, the targets they are choosing are not valuable. Take for example visa.com and mastercard.com. Have you ever been to those sites? For all intent and purposes they are superficial, and have nothing to do with the logistics of the financial services they provide. If you go to either site and try to view financial information you will be given a list of banks that issue that type of card, which provides links to the respective banks that actually issue cards.
Yeah, that's the problem, unless the online merchants have to redirect through those sites in order to get to their payment processor or 3DSecure. In fact, taking out 3DSecure would put a major dent into the Verified by Visa/MasterCard SecureCode stuff - retailers hurting might end up just dropping that since a DoS of that would prevent anyone from checking out on those retailers. Would definitely hurt Visa/Mastercard's attempts at forcing everyone to use 3DSecure if it keeps going down for everyone during a major holiday season.
Hitting Amazon isn't terribly interesting. Hitting Amazon's secure site could be more interesting as it could possibly make checkout slow enough that real customers abandon their purchases.
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Actually, Moore's law does not imply anything about computing power. It says that the number of transistors doubles every 18 months or so. A billion transistors? That's not a lot - your 4GB MLC storage card has easily 2 billion transistors on it for the storage array.
Also, random logic blocks like that in a CPU are not the most transistor-dense things out there - memory is. Whether it's SRAM, DRAM, or flash, a memory device is always silicon-area limited. In fact, a majority of those transistors are probably used for memory blocks (caches etc).
The good thing with Moore's Law is that it means storage will double every 18 months or so, so cheaper SSDs for all.
Easy. Timing and It Just Works(tm).
First is because the whole "portable digital music" thing was in its infancy and just awaiting its exponential growth. Apple got there are the right time.
Second because they had a player that had the right formfactor, ample storage, and a usable UI. The iPod was the size of a deck of cards with 5GB of storage. Players that size had a whopping 128MB of storage! Expandable with 64MB expansion cards that cost an arm and a leg. And the scroll wheel was one of those "why didn't I think of that?" ways of navigating huge quantities of music. The competitor in storage would be the Creative Nomad, which had the bulk of a really old portable CD player, with a pile of heft. Creative included two sets of batteries because the battery life was fairly atrocious - a couple of hours-ish per set.
Then you had Firewire. Filling 6GB of Nomad storage at USB 1.1 speeds took forever. Filling 5GB of space at Firewire speed took an hour or less.
Finally, you have iTunes. In one app you can do your ripping, library management, and syncing.
And Apple had it in such a combination that when the whole digital music revolution took off around 2003-2004, Apple was right there with product in the store. (The iPod, which was the best selling MP3 player since it came out, only sold its 1 millionth unit 3 years later).
Next, Apple came out with the iTunes music store. Suddenly, a way to legally acquire music easily. Now Joe Q. Public had a stupid-simple way to rip their existing CD collection, to buy music, to manage their music, and to copy their music to their portable player.
And yes, it also helped that all the user had to do was plug the thing in and it would automatically sync and update and everything. Suddenly even tech newbies (e.g., your parents) could manage their iPods themselves and their music collections. And the marketing campaign helped spread the idea that MP3s weren't just a geek thing. Which meant the 99.9% of the non-geek population could suddenly have entire music libraries in their pocket.
And when the non-geek population started getting into this, music stores and DRM-free were the result because they cared. Otherwise who would bother serving the 0.1% geek market?
I'd say the store you bought them from was overcharging.
I bought a 2TB (single-disk) USB drive last year for over $200 (on sale). This year, they were available for $100 also on sale. 3 years ago I bought a dual-drive 1TB (2x500 in a case that did concat) for $300, which back then was considered pretty good.
Heck, also in December I picked up 2 2TB bare drives for my Windows Home Server - for about $90 each. The 1.5TB drives were a waste - they weren't that much cheaper than 2TB ones, so I stuck with 2TB.
The price has gone down significantly - if only SSD prices would drop that quick (but they're bound by Moore's Law).
Bare drives aren't much cheaper than the USB ones I find - the USB ones can be had for a few more bucks than the bare drive, or on sale, can be cheaper. I would presume a large quantity of the large drives get redirected for external storage.
Even then, I also had to pay $80 each for 4 500GB PATA drives, and those were the cheapest and largest I found. Oddly, Best Buy had the best prices for me.
First off, I haven't seen the original TRON in over 20+ years, and I never saw it in the theatres. But I've got a copy on VHS I taped off TV sometime in tne 80s, and I've watched it many times in the 80s on TV.
It, like Starfighter, are mostly cult classics because us geeks saw how computer technology was going and we would flourish (and we have).
That said, I enjoyed TRON Legacy. It's not going to be a classic like Gone With the Wind or Sound of Music, just like the original TRON wouldn't either. But it doesn't mean it's not a film a geek shouldn't watch. It's effectively a geek blockbuster - it's not going to be cared for by many in a year.
In fact, I would classify this kind of movie as a "escapist movie" - we have classics, we have blockbusters. And we have movies that are simply a good way to spend a couple of hours but really don't do anything other than provide a distraction. It may be a bad movie, but it's entertaining. Just like I watched Transformers and Transformers 2 (also badly rated), they are great way to spend a few otherwise boring hours and get out and try to be social.
The visuals were great, the plot trite, and the soundtrack asesome. But I don't care, because I enjoyed it completely and find it was an excellent way to spend the three hours I went out a couple of days before Christmas. I escaped the hustle and bustle of christmas shoppers and got wowed by eye-candy. What more would I want?
(I personally hate classic movies - just like I hate all the English classes I had to take where I had to go identify hidden meanings in books and analyze every sentence. I don't care for subtext. I don't care for symbology or metaphors. I just want to enjoy the creative work that one or more people put in.)
More correctly, there are no privacy settings. Everything posted is best assumed to be "for everyone" even if the setting says "friends only". All it takes is one friend to re-post, re-twit, re-something that news and it'll explode, especially since you can't control their privacy settings.
Especially big things - a death, a birth, a wedding, a divorce, a job offer, a job loss, etc. The number of people who seem to find out about those thing via Facebook will be far larger than your friends list. It's gotten so bad that some places, weddings and the like often have "no facebook, no twitter, ..." policies so the couple getting hitched keeps it nice and quiet rather than let the whole world know. And friends/family have been known to sternly warn other family members that births aren't to be posted at all either, again to preserve their privacy.
But it is.
When an app wants to use your location, it has to open up CoreLocation. CoreLocation has two features - first, it has an app-unblockable popup asking if you really want the app to use your location (even GPS apps have to deal with this - and if you think there should be exceptions - guess what? Every app will use the exception). Second, there's a list of banned apps in CoreLocation (that Apple has not had to use yet) that either kill the app or disallow its use of CoreLocation (the famous Apple "kill switch").
And your idea is so wonderful, Apple did it! Since iOS 3.x, you can go to Settings..General and there's a toggle called "Location Services" that can be turned off to disable location. Isn't it wonderful?
Perhaps Android is better, though I wouldn't know. All I know is, while Apple has banned apps, removed apps, they haven't deleted apps from my iTunes or my iPhone (like Google has with several, and Amazon has with books). Yes, we are quick to condemn Apple, but they haven't force-deleted apps yet (you can still install all the removed apps you bought)
Not really. It'll probably lead to NAT (v4/v6) being created as a stopgap, simply because transitioning is HARD. These companies want a simple box then can use to replace their current NATv4 router to give them both v4 and v6 compatibility with zero effort. (After all, why does every PC on my network need to know what my blasted IPv6 prefix is to get on the 'net? And unless I use DHCPv6, each PC on my network will have 3 IPs? link-local, local network (because I'm not typing out individual device IPs when FC00::/64 is available for private networking), and internet-routable). Why can't we have a box that replaces my current D-Link or Linksys? I have better things to do with my time than learn the intricacies of IPv6 (and I know IPv6 simply because I had to learn it, and I'm not looking forward to the migration))
It's doable, too, to give v4 only clients v6 access through protocol translation and a bit of DNS hackery to map v6 addresses to a v4 host temporarily like how NAT works).
We're down to 4 or 5 blocks. Let's make it happen people - a simple way to transition, and keep v4 networks internally while both supporting v4 and v6 externally. I don't care about external connectivity - I can port forward like I normally do.
Really? I think the other day there was articles about charging per site based on DPI. And years ago ISPs ues DPI to throttle Bittorrent traffic. And others uses it to swap out ads and stuff.
No, it's not expensive, and most ISPs probably already have the equipment already. It's just that it's not making the ISP any potential profit.
The technology exists. It's in use right now. It could be used to do good, but so far, it's used to chase the almighty dollar instead.
Hrm, doesn't this cut both ways too? After all, one of the things police do is "live analysis" that requires a system be running (they use power bars, suicide power cables and UPSes to ensure a system stays on). Seems like if this is the case, the kill signal can be sent and live analysis prevented.
After all, analying a live system and yield evidence that a cold system can't...
Yep, also for jailbroken ("rooted") iPhones. It's called Firewall IP and alerts you to all outgoing connections being made. Since ad servers are usually obvious, the ipfw rule is modified to block that connection.
The most annoying part is all these utilities seem to require rooting your phone in some way (rooting and jailbreaking are effectively equivalent operations in the end. We call it jailbreaking on iPhone because the original jailbreaks are used to break out of the chroot-like jail iOS runs apps in. And i guess we call Android "rooting" since "jailbreaking" implies something is closed ("Android is open!", no, it's open-source). Both get you root prompts in the end (iOS apps run under a user account as well)).
Is there sn Android equivalent to manipulating the firewall?
More like, you KNOW there are backdoors in Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and all the other products they have. But don't switch to open-source purely because it's open-source and therefore, backdoors can't be hidden in the code. Even very careful audits can still miss cleverly hidden backdoors.
The silly thing about this issue is that no one can confirm or deny it, short of a full on hard core code review. The people who did it certainly won't say either way (other than "it might"), the ones who know about it won't acknowledge it. And the backdoor doesn't have to be a shell-granting root access. It can a simple matter of key leakage through subtle means and the code looks otherwise innoculous.
I don't think it's CO2 levels or lack of O2 that's the limiting factor in buildings. It's ventilation, which is HVAC. Cram in a lot of people and it's probably nice in the winter, but the A/C won't be able to keep up in the summer (and definitely a problem if the A/C has to run during the winter as there's more heat being produced by everyone than can be dissipated naturally to the outside). It contributes to the "stuffy" feeling.
And it seems, they cram the ones who feel hot the most in the hottest part of the office, and the ones that feel coldest in the coldest part which ends up with no one being happy about the office temperature. (I have a fan at my desk...). Add to that that some open their blinds, contributing to the heat dissipation issues of an office.
Yeah, the first number is the generation - (HD) 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx. The second number is the relative performance within that generation - a 5950 will outperform a 5570, for example. The last two numbers are differeniators. The numbers only work within a generation - they do not tell you performance compared across generations.
The only way to compare cross-generation cards is to benchmark them, and then choose based on the merits - power consumption, cost, performance (which depends on the games), etc.
This is an interesting question. Nintendo protects the Goldeneye game IP, but it's Sony that owns the Bond franchise (after all, they use Sony laptops, Sony-Ericsson phones, Sony Blu-Ray players, Sony TVs, etc everywhere). It'll probably get plastered by both companies - Nintendo for the game IP, Sony for misuse of its franchise IP. And since both are Japanese companies, I wouldn't be surprised if they launched a coordinated C&D - they may compete, but I'm sure they're also backroom buddies both united against the American latecomer (Microsoft).
Children - easy - considering it's that time of year, it seems a perfect request for Santa. Or a prepaid credit card (Visa/MC gift card). Hell, I think Amazon even allows Amazon gift cards to be used as well. Plus, I'm sure at least two of the three, if not all three, take debit, which is available to anyone with a bank account.
And having a choice of Paypal, Amazon AND Google Checkout means you cover practically all the major payment processors right off the bat. People can hate Paypal all they want, but if a site offers alternatives, I find the excuses get weaker and weaker. Between Amazon, Google Checkout and Paypal, that covers practically everyone since the hate towards Google Checkout and Amazon tends to be significantly lower than Paypal. Hell, the only one they don't support is iTunes, for obvious reasons.
In this case, it's hoped that competitors to Uncle Sam's campaign contributors buy this storage array for cheap and easy industrial espionage. It's not about national security or law enforcement, it's ensuring US companies can exercise their right to make a profit. If it involves hacking into a competitor's system and downloading all their data, even better. No one would suspect their disk array!
You just made a fatal mistake in assuming that sharing with friends/family is not sharing with the world. Unless you and your friends and family are so tightly knit that no outsiders are allowed, sharing antyhing is sharing with the world. IF you tell people you got married on FB, chances are long-distance relatives who are 3 links away by Facebook friends will know as everyone rebroadcasts it.
That's the thing - people don't seem to realize that Facebook is a really fast way to spread information around. All it takes is one of your friends or family to go announce it or repost the photo, etc. The grapevine is a lot slower in meatspace, but instanteous on FB.
No privacy setting online is immune from the 50+ year old rule that you never put online what you don't want everyone to read. Hell, we went through this with email, and no one believes that is private, even though it's got more "privacy" than FB. (Just like all the cockamanie schemes used to prevent emails from being read by anyone other than recipient, and not forwarding, etc.).
Because it otherwises kill all benefit to commenting.
A passwordless comment system is like SMTP today. Registration and CAPTCHAs help reduce a good chunk of spam, and brings it to a level that can be manually managed.
And sometimes, having an account gives you benefits, like remembering personal preferences (Gawker has some preferences like an avatar and your default comment view). But losing my account there would be more of an inconvenience so I use a simple password. Oddly though, I couldn't find my account on that Google tables list.
Problem is exactly that. Movies, comic books, books, games are different media with different requirements. There are things you can do in books that you can't do in a movie, comic book or game. And things you have to do in a movie that cannot be done in another media format. Ditto games.
Take an existing universe, say the Halo one (which has comic books, books (NYT bestsellers), and games). If we take a book and game example (The Flood, Halo Combat Evolved), they're describing the same things, yet different. The game has to have action and expository detracts. Yet the book has to have expository because that's what books do. They also have to go deeper down - adding details that don't make sense in the game, and give the Master Chief actually some character.
Then take the comic book and books (The Fall of Reach, same title for both), and the book goes into more background and details that would turn a 20-page by 4 comic book series into a 200+ page series. And it's been set in stone, so Halo Reach couldn't even touch that storyline except at the end, and not directly.
Managing multiple media is extremely difficult - and you'll find the Halo series is probably not even the best example, yet it's one where an attempt has been made at multiple media formats. And probably why the Halo movie has been put off indefinitely. There have been several live-action shorts, but that's it - probably to get a feel for what the limitations are. And to grow a universe, multiple media formats is required - books can do things really well that a game or comic book cannot, and ditto the other formats. But it takes a lot of work.
I think the other problem with movies is the hollywood effect. Games and books tend to appeal to specific audiences (who can and do overlap). Movies have to appeal to everyone as their goal is asses in seats which means unfortunate compromises meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator. So you get crap subplots and false conflicts just to ensure it appeals to as many people as possible.
That hurts, but is pretty juvenile and easily dealt with.
The best way to do it is if they faxed all those cables that Wikileaks has released. Black pages can be recycled easily. Sensitive data? That has to be shredded. And people who aren't supposed to be looking at these things may end up seeing them.
Imagine all the banks and Paypal and Amazon having to now deal with printouts of all the cables themselves - do they shred them? Recycle them without shredding? Also imagine people who shouldn't be looking at them looking at them accidentally (like all those trying to apply for federal jobs).
DDoS the fax? Doesn't do much. But use the fax to DDoS the company is more interesting because someone has to handle the document in the end, and they have to look at the incoming fax to determine routing. They may have to read the cables whether they want to or not to figure out if it's something to can or forward. Black pages - canned easily (and since it's all electronic these days, costs disk space). But pages and pages of readable material...
A US 2x4 is 2"x4" before planing and finishing. Planing removes approximately 1/4" from each side, resulting in a final dimension of 1 1/2" by 3 1/2". Or about 38mm x 89mm.
Your Swedish 2x4 is probably the same dimensions after planing and finishing. It's just that the lengths are in metric (probably 2-3 metres, while US/Canadian lumber ends up around 10 feet, roughly. I don't know the exact values, but I do know it's still incompatible).
Which is kind of useless, because Gawker isn't a super-important website that people should put a really strong password on. Sure you'll find like 90% of the passwords are guessable because it's not a site that really matters if it's compromised. Perhaps some people should be worried if their bank password is "password" but that's a different issued.
Sure you'll glean that most people use stupid passwords, but does it correlate with passwords used for more important sites like banks and such.
Which is why we should just go and accept that NAT is here to stay, and design a NAT system that does v4/v6 protocol translations (you can easily design a system where a v4-only host can access v6-only hosts using clever DNS spoofs, V4 private address space DNS maps, etc). Consumers and companies swap their gateway router with this combined box, so their internal network remains unchanged (keeping their v4 investments) and not losing any bit of the 'net. ISPs can use it to keep v4-only connectivity to customers (albeit restricted since they can't port map) and equipment while they slowly acquire v6 equipment, etc. The vast majority of home users and companies, this is good enough. Thos who want real connectivity like they currently have can do it their own way.
And let's give up with the romanticized idea that every host will be reachable once we have IPv6 going strong like the early IPv4 days that nAT "broke". Because firewalls aren't going away and they purposely break connectivity. New protocols should be translation and firewall friendly.
The final thing? I don't know about you, but my ISP renumbers my IP every few months or so - with IPv6, all my IPv6 hosts have their IPv6 addresses change as the prefix changes. At least NAT allows me to number my hosts any way I choose independent of my real IP. Sure I can use link-local and additional private addresses to all the hosts, but it's an annoyance to deal with multiple IP addresses per host.
Yeah, that's the problem, unless the online merchants have to redirect through those sites in order to get to their payment processor or 3DSecure. In fact, taking out 3DSecure would put a major dent into the Verified by Visa/MasterCard SecureCode stuff - retailers hurting might end up just dropping that since a DoS of that would prevent anyone from checking out on those retailers. Would definitely hurt Visa/Mastercard's attempts at forcing everyone to use 3DSecure if it keeps going down for everyone during a major holiday season.
Hitting Amazon isn't terribly interesting. Hitting Amazon's secure site could be more interesting as it could possibly make checkout slow enough that real customers abandon their purchases.