"Don't even think about a PC-based scope. A scope is a standalone instrument, always has been, always will be."
I hate to break it to you but most scopes already are PC-based.
Yeah, but the 'scope is a dedicated application with dedicated front panel controls. Windows is merely a widget provider. I've used them, and they're very nice as they support modern hardware and printouts/screenshots are a breeze. But you have to buy the ones with the full front panels - the ones that are just PCs are just... useless and you spend way too much time mousing around clicking virtual knobs. Painful.
$2k can get you a nice basic scope. That's all you need. For the rare times you need something fancy, there are many places that'll rent you the high end scopes for days or weeks. Sure you're paying a good chunk of money for someone else's loan, but unless you can ante up the $10-100K+ for those things, it's far more economical. Get what you can (surely you should be able to find a nice 500MHz scope used?) with what you have to do most of the debugging. When it comes time to debug that obscure thing, rent it.
This way you'll get a good scope for normal use, rent a oh-so-beautiful GHz level scope when you need it or even the fancy-smancy "analog digital" combined scope plus logic analyzer. Those let you analyze bus signals in standard 0's and 1's, while seeing actual signals at the same time. Plus, they can capture the analog signals with the digital, so you can trigger on some oddball logic condition on the bus and see any odd analog waveforms at the same time. But those are expensive - your best bet is renting until you can afford to buy one 10+ years from now.
And if your scope only collects dust instead of signal, you've avoided wasting a pile of money.
It gets worse: many so-called Vista "OEM" keys on laptops will only work with the manufacturer's recovery disc, and won't work with a legitimate (but generic) OEM disc. In three instances, I've had to give up and tell clients they'll have to cough up the $40 and buy a recovery disc because I just couldn't get Windows to activate otherwise.
Depends on the OEM key.
If it's from a brand name laptop (Dell/Acer/Asus/Toshiba/Sony/etc) then it probably uses a "SLIC" BIOS so you don't have to activate. If it's a generic whitebox, then it probably just uses the OEM version of Windows. The latter has a sticker with the key that should work, but will need activation.
The former has a product label that often says the manufacturer's name on it as it's a customized key that doesn't work without calling. In this case, the VIsta/7 installation key you must use the global manufacturer OEM CD key. This is the key that those manufacturers use when they do the install. It tells Vista/7 to use the SLIC BIOS rather than requiring a per-copy OEM key. It doesn't need activation, unless you wiped the BIOS and lost the SLIC information, then you're screwed. It's also the key that gets displayed if you use a key retriever (which never matches the sticker).
Pirate Tip: When you get that list of custom OEM keys, you can "Windows Anytime Upgrade" it to convert your SLIC'd PC from Home to Ultimate for free by using the ultimate OEM key (because the OEM key determines the Windows version, while the SLIC only says you're licensed for a copy, but not which copy - this allows OEMs to sell some configurations with HOme Premium, others with Ultimate, etc). Requires a PC with a SLIC BIOS though. Can't go from Vista to 7 this way unless you have a SLIC 2.1 BIOS, but you can go to ultimate for free. And it'll scan as activated and genuine, too.
It's an interesting point - if he can do it simply by visiting a web page, and it's an exploit in the Iphone, is it still illegal? He's only visiting a web page - unless it becomes illegal because you did so knowing it would install software?
Except you have to do more than just visit a web site. You have to visit the web site, then actually do an action in order to jailbreak your phone (i.e., you have to slide the thing over to begin the process). Otherwise you can make a claim that a drive-by download is the same thing.
So it's not illegal to visit that website, it may be illegal to follow through with the actions of that web site, though.
Back in the OS 2.x days where you also had a website jailbreaker, many ipod touches I saw on display were jailbroken - whether by customers or the salespeople, I don't know.
Of course, for fun, install installuous on all those devices...
I have a Samsung Mobile from Sprint, it's running 2.1 and will no longer be upgraded by Sprint according to their news release.
Another annoyance with carriers having to provide the upgrade is they toss in extra junk programs. I have an amazon MP3 store, sprint live Nascar, and other apps that can not be removed. Samsung also tossed in a few non-standard apps, like Moxier Mail, which costs $25 on the app store. So there are some minor benefits to using the network provided Android.
I like these kernel hacks, if they cause enough problems it may force Sprint to give me 2.2!
Doubt it. Unless Samsung provides it, you won't get it. And if it was, there's probably hacked firmware available for you that you can load up yourself.
Sprint however, will probably use this as an opportunity to make firmware that can't be rooted and maybe even enforce ROM signatures so you can't load custom ROMs in.
(And why is it, that Apple basically gave their finger towards AT&T and did their own thing on firmware (so AT&T can't go load on all their crapware), everyone running Android is still catering to the carriers and loading in all their crapware on? Except maybe the Nexus One (no longer available), it seems no one dares give their finger to the carrier and "do their own thing" like Apple...).
In general Apple devices are (forcibly?) updated much more quickly. Perhaps this is because of his holinesses... I mean Steve Jobs powers of persuasion.;)
Nope. Apple does not force any software update on anyone. I have my original iPhone still running at 2.something (with the SMS flaw), simply because I was too lazy to do the required jailbreaking on it.
This is unlike say, the Palm Pre, where you can delay an update, but you can't avoid it. I think Android devices are also voluntary updates as well, but the carrier can go force the issue (see what Rogers did by forcing an unrootable firmware on their G1s).
How well do license-server based apps work on laptops? And how well would they work on Android device without a cellular radio, something like an Archos 5?
Sad to say, but Google doesn't care if your Android device isn't a phone. They don't care, they don't "With Google" you or anything. To Google, if it's not a phone, they're not interested.
As for the Archos 5, that thing is so locked down it's practically impossible to root it or customize it, so it's stuck with Android 1.6, which won't support this anyhow.
And OS-managed DRM is a good thing. It being in one place means rooting the phone means you can pirate apps again by stubbing out those APIs to use fake responses. Even if Google encrypts the binary, it has to be decrypted somehow, and you'll just be right where iOS piracy is. Yes, the executable inside the an iOS ipa is encrypted in spots (running it will crash the app) and the loader decrypts it based on your device key. The iOS piracy scripts basically run the app inside gdb and grab the memory image after it's been decrypted. Android apps probably won't be much different - unless Dalvik starts having special hooks where the code is encrypted in random spots and it automatically decrypts.
I'm surprised Android piracy is so high though - iOS has various pirate web sites, and of course on bittorrent and even an "alternative app store" where you can download and install pirated apps right on your device. I haven't heard of sites hosting pirated android apps exclusively, nor pirate app installers, etc. I've seen the torrents though, but those I expect.
Banks will often not even look at a signature on a cheque, let alone make any attempt to verify it. As an example, I once accidentally grabbed my wife's chequebook and used it (signing my own name) to purchase goods. I realised my mistake a couple of days later and attempted to go into the shop to replace my presumably dodgy cheque with cash, but the bank had already paid up on it. Now in this case, it was an honest enough mistake, but it has made me a lot more careful about where we store our chequebooks since.
Actually, the signature is nothing more than an approval to a contract, not for comparison purposes. The signature panel on the back of your credit card signifies that you agreed to the cardholder agreement. The signature on the slip signifies that you are agreeing to pay the amount specified as a valid debt. The signature on the cheque indicates that you're agreeing to pay the amount specified on the note. A cheque can be written on anything as long as it contains the payee details (name), payer details (name, account number), the amount to be paid, the date and a signature indicating approval of the transaction. You could write this all on a piece of paper and it would be valid - it's how banks give you generic cheques where you have to fill in all the details yourself while your customized ones arrive later.
And yes, you should be careful how you store your chequebooks as there's a lot of valuable personal information on it.
I don't know which nVidia parts are affected, but it's possible that RAMBUS might have shot itself in the foot if they covered all GPUs.
After all, RAMBUS' biggest wins are in the console market, and the PS3 has the distinction of having both RAMBUS memory in it (256MB system RAM - XDR-RAM), and nVidia GPU ("RSX"). Xbox360 and Wii use ATi parts, and don't use RAMBUS memory.
So if the PS3 also ends up blocked because of the ITC, it would affect licensing revenues for RAMBUS themselves, no? Heck, it may cause Sony to consider withdrawing their support as well...
Those of you silly enough to argue that living is infringement failed to read further into the article that says that bypassing a copy protection device is illegal. Even if the bypassing device has legitimate uses.
Sound familiar? It's like the DMCA, though the DMCA was updated earlier this week with a ruling that said that no longer applied for fair use (which still blocks space shifting, but allows the formerly illegal mashups from DVDs and Blu-Rays, short clips etc.).
So jailbreaking is still illegal in the UK, you cannot pick DRM locks, and you cannot bypass copy protections that may be present for whatever reason.
Now that wireless hardware is so cheap I'm surprised we don't see more of these made commercially. Why are there so few of those little handheld electronic games that have wireless connectivity? They could sell like 4 of em together in one package.
They're too expensive.
If we take a BOM cost of maybe $15 for all those parts and assembly and such, you're looking at a toy that'll sell for $60+. Which is a super-expensive toy - parents balk at paying that much. The ideal toy price is around $20 - $10 is great, $30 is tops, and $50 is expensive.
Those little electronic handheld games that sell for $10 probably cost $1 in total cost to the manufacturer, and the retailer probably paid $5 for it (probably $6-7 after warehouse and shipping and such). $20 game may probably cost $3 to manufacture.
If the manufacturer was making low margins, that $15 badge would probably sell for $25 wholesale and maybe $50 MSRP.
If you think those margins are high, remember they include store overhead, defect overhead (many of these things are just thrown away if a customer returns it as defective, and the manufacturer and retailer look at those return rates to determine how much will be paid), plus shipping from manufacturer to retailer warehouse to retailer. Plus, when the retailer starts discounting as well...
Wow, there's a company I haven't heard of in years. Didn't they make some hideously expensive RAM that was supposed to perform twice as well as normal RAM, but never lived up to the hype? Basically, they patented the design, couldn't get it to work right, and now they're suing the companies who did.
Actually, they're quite big and raking in the dough. They're in one of the best selling consoles, and in this generation's worst-selling console.
Yes, the PS2 has 32MB of RAMBUS RDRAM in it. It was one of their big announcements after thair failed foray into PCs.
And yes, there's also 256MB of XDR DRAM in the PS3 (the other 256 is GDDR3 for the nVidia RSX). XDR technology is owned by RAMBUS.
Despite not selling well in the PC world, they're doing good enough in other markets. Hell, many/.'ers probably own a PS3 and thus have contributed to this patent trolling. Probably some of those complaining about patent trolls in this article too will extol the virtues of the PS3 (or PS2) in other threads without realizing that they're really just helping RAMBUS.
I recently had a $10 charge from a company I'd never heard of. Slightly different than this story, it was not from a rogue antivirus, but just a plain-old unauthorized charge (out of the blue). I called my bank to dispute it, but they said I'd need to change my charge number if I disputed it. I decided I'd rather eat the $10 charge, than deal with the hassle of updating my card number (and updating everything that auto-bills it).
Well, someone's got your credit card number. You can dispute the charge, but because it was unauthorized, the bank would prefer you throw away your old card because if there's one, perhaps there's another. Hell, if you look close, you might find a "testing charge" from iTunes or something a month back. Because you can be sure the next month they'll try charging $5000+. Heck, they may have already done an authorization charge for that much but the charge hasn't come yet.
I've had my card fraudulently used, and the biggest pain is not the auto-bills (especially since they were coming due), but not having a card for a week. I changed it again a year later when one of the stores I visit had their credit card processor breached (possibly). I did it pre-emptively to avoid any hassles. This time I rushed the card and was only without it for a few days.
What I want to know is how much of the released documents painted the military in a good light versus in a negative light. In any given set of after action reports there is bound to be a certain amount of good stories and a certain amount of bad ones. Both do not get released because they contain sensitive data. However both exit. What was the ratio of positive to negative? Or was it all negative?
Well, most likely it's all negative. It's all about spin - you publish your successes, you bury your failures. Oh, we killed 100 insurgents today and only lost one? Publish that! Hide the fact we accidentally killed 5 children - One heroic death while killing 100 evil nasty enemies.
Positive news gets redacted of sensitive information and published. Negative news, even the downsides to the positive news, gets buried. Of course, some easily controlled negative news gets out since no one believes anyone can be 100% successful.
Sorry, but that's kind of a depressing analogy. It seems to me that most of the people with iPads are getting exactly the features they want or enough of the features they want that the ones they don't have don't matter. If I only wanted or needed a car on weekends and someone rented me a car Saturday and Sunday for a good rate I'd be happy with that, even if it wasn't ideal on long weekends.
In reasonable cities, that does happen with the likes of ZipCar and other services. These people live close to work (or public transportation), schools and shops so they can get by without a car. The few times they need it, they rent one. It's just like owning a car and having to rent a truck once in a while to do some heavy lifting or big moving. Doesn't justify needing to own a truck and associated expenses.
Sure if you need the car more often it would be costlier, but for occasional use, a number of people feel that not having car payments, insurance and maintenance bills that occur even if you don't use it is a good deal.
Singapore has (had?) a system like that too - cars are expensive because of limited land so supply is restricted by government. To make cars workable for those that only really need it on the weekend, they introduced special licensing where the car can only be driven "free" on weekends and holidays. During other times they need a special day pass shown on the windscreen.
Some people want full PCs. Others want appliances. They're not mutually exclusive groups, either - you may want a full PC for one task, and an appliance for another. The whole point of a free market is to let people have cake and eat it too. We bemoan the next DRM scheme that removes freedom from our PC, but we embrace the simplicity of gaming on consoles (which are full of DRM).
The problem with multi-player is that it depends on an online server today which will shut down in time. Consider Super Mario Bros. a game made what? Nearly 30 years ago? It is still as playable today as is was in the 80s. Now consider Halo 2 made in 2004 which is now crippled in 2010 because Xbox live for the Xbox has been discontinued.
That's because the Xbox is holding back the Xbox360. There's a point in time when backwards compatibility is just holding back development and you have to cut free (see Windows Vista). It's sad, but you knew the day was coming - people were complaining they wanted stuff on Xbox Live that Microsoft could not deliver because of the Xbox. Eventually you were looking at supporting 1,000-odd users of Halo 2 (the other 9 games on the list weren't even totalling Halo 2's total), and holding back features for millions of other users.
Hell, you can still play Halo 2 online if you wanted to - the PC version is still supported. (It's not been updated the past couple of weeks because of stuff like E3 and SDCC).
But yes, I think there's been too much emphasis on PvP multiplayer and not enough on co-op or vs. computer play (it's changing again though). Some of us get home so burned out from the day, we want to plop in front of the couch and mindlessly shoot aliens. It's cathartic. We don't want to do team games, we don't want to get on and get pwned. We just want to get out and shoot. Alas, I know only since Halo ODST did this happen ("Firefight" mode), and it's starting to happen in other games as well. I just wish games like Halo 3 had it.
Some of my best Starcraft games was with my friend battling the computer. When we got down to the end, we ended up toying with the computer opponent - something you can't do in real life, but amusing.
How long until we move to using dedicated terminals to access our online banking. A device that only did banking could be really cheap. Load a custom, hardened version of Linux on there, that only displayed a web browser, and only went to the bank's website, and you'd probably go a long way to stopping this, and many other kinds of fraud.
You could do it right now. Netbooks are cheap and easy things to get, just install your favorite Linux and you're done. Nota s cheap as your dedicated banking terminal, but you can still do it yourself fairly cheaply and protect yourself, if not your family.
In the case of this thread though, there are really no other option than h.264, as that is the format of choice between high-end smart-phones. I have no idea how Android or iPhone handles 3gp, but then again, that format is not exactly a high performer in any quality category anyway.
Most "featurephones" do h.264 as well. Using h.264 is a misnomer since it spans a quality continuum from 160x120 through 1080p and beyond. Most higher end phones can do VGA on h.264 easily.
3gp is a container format. It's a subset of the mp4 container format. Which is a subset of the mov container format (Apple QuickTime). Anything that plays mp4 should handle 3gp easily as the real difference is codec support. Most mp4 parsers understand MOV as well because it's not that much extra work (and Apple's documented MOV anyhow). 3gp can hold quality videos, but since most devices producing them are featurephones with their crappy-cam sensors and fleapower CPUs that can barely do CIF resolution in real time, nevermind QVGA.
USPS is also one of the most economical ways to ship internationally.
Sure you could ship UPS, if you want to ding the recipient with addicitional fees that range anywhere from 30-200% the declared cost (plus taxes).
At least FedEx dings you $25 plus taxes, so anything shipped via FedEx better be expensive to justify it.
USPS, I get billed $5 or $8, depending on whether it was regular priority mail or express mail.
I think the only other company able to do it so cheap is DHL, but I think they've left the US.
I never buy from stores that ship via UPS - it's not worth it, and even the importer that charges 100% markup can be cheaper than buying direct. FedEx I reserve for expensive items, and USPS all the way for everything else.
The important thing to realize is not that the input types evolved to improve gameplay, but rather that the games evolved to fit the controllers that were commonly available. FPS's were born on the PC, so it's not surprising that they're best played with the keyboard/mouse. Platformers did most of their growing on consoles, and that's why they work better there.
TFA doesn't say what games were tested, but if they were console ports from PC, I would expect PC games to win becuase you're going from something designed for flexible input to a few buttons only. And most FPS games are designed for play on PC. And most console FPS use engines that were developed for PC use.
However, take something these days designed for consoles and ported to PC, then things might be different, especially since PC gamers always complain about console ports having sucky controls. Like the Halo series or something.
Serious question firm an iPhone owner... I've always thought that the appeal of Android was that it was wide open. That had me considering picking up one in the future. If I have to perform what sounds like a jailbreak why should I not stick with my current (and possibly future) jail broken iPhones?
Actually, Android is open-source, but not open. A very subtle difference, because you can have unrootable un moddable Android devices. Many manufacturers have made it basically impossible to do custom firmware - even Linux-running gadgets can have TiVo-ization things done to them.
The "open" part of Android OS compared to the iPhone is that apps don't have to go through the approval process, nor do they have to be bought from only the Android Marketplace. You can load apps in via SD card or USB, and Marketplace listing only needs like a flat fee per year (it's an open listing - you post your app and it shows up there, no approval process). Not sure how the Android piracy scene is (but I think it's minimal - most apps are free, and developers use ads for support rather than upfront payment and having to worry about piracy).
But for phone manufacturers, the OS itself is desired to be as closed as iOS is. Rooting it lets you do more things (like jailbreaking does on iOS). But custom ROMs and the like were another different thing altogether from rooting, and were done before Android and the requirement for source code even.
Windows Mobile devices from HTC often featured custom ROMs, but others were often locked down. Android's the same - just because it's running Android and you can grab the source, doesn't mean you can necessarily replace the ROM on your phone with it.
It's just that manufacturers haven't really cared much to do it. Motorola's starting to lock down their phones (just like they lock down their WinMo phones in the past). HTC appears to continue doing the same "we don't care" thing they did since the WinMo days. (Some HTC OEM designs hated that - they really didn't like xda-developers). But Android phones can be TiVo-ized. Especially since the majority of the OS code is designed that way (Apache license).
My only Android question is - is there any way to get Marketplace apps outside of the Marketplace app? Sometimes you see nice apps that are temporarily free and it would be nice to get them before they go up in price...
The prime candidate (IMO) is something in the Xbox3. After being burned by not controlling the CPU and GPU designs chipset parts for the Xbox1 they had tighter control on the Xbox2 (360) with thier own 3 core Power PC design.
I don't see it as a core processing element, but maybe as an IO controller or something. But that would be awful since it's a lot of extra coding, especially multi-architecture coding.
However, it's also possible that Microsoft is considering some sort of portable Xbox system. ARMs just don't to the crazy speeds that the current gen consoles are at (Cortex A8/A9 only go to 1.something GHz, those PowerPC cores are pushing 3GHz). A portable system however, doesn't need too much power, and power-optimizing ARM has a lot of knowledge already from cellphones and the like.
It's unlikely to be a tablet (Microsoft wants Windows 7 for tablets), so I guess a handheld Xbox would be it.
IOW: MS is too big to turn on a dime. MS has become what they were striving to replace: IBM.
More like they can't. A problem may be a simple fix inside a problem module, but it's also got to go through rounds of testing to make sure that simple fix actually doesn't break anything. After all, even doing stuff like implementing LUA showed how badly things broke (see Vista).
The problem when you're the giant is you attract all the developers. The problem is, most developers write crap for code, and do things they really shouldn't. If you remember back in the DOS days, people hacked inside DOS data structures all the time - so much so that Microsoft was stuck in that they couldn't move its place in memory or alter it. Or even assume that its values haven't changed. The same thing's happened with Windows. The desktop "window" actually has a title called "Program Manager". The icons and other resources inside explorer.exe and other shell DLL's can never, ever be touched, removed, replaced or altered because apps actually "steal" the icons from within. (Things broke horribly during the XP betas because they renamed the window classes (not to be confused with a C++ class)). Or why "Documents and Settings" is a hardlink on Vista and Windows 7.
I think they're also a short way away from recognizing that if you type "C:\Program Files" to actually take you to %PROGRAMFILES% because people assume that it will always be called "Program Files". (Not "Program Files (x86)", not localized, etc.).
It's not just areas without 3G signal, in Europe if I drive a few hundred kms (as little as 100km in one direction) I'm in another country. Despite the EU brining them a bit under control the data charges are still punishingly expensive - it's not worth it to pay 20 Euros in data charges just to navigate somewhere.
Not to mention if you have to deviate for whatever reason. Part of the whole appeal of GPS Is if you get lost, miss a turn, decide to go off the beaten path for a side trip, or are in an unfamiliar area, it's there to back you up and get you back on course. And other countries are often unfamiliar areas. Sure you can get me from point A to my desired point B and have map data all the way, but what if I needed to divert? Or I saw/heard a nice little shop on the other side of this new unfamiliar town?
Offline maps always have that advantage. At least until we get rid of bogus data roaming charges. Right now it seems like if I don't have coverage and am lost, I need to find a WiFi hotspot, pay the few bucks to use it and to get the updated maps to get me on track. Stuff that a GPS is supposed to avoid me having to do. Especially if you make a wrong turn and end up in a bad area.
I'm sure they fix it in a few months with the next version of the Iphone
With magical predictive powers, I predict Apple will release the iPhone 5 sometime in June 2011. I also predict that touching that spot on the iPhone 5 won't drop signal compared to the iPhone 4. Of course, I can't predict if touching a different spot drops signal. Oh yeah, the iPhone 5 will be bigger and badder than the iPhone 4, too.
Considering they're still shipping every single unit they make, it would seem Antennagate is a tempest in a teapot. Hell, I'd suspect a good few complaining never noticed it until someone showed them as they couldn't reproduce it. (You know people will try to, and they'll probably start noticing it because its trendy).
With the iPhone 5 coming out in a few months, there's always the option of waiting. All the iPhones on the planet don't stop working when Apple releases a new one. (Is there even a public jailbreak for the iPhone 4 yet?)
Hell, BP is probably cursing Toyota for not being in the news when that spill happened. They are, however, thanking Apple for Antennagate (and probably placed a few million orders for iPhone 4s as thank yous). Considering the noise Antennagate made, you'd think it was the end of the world or something, and BP's oil spill was a that someone dropped a bucket overboard. (And let's not forget BP's disaster affects people involutnarily - last I checked Antennagate didn't affect people who don't own iPhone 4s.)
The dollar figure is BS - its not like he did damage to the hardware, programs, or data. But he did hack the system...and should be punished.
Not for the people who are involved. If your systems get "browsed through" would you not be combing through just to make sure the guy didn't decide to do something malicious instead? Or do you trust the hacker that just cracked your SSH password that all he did was "look around"?
The numerical amount may be high, but that could encompass a lot of costs in having to hire forensic investigators to check out each and every system (since breaking into one can also lead to breaking into others). So you've got the cost of downtime for everyone using the systems (because you want to freeze the system for investigation), the cost of the investigation itself, plus the cost of incidentals (e.g., changing passwords, etc).
No sane admin treats a system that was "just looked over" as untouched - they all treat it as someone intentionally put something on the machine, and until proven otherwise, the machine is untrustworthy.
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Yeah, but the 'scope is a dedicated application with dedicated front panel controls. Windows is merely a widget provider. I've used them, and they're very nice as they support modern hardware and printouts/screenshots are a breeze. But you have to buy the ones with the full front panels - the ones that are just PCs are just... useless and you spend way too much time mousing around clicking virtual knobs. Painful.
$2k can get you a nice basic scope. That's all you need. For the rare times you need something fancy, there are many places that'll rent you the high end scopes for days or weeks. Sure you're paying a good chunk of money for someone else's loan, but unless you can ante up the $10-100K+ for those things, it's far more economical. Get what you can (surely you should be able to find a nice 500MHz scope used?) with what you have to do most of the debugging. When it comes time to debug that obscure thing, rent it.
This way you'll get a good scope for normal use, rent a oh-so-beautiful GHz level scope when you need it or even the fancy-smancy "analog digital" combined scope plus logic analyzer. Those let you analyze bus signals in standard 0's and 1's, while seeing actual signals at the same time. Plus, they can capture the analog signals with the digital, so you can trigger on some oddball logic condition on the bus and see any odd analog waveforms at the same time. But those are expensive - your best bet is renting until you can afford to buy one 10+ years from now.
And if your scope only collects dust instead of signal, you've avoided wasting a pile of money.
Depends on the OEM key.
If it's from a brand name laptop (Dell/Acer/Asus/Toshiba/Sony/etc) then it probably uses a "SLIC" BIOS so you don't have to activate. If it's a generic whitebox, then it probably just uses the OEM version of Windows. The latter has a sticker with the key that should work, but will need activation.
The former has a product label that often says the manufacturer's name on it as it's a customized key that doesn't work without calling. In this case, the VIsta/7 installation key you must use the global manufacturer OEM CD key. This is the key that those manufacturers use when they do the install. It tells Vista/7 to use the SLIC BIOS rather than requiring a per-copy OEM key. It doesn't need activation, unless you wiped the BIOS and lost the SLIC information, then you're screwed. It's also the key that gets displayed if you use a key retriever (which never matches the sticker).
Pirate Tip: When you get that list of custom OEM keys, you can "Windows Anytime Upgrade" it to convert your SLIC'd PC from Home to Ultimate for free by using the ultimate OEM key (because the OEM key determines the Windows version, while the SLIC only says you're licensed for a copy, but not which copy - this allows OEMs to sell some configurations with HOme Premium, others with Ultimate, etc). Requires a PC with a SLIC BIOS though. Can't go from Vista to 7 this way unless you have a SLIC 2.1 BIOS, but you can go to ultimate for free. And it'll scan as activated and genuine, too.
Except you have to do more than just visit a web site. You have to visit the web site, then actually do an action in order to jailbreak your phone (i.e., you have to slide the thing over to begin the process). Otherwise you can make a claim that a drive-by download is the same thing.
So it's not illegal to visit that website, it may be illegal to follow through with the actions of that web site, though.
Back in the OS 2.x days where you also had a website jailbreaker, many ipod touches I saw on display were jailbroken - whether by customers or the salespeople, I don't know.
Of course, for fun, install installuous on all those devices...
Doubt it. Unless Samsung provides it, you won't get it. And if it was, there's probably hacked firmware available for you that you can load up yourself.
Sprint however, will probably use this as an opportunity to make firmware that can't be rooted and maybe even enforce ROM signatures so you can't load custom ROMs in.
(And why is it, that Apple basically gave their finger towards AT&T and did their own thing on firmware (so AT&T can't go load on all their crapware), everyone running Android is still catering to the carriers and loading in all their crapware on? Except maybe the Nexus One (no longer available), it seems no one dares give their finger to the carrier and "do their own thing" like Apple...).
Nope. Apple does not force any software update on anyone. I have my original iPhone still running at 2.something (with the SMS flaw), simply because I was too lazy to do the required jailbreaking on it.
This is unlike say, the Palm Pre, where you can delay an update, but you can't avoid it. I think Android devices are also voluntary updates as well, but the carrier can go force the issue (see what Rogers did by forcing an unrootable firmware on their G1s).
Sad to say, but Google doesn't care if your Android device isn't a phone. They don't care, they don't "With Google" you or anything. To Google, if it's not a phone, they're not interested.
As for the Archos 5, that thing is so locked down it's practically impossible to root it or customize it, so it's stuck with Android 1.6, which won't support this anyhow.
And OS-managed DRM is a good thing. It being in one place means rooting the phone means you can pirate apps again by stubbing out those APIs to use fake responses. Even if Google encrypts the binary, it has to be decrypted somehow, and you'll just be right where iOS piracy is. Yes, the executable inside the an iOS ipa is encrypted in spots (running it will crash the app) and the loader decrypts it based on your device key. The iOS piracy scripts basically run the app inside gdb and grab the memory image after it's been decrypted. Android apps probably won't be much different - unless Dalvik starts having special hooks where the code is encrypted in random spots and it automatically decrypts.
I'm surprised Android piracy is so high though - iOS has various pirate web sites, and of course on bittorrent and even an "alternative app store" where you can download and install pirated apps right on your device. I haven't heard of sites hosting pirated android apps exclusively, nor pirate app installers, etc. I've seen the torrents though, but those I expect.
Actually, the signature is nothing more than an approval to a contract, not for comparison purposes. The signature panel on the back of your credit card signifies that you agreed to the cardholder agreement. The signature on the slip signifies that you are agreeing to pay the amount specified as a valid debt. The signature on the cheque indicates that you're agreeing to pay the amount specified on the note. A cheque can be written on anything as long as it contains the payee details (name), payer details (name, account number), the amount to be paid, the date and a signature indicating approval of the transaction. You could write this all on a piece of paper and it would be valid - it's how banks give you generic cheques where you have to fill in all the details yourself while your customized ones arrive later.
And yes, you should be careful how you store your chequebooks as there's a lot of valuable personal information on it.
I don't know which nVidia parts are affected, but it's possible that RAMBUS might have shot itself in the foot if they covered all GPUs.
After all, RAMBUS' biggest wins are in the console market, and the PS3 has the distinction of having both RAMBUS memory in it (256MB system RAM - XDR-RAM), and nVidia GPU ("RSX"). Xbox360 and Wii use ATi parts, and don't use RAMBUS memory.
So if the PS3 also ends up blocked because of the ITC, it would affect licensing revenues for RAMBUS themselves, no? Heck, it may cause Sony to consider withdrawing their support as well...
Those of you silly enough to argue that living is infringement failed to read further into the article that says that bypassing a copy protection device is illegal. Even if the bypassing device has legitimate uses.
Sound familiar? It's like the DMCA, though the DMCA was updated earlier this week with a ruling that said that no longer applied for fair use (which still blocks space shifting, but allows the formerly illegal mashups from DVDs and Blu-Rays, short clips etc.).
So jailbreaking is still illegal in the UK, you cannot pick DRM locks, and you cannot bypass copy protections that may be present for whatever reason.
They're too expensive.
If we take a BOM cost of maybe $15 for all those parts and assembly and such, you're looking at a toy that'll sell for $60+. Which is a super-expensive toy - parents balk at paying that much. The ideal toy price is around $20 - $10 is great, $30 is tops, and $50 is expensive.
Those little electronic handheld games that sell for $10 probably cost $1 in total cost to the manufacturer, and the retailer probably paid $5 for it (probably $6-7 after warehouse and shipping and such). $20 game may probably cost $3 to manufacture.
If the manufacturer was making low margins, that $15 badge would probably sell for $25 wholesale and maybe $50 MSRP.
If you think those margins are high, remember they include store overhead, defect overhead (many of these things are just thrown away if a customer returns it as defective, and the manufacturer and retailer look at those return rates to determine how much will be paid), plus shipping from manufacturer to retailer warehouse to retailer. Plus, when the retailer starts discounting as well...
Actually, they're quite big and raking in the dough. They're in one of the best selling consoles, and in this generation's worst-selling console.
Yes, the PS2 has 32MB of RAMBUS RDRAM in it. It was one of their big announcements after thair failed foray into PCs.
And yes, there's also 256MB of XDR DRAM in the PS3 (the other 256 is GDDR3 for the nVidia RSX). XDR technology is owned by RAMBUS.
Despite not selling well in the PC world, they're doing good enough in other markets. Hell, many /.'ers probably own a PS3 and thus have contributed to this patent trolling. Probably some of those complaining about patent trolls in this article too will extol the virtues of the PS3 (or PS2) in other threads without realizing that they're really just helping RAMBUS.
Well, someone's got your credit card number. You can dispute the charge, but because it was unauthorized, the bank would prefer you throw away your old card because if there's one, perhaps there's another. Hell, if you look close, you might find a "testing charge" from iTunes or something a month back. Because you can be sure the next month they'll try charging $5000+. Heck, they may have already done an authorization charge for that much but the charge hasn't come yet.
I've had my card fraudulently used, and the biggest pain is not the auto-bills (especially since they were coming due), but not having a card for a week. I changed it again a year later when one of the stores I visit had their credit card processor breached (possibly). I did it pre-emptively to avoid any hassles. This time I rushed the card and was only without it for a few days.
Well, most likely it's all negative. It's all about spin - you publish your successes, you bury your failures. Oh, we killed 100 insurgents today and only lost one? Publish that! Hide the fact we accidentally killed 5 children - One heroic death while killing 100 evil nasty enemies.
Positive news gets redacted of sensitive information and published. Negative news, even the downsides to the positive news, gets buried. Of course, some easily controlled negative news gets out since no one believes anyone can be 100% successful.
In reasonable cities, that does happen with the likes of ZipCar and other services. These people live close to work (or public transportation), schools and shops so they can get by without a car. The few times they need it, they rent one. It's just like owning a car and having to rent a truck once in a while to do some heavy lifting or big moving. Doesn't justify needing to own a truck and associated expenses.
Sure if you need the car more often it would be costlier, but for occasional use, a number of people feel that not having car payments, insurance and maintenance bills that occur even if you don't use it is a good deal.
Singapore has (had?) a system like that too - cars are expensive because of limited land so supply is restricted by government. To make cars workable for those that only really need it on the weekend, they introduced special licensing where the car can only be driven "free" on weekends and holidays. During other times they need a special day pass shown on the windscreen.
Some people want full PCs. Others want appliances. They're not mutually exclusive groups, either - you may want a full PC for one task, and an appliance for another. The whole point of a free market is to let people have cake and eat it too. We bemoan the next DRM scheme that removes freedom from our PC, but we embrace the simplicity of gaming on consoles (which are full of DRM).
That's because the Xbox is holding back the Xbox360. There's a point in time when backwards compatibility is just holding back development and you have to cut free (see Windows Vista). It's sad, but you knew the day was coming - people were complaining they wanted stuff on Xbox Live that Microsoft could not deliver because of the Xbox. Eventually you were looking at supporting 1,000-odd users of Halo 2 (the other 9 games on the list weren't even totalling Halo 2's total), and holding back features for millions of other users.
Hell, you can still play Halo 2 online if you wanted to - the PC version is still supported. (It's not been updated the past couple of weeks because of stuff like E3 and SDCC).
But yes, I think there's been too much emphasis on PvP multiplayer and not enough on co-op or vs. computer play (it's changing again though). Some of us get home so burned out from the day, we want to plop in front of the couch and mindlessly shoot aliens. It's cathartic. We don't want to do team games, we don't want to get on and get pwned. We just want to get out and shoot. Alas, I know only since Halo ODST did this happen ("Firefight" mode), and it's starting to happen in other games as well. I just wish games like Halo 3 had it.
Some of my best Starcraft games was with my friend battling the computer. When we got down to the end, we ended up toying with the computer opponent - something you can't do in real life, but amusing.
You could do it right now. Netbooks are cheap and easy things to get, just install your favorite Linux and you're done. Nota s cheap as your dedicated banking terminal, but you can still do it yourself fairly cheaply and protect yourself, if not your family.
Most "featurephones" do h.264 as well. Using h.264 is a misnomer since it spans a quality continuum from 160x120 through 1080p and beyond. Most higher end phones can do VGA on h.264 easily.
3gp is a container format. It's a subset of the mp4 container format. Which is a subset of the mov container format (Apple QuickTime). Anything that plays mp4 should handle 3gp easily as the real difference is codec support. Most mp4 parsers understand MOV as well because it's not that much extra work (and Apple's documented MOV anyhow). 3gp can hold quality videos, but since most devices producing them are featurephones with their crappy-cam sensors and fleapower CPUs that can barely do CIF resolution in real time, nevermind QVGA.
USPS is also one of the most economical ways to ship internationally.
Sure you could ship UPS, if you want to ding the recipient with addicitional fees that range anywhere from 30-200% the declared cost (plus taxes).
At least FedEx dings you $25 plus taxes, so anything shipped via FedEx better be expensive to justify it.
USPS, I get billed $5 or $8, depending on whether it was regular priority mail or express mail.
I think the only other company able to do it so cheap is DHL, but I think they've left the US.
I never buy from stores that ship via UPS - it's not worth it, and even the importer that charges 100% markup can be cheaper than buying direct. FedEx I reserve for expensive items, and USPS all the way for everything else.
TFA doesn't say what games were tested, but if they were console ports from PC, I would expect PC games to win becuase you're going from something designed for flexible input to a few buttons only. And most FPS games are designed for play on PC. And most console FPS use engines that were developed for PC use.
However, take something these days designed for consoles and ported to PC, then things might be different, especially since PC gamers always complain about console ports having sucky controls. Like the Halo series or something.
Actually, Android is open-source, but not open. A very subtle difference, because you can have unrootable un moddable Android devices. Many manufacturers have made it basically impossible to do custom firmware - even Linux-running gadgets can have TiVo-ization things done to them.
The "open" part of Android OS compared to the iPhone is that apps don't have to go through the approval process, nor do they have to be bought from only the Android Marketplace. You can load apps in via SD card or USB, and Marketplace listing only needs like a flat fee per year (it's an open listing - you post your app and it shows up there, no approval process). Not sure how the Android piracy scene is (but I think it's minimal - most apps are free, and developers use ads for support rather than upfront payment and having to worry about piracy).
But for phone manufacturers, the OS itself is desired to be as closed as iOS is. Rooting it lets you do more things (like jailbreaking does on iOS). But custom ROMs and the like were another different thing altogether from rooting, and were done before Android and the requirement for source code even.
Windows Mobile devices from HTC often featured custom ROMs, but others were often locked down. Android's the same - just because it's running Android and you can grab the source, doesn't mean you can necessarily replace the ROM on your phone with it.
It's just that manufacturers haven't really cared much to do it. Motorola's starting to lock down their phones (just like they lock down their WinMo phones in the past). HTC appears to continue doing the same "we don't care" thing they did since the WinMo days. (Some HTC OEM designs hated that - they really didn't like xda-developers). But Android phones can be TiVo-ized. Especially since the majority of the OS code is designed that way (Apache license).
My only Android question is - is there any way to get Marketplace apps outside of the Marketplace app? Sometimes you see nice apps that are temporarily free and it would be nice to get them before they go up in price...
I don't see it as a core processing element, but maybe as an IO controller or something. But that would be awful since it's a lot of extra coding, especially multi-architecture coding.
However, it's also possible that Microsoft is considering some sort of portable Xbox system. ARMs just don't to the crazy speeds that the current gen consoles are at (Cortex A8/A9 only go to 1.something GHz, those PowerPC cores are pushing 3GHz). A portable system however, doesn't need too much power, and power-optimizing ARM has a lot of knowledge already from cellphones and the like.
It's unlikely to be a tablet (Microsoft wants Windows 7 for tablets), so I guess a handheld Xbox would be it.
More like they can't. A problem may be a simple fix inside a problem module, but it's also got to go through rounds of testing to make sure that simple fix actually doesn't break anything. After all, even doing stuff like implementing LUA showed how badly things broke (see Vista).
The problem when you're the giant is you attract all the developers. The problem is, most developers write crap for code, and do things they really shouldn't. If you remember back in the DOS days, people hacked inside DOS data structures all the time - so much so that Microsoft was stuck in that they couldn't move its place in memory or alter it. Or even assume that its values haven't changed. The same thing's happened with Windows. The desktop "window" actually has a title called "Program Manager". The icons and other resources inside explorer.exe and other shell DLL's can never, ever be touched, removed, replaced or altered because apps actually "steal" the icons from within. (Things broke horribly during the XP betas because they renamed the window classes (not to be confused with a C++ class)). Or why "Documents and Settings" is a hardlink on Vista and Windows 7.
I think they're also a short way away from recognizing that if you type "C:\Program Files" to actually take you to %PROGRAMFILES% because people assume that it will always be called "Program Files". (Not "Program Files (x86)", not localized, etc.).
It's a miracle Windows works at all.
Not to mention if you have to deviate for whatever reason. Part of the whole appeal of GPS Is if you get lost, miss a turn, decide to go off the beaten path for a side trip, or are in an unfamiliar area, it's there to back you up and get you back on course. And other countries are often unfamiliar areas. Sure you can get me from point A to my desired point B and have map data all the way, but what if I needed to divert? Or I saw/heard a nice little shop on the other side of this new unfamiliar town?
Offline maps always have that advantage. At least until we get rid of bogus data roaming charges. Right now it seems like if I don't have coverage and am lost, I need to find a WiFi hotspot, pay the few bucks to use it and to get the updated maps to get me on track. Stuff that a GPS is supposed to avoid me having to do. Especially if you make a wrong turn and end up in a bad area.
With magical predictive powers, I predict Apple will release the iPhone 5 sometime in June 2011. I also predict that touching that spot on the iPhone 5 won't drop signal compared to the iPhone 4. Of course, I can't predict if touching a different spot drops signal. Oh yeah, the iPhone 5 will be bigger and badder than the iPhone 4, too.
Considering they're still shipping every single unit they make, it would seem Antennagate is a tempest in a teapot. Hell, I'd suspect a good few complaining never noticed it until someone showed them as they couldn't reproduce it. (You know people will try to, and they'll probably start noticing it because its trendy).
With the iPhone 5 coming out in a few months, there's always the option of waiting. All the iPhones on the planet don't stop working when Apple releases a new one. (Is there even a public jailbreak for the iPhone 4 yet?)
Hell, BP is probably cursing Toyota for not being in the news when that spill happened. They are, however, thanking Apple for Antennagate (and probably placed a few million orders for iPhone 4s as thank yous). Considering the noise Antennagate made, you'd think it was the end of the world or something, and BP's oil spill was a that someone dropped a bucket overboard. (And let's not forget BP's disaster affects people involutnarily - last I checked Antennagate didn't affect people who don't own iPhone 4s.)
Not for the people who are involved. If your systems get "browsed through" would you not be combing through just to make sure the guy didn't decide to do something malicious instead? Or do you trust the hacker that just cracked your SSH password that all he did was "look around"?
The numerical amount may be high, but that could encompass a lot of costs in having to hire forensic investigators to check out each and every system (since breaking into one can also lead to breaking into others). So you've got the cost of downtime for everyone using the systems (because you want to freeze the system for investigation), the cost of the investigation itself, plus the cost of incidentals (e.g., changing passwords, etc).
No sane admin treats a system that was "just looked over" as untouched - they all treat it as someone intentionally put something on the machine, and until proven otherwise, the machine is untrustworthy.