Speaking as a student I want to know why all these companies keep thinking we want e-readers and e-books instead of textbooks. I don't want my textbook to go dead 9 hours into studying, or not be able to have 3-4 books open to 3-4 different sections each. I would however, like one for pleasure reading, but not a $500/5.5 lb machine. What exactly is this for?
The big problem is, electronic documents are great for searching, but terrible at seeking (searching - you ask computer for location, it finds. Seeking - you know you saw something interesting 10 pages forward and move that way). This applies to e-readers, iPads, PDFs, HTML files. A hack is being able to bookmark the spot, but putting bookmarks is terrible since they quickly muliply if you bookmark everything, or didn't bookmark that interesting thing.
Reading fiction requires little seeking and electronic means make it very practical.
Textbooks and other reference materials are full of seeks - you look at the table of contents and go there, then scan from that to find the relevant information, then back and forth, back and forth. On paper, you use little post-it tabs or something, or if it's a quick browse, your fingers to act as temporary bookmarks. Seeking back and forth is instananeous, and even though you might not know where something is exactly, you can probably roughly tell as you skim the headings during your seek.
It's a subtle concept to master, and why the "paperless office" never really happened since screens are lousy seekers, and the only way we can fix it is... more screens! After all, I can have multiple documents open (e.g., one document describes a hardware register, another document describes the settings I need to put on the register, a third describing how to set the register properly, and a fourth maybe to reference background material on why certain tings are set certain ways. If it's one document, it's a nightmare having to rapidly go between these places (seeking), and why I often print out the relevant pages so I can have them "all open" at the same time.
And on a more cynical note, the reason publishers are going electronic is simple - the used textbook market is a major thorn in their sides, just like used games are a major thorn on game publishers. They may tout crap like you only carry a 1lb device instead of 30lbs of books, but the real reason is the inability to resell.
3000 bucks for solving a problem that would cost FB at least 10 times more money in developing cost....
Actually, if you look at the problems and the solutions, you submit the answer. You don't submit how you got the answer, or your program source code at all. Some of those problems look like the best strategy is to simply apply pencil and paper and solve it manually. Or think it through and compose an answer.
It's computer oriented, but use of a computer in the final solution is optional - it may be really useful (e.g., the RPS hard challenge, but that can also be manually evaluated), or it may be completely useless (e.g., the fish game). No hidden datasets that you're tested on, just a problem, and the result you send back is the answer. How you got to the answer is up to you - completely using your brain, or completely using your computer, or more likely, a reasonable mashup between the two, coupled with the Internet.
Actually, the biggest problem isn't technology, but social. The trip itself is technological - if we don't have it now, we probably will in the future. The social part isn't, and we don't have much research on long duration isolation. And if we can't solve the social problem, then even if we can send ships to Alpha Centauri and back, it'll be pointless if the crew kills themselves several months in. And yes, we have plenty of short-duration isolation studies (submarines, space stations etc. have all provided the research).
It's a LONG trip. And for the entire duration, you're going to be with the same people you started with. Interactions, positive and negative happen, and it gets important to see if there's a way to handle them before they get serious enough to compromise the entire point. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends, people resenting each other, emotions, anger, hostility. It's all bound to happen when you coop people up for a year and a half and the best communications gets you is e-mail or video-mail. Basically, it's an extreme case of cabin fever.
Here's some things to ponder: * What kind of crew makeup should there be? Male/Female ratio? Occupational makeup? * How are contentions resolved? * Can you even go this long without everyone going stir-crazy? * Would having more space help, and how much space per person? * Resource issues, workload issues.
It may literally take us 100+ years to do all the research simply because the durations are so long, the groups under study are so small and so on. You can repeat the same experiment with the same makeup of people (male/female, occupation, etc) and have wildly different results, which ask why.
It's bleach. It's just like your standard bottle of Clorox, only about 7x stronger. Bleach breaks down pretty quickly to relatively harmless chemicals except for AOX, which is harmful to invertebrates and fish. STB is not used in large enough quantities to do any real damage. If the decom site is next to a pond, expect all the fish to die. If it is next to a small lake, it won't be much of a problem.
So, the question to you is this: What is more important, the possible death of a pond full of fish or the certain death of large group of human soldiers and a victory to the types of assholes that would use chem/bio weapons?
Of course, if this "green" product works as well or better than the products we are using today, like STB, the great! I'm all for it. However, when it's my ass on the line, don't ask me to be the one to test it. When I've been "contaminated", I don't even want the NBC Decom specialist even taking the time to tell me how green the product is. Just get this human pesticide off of me!
I think you're missing the point. The point is, after the attack happened and people are treated, now you need to clean up the crap from the buildings and the ground - you know, to prevent other people from being affected. Especially if it gets into the water table.
A pond of fish dying after an attack isn't a big deal if they died because STB was used to decontaminate people. But once the people are gone, the ground is still contaminated with whatever crap was unleashed, and if untreated, it may go into that pond, leech into the water table, and kill everyone in the neighbouring town.
This green stuff is used to decontaminate the site afterwards. You want it to be green because you don't really want to contaminate the land some more (great, you just replaced one problem with another).
It's not for the OMG Attack! time. It's for the time after all the excitement is over and done with, and the real work begins.
Just like there's a niche speciality in "forensic cleaners" who clean up crime scenes after the investigation is over (removing all the blood and other crap that can embed itself into walls and such - it's a very difficult job), there's a need for stuff like this too.
Iridium are the best duplex LEO network (better for low power applications than GEO) and the only serious competition to Inmarsat. Inmarsat would not have made nearly as much progress if they had no decent competition - GlobalStar are simplex and Orbcomm are as abysmally useless are always.
Also, Iridium has better coverage (as in, full globe). GlobalStar actually has deadspots in their coverage because of their design. Also, one of Iridium's biggest customers is the US military - because of this global coverage. Inmarsat's great for fixed operations, but if you want an emergency telephone, the Iridium ones tend to be easier with their "see sky, point antenna at sky, make call" operation (i.e., no aiming). Dead spots is an issue - even if it's only 1% of the world that's not covered, you'll be the one needing to make a emergency call in that 1%.
(FYI - an Iridium satellite is an orbiting cell tower capable of switching calls between satellite to ground, ground to satellite, and satellite to satellite. GlobalStar's architecture is "antenna up high" - you uplink to GlobalStar satellite which relays it to a ground station where the actual switching occurs. It's cheaper, but there are dead spots because a satellite might not be able to see a ground station - Iridium passes the call to another satellite in this case that might be able to see the ground, or routes the call onward again).
Also, those SPOT devices use GlobalStar to relay your GPS coordinates to the ground station - very popular amongst hikers, pilots and other people where they may have issues getting continuous cell coverage.
The panel is obviously not e-ink...is this old school monochrome LCD, then? If the viewing angles are OK, I don't see why not.
There are some LCDs that are non-backlit, but are very contrasty with very nice viewing angles available. The Aluratek Librie e-reader's a cheap ($120-ish) version of that whose screen is almost like e-Ink, and very, very nice. Probably active-matrix panels to avoid all the nasty ghosting monochrome panels of old are. I used one and I didn't realize it was LCD - I just thought it was quite responsive, then saw it was actually an LCD.
Alas, it's major setback is the cheap plasticky feel, the sharp "I'm high tech" edges and ridges, and positively lousy looking and feeling firmware. (And that's a major setback of all these devices is crappy-ass firmware...).
This is of course partially Apple's fault as well as AT&T, because Apple tied the iWhatevers to AT&T. Its about time that Apple gets hit with the same wonderful consideration that normal people receive every day when they are locked into a particular vendor.
iPhones are tied to AT&T. iPads are not, and Steve Jobs has made big fuss that the iPad is not SIM-locked. People have bought US iPad 3G's and used them quite successfully in Europe and Canada. However, Apple does work with AT&T to offer special plans and pricing. Hell, AT&T probably got the idea from Rogers (Canada), which offers no unlimited plan at all. And competition is grand, for Bell (Canada) will offer the exact same plans and pricing for the iPad.
You can even buy an iPad 3G and use it on T-mobile. The only deal is that T-mobile's 3G frequencies are not supported by the iPad, so you get EDGE speeds at best. (Carriers in other countries often have at least one band covered by the iPad, if not both AT&T and T-Mobile's bands).
Of course, since Verizon announced the end of unlimited data as well (at least for 4G)...
Since one of the participation requirements is that you have to "promise not to reverse engineer the box", I'm guessing that it will do something more than just plain-text pass through "counting" of packets over time.
And since every packet is going to go through this box, that means that every packet can be monitored as it's registered for "bandwidth" purposes.
My vote goes towards the black box approach, otherwise why would the be so adamant about people reverse engineering it?
Because people on both sides (especially ISPs) will love to be able to manipulate results. ISPs would love to know what the black box is measuring and how it reports results. Then they can detect black box users, and "optimize" the traffic the black box measures.
Or they can offer the little ol' Grandma down the street free Internet service, top tier 100Mbps, a netbook, on the condition it's for the whole time they have the black box. All for free for a few months. Call it an FCC lottery for them.
Carriers already hate what the FCC's proposing to do with net neutrality, caps, and people paying for bandwidth they can't get. Now the FCC wants to measure to see if there's a need, and you can be sure the carriers would love to skew the results towards "it's not necessary - see, we're fast, and people really don't use more than 1GB per month! Honest!".
Are the screen sizes a big deal? Application and web developers have dealt with this problem for decades now.
I think there's only two right now - HVGA (320x480), and WVGA (480x800), though there may also be VGA sized screens as well.
The big issue is that the density increases but the screen size remains the same, so if your app isn't DPI aware things get small and hard to control. Desktop app developers tend to be fixed DPI - a larger window lets you show more information. Ditto web developers. But high-DPI displays means you don't want to show more information, but you should scale everything up. Even pictures if it makes the picture grow from literal thumbnail to larger blob.
DPI-awareness is a difficult thing and many apps still get it wrong on the desktop, if you switch your Windows desktop to high-DPI mode.
I don't really think anyone seriously believes in Intelligent Design. There are lots of Creationists who will wave it around, but generally to them ID==Creationism. As was pretty clear from Dover and other attempts to teach it, the school boards in question were populated with Creationists who had been scammed by DI into believing that Creationism was going to be taught in the classroom.
As to the ID formulators, considering the amount of work they put into formulating ID as a neutered replacement of out-and-out Creationism, I think it's hard to accept any claim of sincerity. ID is a legal creation, a fabrication with but one purpose, to get Creationism past the Establishment Clause.
Actually, Creationism and ID are linked - the Discovery Institute left behind transitional fossils (evolution, natch) when they searched-and-replaced "Creationism" with "Intelligent Design" in one version of their books. As in, something like "crintelligent designism" or something like that.
Though, I think at lot of the reason Creationists left was because the sole purpose of getting Creationism/ID in schools was under the banner that "good religious" kids (i.e., Christians - they're not advocating Islam or other religion) makes for moral kids. Moral kids aren't the ones who go shooting up schools, doing drugs, being bullies, disrespecting authority, etc. etc. etc. As in, Christianity in schools would solve all our social ills.
There was that great PBS show on ID that really tore through the DI for their real purpose at trying to cloud the issue. It really wasn't evolution they're against, it's just that evolution is controversial enough that they could use it as a means to get more Christian teachings in class.
Aircraft electrics have been WiFi/phone safe for decades, if they weren't then every lightning bolt with 100 miles would be a threat.
The reasons for not allowing those things aren't to do with safety.
Not entirely true. There are documented cases where cellphones have caused navigational systems to lose lock - notably a Samsung phone caused the onboard GPS to lose lock, amongst other things. The following article has some research the IEEE did a few years ago to that effect. It's a bit dated given how far technology's advanced, but you can be sure the problem is still present given how many cellphones and how many models there are.
The more practical matter was to prevent a planeload of cellphones from DoS'ing the cellphone network because each cellphone can suddenly see towers across several states. Yes, the majority of the signal is aimed downwards, but short of parabolic dish antennas, all antennas have unwanted sidelobe radiation. Heck, I'm sure some terrorist group may be contemplating some illegally amplified cellphones flying across a city to effectively kill the cell network in the city as well as the surrounding region (and maybe even states).
And light aircraft carry cellphones all the time. When you file a flight plan the briefer often asks if I'm carrying a cellphone. First, it may help in an emergency. Second, if you lose your radios or electrical system (common issue), you can still maintain communications with an airport tower (you're low enough that multiple towers isn't really an issue).
One other interference issue is the aviation band is smack dab in the middle where it's easy to have unintentional radiators. Inflight systems know to avoid running any bus between 118-140MHz or so (which is an issue when you have DDR RAM running at 133MHz (266DDR), or LCD pixel clocks often rise somewhere in that area).
Too bad there isn't a way to ship the firmware update on a data part of the disc itself. Then you insert the disc, firmware is upgraded (the first time you insert), and no internet connection is ever needed.
Two problems.
One, the obvious technical one - there are many players on the market, and each has a different architecture. You've got PCs and the players for them (PowerDVD, WinDVD, TotalMedia Theatre), the PS3 (Cell-based), and many Blu-Ray players that may or may not be based on many differing designs, but each requiring their own firmware (the Blu-Ray spec doesn't really call for a "BIOS" type firmware design that allows the code to be modular, other than the JVM).
The second problem is the social one. Imagine you insert the disc in your player and it updates the firmware. It means on startup your player must do the update, slowing things down just like unskippable ads (WTF - you can't bypass these ads in a number of recent Blu-Ray releases - you can only fast-forward... popup menu/top menu are prohibited...). Or if one of the update files is bad and bricks your player. Or you have a PS3 and want to enjoy OtheroS.
Precisely. It's all about the DRM. If we are lucky this will play out exactly like it did for the music industry. Those fatcats didn't voluntarily stop using DRM - they just got so sick of Steve Jobs and his monopoly control of itunes that they figured dropping DRM was the lesser of two evils. It was either keep DRM and lose pricing control to Jobs or drop DRM and regain pricing control via multiple reseller like Walmart, Amazon. The tv & movie guys have avoided dropping DRM because Apple does not hold a monopoly on video playback devices. If the ebook market goes the way of the mp3 player, then the ebook publishers will probably have to go to something like plain HTML in order to escape Jobs's tyranny.
Highly unlikely. You see, Apple got timing right with the iPod and iTunes Music Store - neither markets were really "for the average person" when Apple inroduced those things (yes, there were MP3 players before the iPod, and music stores before iTMS, but the average user couldn't really use them back then). This led to iTunes' domincance on the online music store scene coupled with the iPod dominance in the portable music player market.
But right now, we have many highly-competitive book readers on the market - Sony, Amazon and B&N on the E-ink side, and Apple on the LCD screen side. They're competing against each other - two are big book sellers, one is veteran selling ebooks (Sony's been doing it for years), and Apple's well, Apple. No one device is taking up the whole market (Sony could've, being the only reader out there more or less at the time), and they're all taking up shares of a tiny market.
Amazon and B&N both have apps for Apple's devices, so you could can use their books on the iPad and the like, which means iBooks is already at a disadvantage. And Amazon and Apple have managed to lock publishers up in such a way that prices cannot be reduced on one store vs. another. The only real way out is if the publishers themselves end up getting fed up of supporting so many formats that they themselves give up and go DRM-free, because there's no dominant player to want to "break out from". Sony, B&N, and Apple have ePub with differing DRM, and Amazon has their own format (mobi-like).
Maybe the way to break out is to support ePub DRM-free, then they'd only support one format instead of 4 separate ones. Perhaps another strong bookseller can come in with their own DRM format and press the issue. The iTunes DRM dominance isn't likely to re-occur here regardless if it's Apple, Amazon, B&N or Sony that is the dominant one.
And perhaps the way to do it is to watermark the books to heck and beyond. Do what Apple does and put personal information in the book - make it visible - perhaps along the edges ("Purchased by John Doe of 123 Main Street, SomeCity, State, 12345. (555) 123-4567. Account jdoe@example.com, credit card Visa xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234"). Which would keep most casual sharing off the Internet - those who pirate would've done so anyhow (and those that really work at it can remove the markings). I'm still amused by those who share their music via BitTorrent and all their Apple details are still visible in the files.
How's charging a reasonably low price for a phone call or two to resolve the issue with a support person who is knowledgeable as well as able to effect change? Say, charge someone's card $10 and then initiate the support call, and if they are found out to have been an erroneous ban, refund the $10. Keeps the spammers from appealing in a massive manner, while allowing the one-off mistakes relief.
Doesn't work. The user is already pissed off at being locked out, and they'll see this refundable $10 charge as a scame to increase profits. Even if you emphasise "the money will be refunded! HOnest!" the pissed-off user will not believe it. It's human nature - the company makes a mistake, and now you have to pay to fix that mistake. And how often promises of refunds take weeks or months to resolve. (Think mail-in-rebates...)
Hell, even if you offered them 100% of the money on top of what they paid (i.e., Google pays $20 for a mistaken ban, charging $10 for a support call, so banned user gets a free $10), most will still be pissed off at having to pay for a mistake. Or if you take payment details first, don't charge anything unless there's fault.
It's just like online shopping - get a defective product and you have to pay return shipping (very few retailers offer to pay return shipping on defective goods - those that do often seen "defective" marchandise destroyed in an effort to return unwanted goods).
Again, this isn't really true. The game itself may only get a few patches, but most of the time the engine is reused. Of course, by the time that the next game is released, hardware capabilities have improved and so the engine will need updating to take advantage of them, or you end up with something dated. If the game is very successful, then you may end up licensing the engine to other companies to use. Or you might end up open sourcing it. In both cases, the quality of the code does matter if you expect other people to modify it.
Most engines are licensed from a third party, who's in charge of maintaining it. The game company licenses the engine (which has nice interfaces and the like) and writes the stuff around it. So the engine is well-maintained and not dated (since those companies are interested in continuing to license the engine for next-gen hardware). Very few companies have their own engines - Valve, Bungie and iD come to mind (Valve and iD license their engines, I believe), most use third party ones - Unreal, Unity, and many, many others (too numerous to mention).
The thing is, customers pretty much use one version of the engine and throw it away for the next game, so the code around it is more "get 'er done" style quality than "look good". This also means the engine APIs can change since there's no legacy code to speak of.
Games have no longevity code-wise - once it's shipped, start another game pretty much from scratch. There may be libraries and such reused, but that's a convenience - if it's too messy, it'll be re-written, and copy-and-paste coding rules the day.
Valve and Blizzard are the few exceptions, where games can get updates long after release that fix game issues or other things...
And how many non-techies do you think would do that? Most people don't need PPAs when they have 20k+ packages in the main repositories.
A lot.
It's just like all those jailbroken iPhones, iPod Touches and now iPads who have OpenSSH with default passwords. (Hint: username is "root" or "mobile", password is "alpine"). Why do they have OpenSSH installed? Because they were blithely following some tutorial on getting something they wanted done. Be it modifying some files, installing various.debs and the like. Tutorial says "To do XXXX, go to Cydia, install OpenSSH. Using FileZilla, connect to your device root/alpine, upload the file. Then use Putty to log in (root/alpine), then "dpkg -i file.deb", then "killall springboard". Enjoy your new ability".
Users using Ubuntu are the same as well - "I need to do XXX/try program YYY/I can't find YYY/install this PPA then install/thanks!"
Ditto MacOS X and Windows. It's task-orientation. People need to do a task. They do the necessary prerequesites to do the task, not caring about what happens in-between, they want to get their task done. Just like how people see a car as mere transportation (task: get from A to B), while others see it as a wonderful result of engineering and a joy to tinker with. The groups overlap - someone who enjoys farting around with Linux may switch to "I need to do XXXX" mode in order to get something they need done - though hopefully they actually understand what they're doing.
Personally, I think Google is waiting for Skype to fight the data vs. telephone case and then follow the "open" path Skype has created to swoop in with Google Voice end-to-end VoIP apps and scale out like sand in a sandstorm.
Carriers can make sure that VoIP is unusable without doing anything special. VoIP has a very nasty requirement that no other usage has - it is very time sensitive. Latency can turn a great VoIP connection into garbage. HTTP and other traffic wouldn't notice it. And not just any latency, but jitter especially.
Imagine a carrier randomly delaying a bunch of packets 50ms, then 0ms, then 50ms then 0ms. The receiver will get no packets, then a pile of packets, then no packets. Do it wildly enough and the VoIP connection can be just awful even though both ends are getting every single packet (as VoIP discards late packets).
Jitter's already pretty bad on cellular networks, so it's hard to tell if a carrier is doing it intentionally or it happens to be natural cellular traffic.
And by a 5-3 margin, they'll say mp3s have a 'copyright bit' embedded in the ID3 tag and bypassing it is a violation of the DMCA. Common sense surrenders.
Actually, I think the MP3 header has a copyright bit in it from the very beginning. The old players used to display it, but everyone's pretty much forgotten about it. I think LAME still has an option to set the bit if you really wanted to.
Given that VP8 is really just a minor modification of h.264, and Intel already supports h.264 decoding in hardware, what exactly has to be done to support VP8? Modify the driver to reload the proper DCT constants and other minor things. The only hardware stuff I can see is if the hardware is hardwired for h.264 in which case they need to rewire it to be a little more flexible. But given they support many codecs already with the same pieces, it should be already in place (a lot of other pieces get reused decoding VC-1, for example).
Surely all the h.264 blocks could be re-used as VP8? In which case Theora's practically dead because everything supports h.264 decoding already and can probably be trivially converted to support VP8 as well.
Heck, you probably can do the same with an h.264 encoder to have it spit out a VP8 bitstream...
Yeah, that's what I was wondering too the moment I saw the 1 million cycles... what I heard was that SLC is usually rated for ~100k writes and MLC for ~10k writes, so completely different type of chip. So I'm not sure what this data will be relevant for, but it's not SSDs... what's this for, BIOS chips or something?
Oddly, the NAND I deal with (MLC and SLC) tend to have ~1M writes for SLC, and at least 100k writes for MLC. The 10k flash chips I used were high capacity Intel Strataflash (MLC, but NOR), which aren't written as often.
NOR has markedly less endurance because it uses tunnelling one way (erase, I think) and hot electron injection the other way (write). Sending electrons blasting through insulation is a good way to wear it out. NAND flash uses tunnelling, so it doesn't wear as much.
I've also seen this kind of I2C flash with as low as 1k write/erase cycles.
And a little known fact is that these endurance ratings tend to be guaranteed by manufacturer. In practice, it's not unheard of to get 10x as many cycles in. The other thing is, flash gets slower as it wears out - if the cell doesn't die outright (i.e., insulation breakdown), the cell may take so long to program or erase that that internal programming/erasing timer expires and you get a timeout. That too is an error condition.
What if iPhone Firefox had a built-in Flash viewer that would be activated only after the software were approved, e.g. with a datebomb or visiting a secret website that would not be available until "everyone" had the app installed? This could be the crowbar move to get Apple moving with Flash after everyone sees how wonderful it is.
Have you seen the Android phone requirements for Flash? You need a phone with a 1GHz CPU. No iPhone right now has a 1GHz CPU. The 3GS' is only 600MHz. Which is why if you don't have flash, the Nexus One should blow away the 3GS in everything (and in Android 2.2, it does) - after all, its CPU is 50% faster clock for clock.
Run flash on anything besides a 4G iPhone with its 1GHz A4 (rumored), and everyone will curse Flash more than they already do. Heck, the Flash on Android 2.2 makes the browser dog-slow again. Hardware accelleration only really works on videos (when it's finally implemented), but other flash content won't see much benefit. Advertisers would like it, as you can't scroll away from their ad as quickly, though.
Heck, to be honest, I'd like to see Firefox run acceptably well on any machine sub-1GHz. It ran poorly on my 600MHz PocketPC, it runs poorly on a Tegra dev board I have, and I hear the Android version is good if you like seeing paint dry.
So, I'm gonna throw it out there and suggest that none of these people are close to journalists. If they were, they would know that these products are often a lot more price-y in Europe than in the United States. Add to that, Scandinavia has the highest cost of living in the world on average. So that would make sense for the Natal to cost $197 in Sweden.
So how in the hell did anyone think that the price tag of this product in Sweden would have anything to do with its price tag in say... the United States? If this is the journalism rising in the place of newspapers, then I want print back
Things aren't a lot more pricey in Europe. It's because prices in the US don't include sales tax, while prices in Europe have to (well, there's an untaxed price for tax-exempt entities, but I digress).
That would translate to a roughly 33% total tax load in Sweden (import taxes plus VAT and others added together could easily amount to 30-odd percent).
Maybe people should start realizing this and that Europe isn't necessarily more expensive because it's fun to ripoff EU countries, but that you're comparing prices with tax vs. prices without tax.
I usually just find a dream-bathroom and pee. If my thighs suddenly get really warm, it's a dream. And my girlfriend is very angry.
Funny enough, I think the number one check for me is having to go and not having any convenient toilet around - it's as if all the toilets suddenly disappeared and you have to go in the weirdest places, like sinks and water fountains.
The other surefire method is after "going", I still have a need to go. Usually a sure sign that I should wake up and go for real before it gets warm down there.
That's right. Apple's simply better at it. They disguised their monopoly, and profited off it longer. Why do you think Apple's always pushed its elitist standard? To make it seem more niche, to avoid exactly what happened to Microsoft. There is absolutely no legitimate reason to lock an iPod or iPhone or iAnything to only use iTunes, except to promote hegemony. Sure, they could *optimize* their stuff to work best with their software. That's how it should be. But if I want to use Windows Media Player, or VLC, then I should be able to.
Actually, it is not illegal to have a monopoly. Natural monopolies aside, if someone is able to garner enough goodwill and purchasing power to be a monopoly in one area, it's not illegal. The only illegality comes when a monopoly is abused.
Microsoft took their Windows monopoly to put IE on the desktop. There was no need for any third-party browser now, and that desktop monopoly became an web browser monopoly as well, something we all are fighting to this day. IE6 will not die, and IE in general still holds a commanding share of web browser "marketshare".
Apple had a monopoly on selling music on iPods, but Amazon came up and took away that monopoly (because iPods play MP3s). In fact, the closest Apple had was when they were leveraging iPod sales and iTunes - this was why the EU was doing investigations into Apple. Now that Apple has gone DRM free, those concerns disappeared (because Apple sold music that only worked on iPods, thus limiting third party MP3 players from being able to play purchased music).
This case is that Apple is using it's "monopoly" on music sales to limit Amazon's ability to sell music. Namely, by demanding that the music labels cannot give preferential pricing to a third party without offering it on Apple's store as well. If a music label wants to make a track of the week 70 cents on Amazon, it also becomes 70 cents on iTunes.
Which seems bad, but remember that Apple and Amazon are also doing the exact same thing with each other on the ebook market. Apple gave publishers an option they liked better than Amazon's option, so publishers went with Apple, and Amazon relented. Apple's agreement with publishers is they don't give anyone but Apple preferential pricing. Amazon caved and went with the same agency model, and also demands that publishers cannot give preferential pricing to anyone else other than Amazon.
And Amazon's not exactly the innocent party as well - having "dealt with" publishers that refuse to go along with its pricing model by trying to "devalue" books from that publisher, or even worse, not offering to sell the book on its marketplace.
Apple's only real leverage is marketshare, and all it takes is someone to make a better iPod and all that advantage disappears. So Apple may have a monopoly on music sales, but it's far from a certain one and the iPod has to compete with everything else out there. Even music sold on Apple's store isn't locked to an iPod anymore, and modern MP3 players will play it just fine as well (say, Microsoft's Zune).
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And a bunch of confused tourists wondering why their GPSes are off so badly - the map is right, but it says the town is somewhere else.
The big problem is, electronic documents are great for searching, but terrible at seeking (searching - you ask computer for location, it finds. Seeking - you know you saw something interesting 10 pages forward and move that way). This applies to e-readers, iPads, PDFs, HTML files. A hack is being able to bookmark the spot, but putting bookmarks is terrible since they quickly muliply if you bookmark everything, or didn't bookmark that interesting thing.
Reading fiction requires little seeking and electronic means make it very practical.
Textbooks and other reference materials are full of seeks - you look at the table of contents and go there, then scan from that to find the relevant information, then back and forth, back and forth. On paper, you use little post-it tabs or something, or if it's a quick browse, your fingers to act as temporary bookmarks. Seeking back and forth is instananeous, and even though you might not know where something is exactly, you can probably roughly tell as you skim the headings during your seek.
It's a subtle concept to master, and why the "paperless office" never really happened since screens are lousy seekers, and the only way we can fix it is ... more screens! After all, I can have multiple documents open (e.g., one document describes a hardware register, another document describes the settings I need to put on the register, a third describing how to set the register properly, and a fourth maybe to reference background material on why certain tings are set certain ways. If it's one document, it's a nightmare having to rapidly go between these places (seeking), and why I often print out the relevant pages so I can have them "all open" at the same time.
And on a more cynical note, the reason publishers are going electronic is simple - the used textbook market is a major thorn in their sides, just like used games are a major thorn on game publishers. They may tout crap like you only carry a 1lb device instead of 30lbs of books, but the real reason is the inability to resell.
Actually, if you look at the problems and the solutions, you submit the answer. You don't submit how you got the answer, or your program source code at all. Some of those problems look like the best strategy is to simply apply pencil and paper and solve it manually. Or think it through and compose an answer.
It's computer oriented, but use of a computer in the final solution is optional - it may be really useful (e.g., the RPS hard challenge, but that can also be manually evaluated), or it may be completely useless (e.g., the fish game). No hidden datasets that you're tested on, just a problem, and the result you send back is the answer. How you got to the answer is up to you - completely using your brain, or completely using your computer, or more likely, a reasonable mashup between the two, coupled with the Internet.
Actually, the biggest problem isn't technology, but social. The trip itself is technological - if we don't have it now, we probably will in the future. The social part isn't, and we don't have much research on long duration isolation. And if we can't solve the social problem, then even if we can send ships to Alpha Centauri and back, it'll be pointless if the crew kills themselves several months in. And yes, we have plenty of short-duration isolation studies (submarines, space stations etc. have all provided the research).
It's a LONG trip. And for the entire duration, you're going to be with the same people you started with. Interactions, positive and negative happen, and it gets important to see if there's a way to handle them before they get serious enough to compromise the entire point. Friends become enemies, enemies become friends, people resenting each other, emotions, anger, hostility. It's all bound to happen when you coop people up for a year and a half and the best communications gets you is e-mail or video-mail. Basically, it's an extreme case of cabin fever.
Here's some things to ponder:
* What kind of crew makeup should there be? Male/Female ratio? Occupational makeup?
* How are contentions resolved?
* Can you even go this long without everyone going stir-crazy?
* Would having more space help, and how much space per person?
* Resource issues, workload issues.
It may literally take us 100+ years to do all the research simply because the durations are so long, the groups under study are so small and so on. You can repeat the same experiment with the same makeup of people (male/female, occupation, etc) and have wildly different results, which ask why.
I think you're missing the point. The point is, after the attack happened and people are treated, now you need to clean up the crap from the buildings and the ground - you know, to prevent other people from being affected. Especially if it gets into the water table.
A pond of fish dying after an attack isn't a big deal if they died because STB was used to decontaminate people. But once the people are gone, the ground is still contaminated with whatever crap was unleashed, and if untreated, it may go into that pond, leech into the water table, and kill everyone in the neighbouring town.
This green stuff is used to decontaminate the site afterwards. You want it to be green because you don't really want to contaminate the land some more (great, you just replaced one problem with another).
It's not for the OMG Attack! time. It's for the time after all the excitement is over and done with, and the real work begins.
Just like there's a niche speciality in "forensic cleaners" who clean up crime scenes after the investigation is over (removing all the blood and other crap that can embed itself into walls and such - it's a very difficult job), there's a need for stuff like this too.
Also, Iridium has better coverage (as in, full globe). GlobalStar actually has deadspots in their coverage because of their design. Also, one of Iridium's biggest customers is the US military - because of this global coverage. Inmarsat's great for fixed operations, but if you want an emergency telephone, the Iridium ones tend to be easier with their "see sky, point antenna at sky, make call" operation (i.e., no aiming). Dead spots is an issue - even if it's only 1% of the world that's not covered, you'll be the one needing to make a emergency call in that 1%.
(FYI - an Iridium satellite is an orbiting cell tower capable of switching calls between satellite to ground, ground to satellite, and satellite to satellite. GlobalStar's architecture is "antenna up high" - you uplink to GlobalStar satellite which relays it to a ground station where the actual switching occurs. It's cheaper, but there are dead spots because a satellite might not be able to see a ground station - Iridium passes the call to another satellite in this case that might be able to see the ground, or routes the call onward again).
Also, those SPOT devices use GlobalStar to relay your GPS coordinates to the ground station - very popular amongst hikers, pilots and other people where they may have issues getting continuous cell coverage.
There are some LCDs that are non-backlit, but are very contrasty with very nice viewing angles available. The Aluratek Librie e-reader's a cheap ($120-ish) version of that whose screen is almost like e-Ink, and very, very nice. Probably active-matrix panels to avoid all the nasty ghosting monochrome panels of old are. I used one and I didn't realize it was LCD - I just thought it was quite responsive, then saw it was actually an LCD.
Alas, it's major setback is the cheap plasticky feel, the sharp "I'm high tech" edges and ridges, and positively lousy looking and feeling firmware. (And that's a major setback of all these devices is crappy-ass firmware...).
iPhones are tied to AT&T. iPads are not, and Steve Jobs has made big fuss that the iPad is not SIM-locked. People have bought US iPad 3G's and used them quite successfully in Europe and Canada. However, Apple does work with AT&T to offer special plans and pricing. Hell, AT&T probably got the idea from Rogers (Canada), which offers no unlimited plan at all. And competition is grand, for Bell (Canada) will offer the exact same plans and pricing for the iPad.
You can even buy an iPad 3G and use it on T-mobile. The only deal is that T-mobile's 3G frequencies are not supported by the iPad, so you get EDGE speeds at best. (Carriers in other countries often have at least one band covered by the iPad, if not both AT&T and T-Mobile's bands).
Of course, since Verizon announced the end of unlimited data as well (at least for 4G)...
Because people on both sides (especially ISPs) will love to be able to manipulate results. ISPs would love to know what the black box is measuring and how it reports results. Then they can detect black box users, and "optimize" the traffic the black box measures.
Or they can offer the little ol' Grandma down the street free Internet service, top tier 100Mbps, a netbook, on the condition it's for the whole time they have the black box. All for free for a few months. Call it an FCC lottery for them.
Carriers already hate what the FCC's proposing to do with net neutrality, caps, and people paying for bandwidth they can't get. Now the FCC wants to measure to see if there's a need, and you can be sure the carriers would love to skew the results towards "it's not necessary - see, we're fast, and people really don't use more than 1GB per month! Honest!".
I think there's only two right now - HVGA (320x480), and WVGA (480x800), though there may also be VGA sized screens as well.
The big issue is that the density increases but the screen size remains the same, so if your app isn't DPI aware things get small and hard to control. Desktop app developers tend to be fixed DPI - a larger window lets you show more information. Ditto web developers. But high-DPI displays means you don't want to show more information, but you should scale everything up. Even pictures if it makes the picture grow from literal thumbnail to larger blob.
DPI-awareness is a difficult thing and many apps still get it wrong on the desktop, if you switch your Windows desktop to high-DPI mode.
Actually, Creationism and ID are linked - the Discovery Institute left behind transitional fossils (evolution, natch) when they searched-and-replaced "Creationism" with "Intelligent Design" in one version of their books. As in, something like "crintelligent designism" or something like that.
Though, I think at lot of the reason Creationists left was because the sole purpose of getting Creationism/ID in schools was under the banner that "good religious" kids (i.e., Christians - they're not advocating Islam or other religion) makes for moral kids. Moral kids aren't the ones who go shooting up schools, doing drugs, being bullies, disrespecting authority, etc. etc. etc. As in, Christianity in schools would solve all our social ills.
There was that great PBS show on ID that really tore through the DI for their real purpose at trying to cloud the issue. It really wasn't evolution they're against, it's just that evolution is controversial enough that they could use it as a means to get more Christian teachings in class.
Not entirely true. There are documented cases where cellphones have caused navigational systems to lose lock - notably a Samsung phone caused the onboard GPS to lose lock, amongst other things. The following article has some research the IEEE did a few years ago to that effect. It's a bit dated given how far technology's advanced, but you can be sure the problem is still present given how many cellphones and how many models there are.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed
The more practical matter was to prevent a planeload of cellphones from DoS'ing the cellphone network because each cellphone can suddenly see towers across several states. Yes, the majority of the signal is aimed downwards, but short of parabolic dish antennas, all antennas have unwanted sidelobe radiation. Heck, I'm sure some terrorist group may be contemplating some illegally amplified cellphones flying across a city to effectively kill the cell network in the city as well as the surrounding region (and maybe even states).
And light aircraft carry cellphones all the time. When you file a flight plan the briefer often asks if I'm carrying a cellphone. First, it may help in an emergency. Second, if you lose your radios or electrical system (common issue), you can still maintain communications with an airport tower (you're low enough that multiple towers isn't really an issue).
One other interference issue is the aviation band is smack dab in the middle where it's easy to have unintentional radiators. Inflight systems know to avoid running any bus between 118-140MHz or so (which is an issue when you have DDR RAM running at 133MHz (266DDR), or LCD pixel clocks often rise somewhere in that area).
Two problems.
One, the obvious technical one - there are many players on the market, and each has a different architecture. You've got PCs and the players for them (PowerDVD, WinDVD, TotalMedia Theatre), the PS3 (Cell-based), and many Blu-Ray players that may or may not be based on many differing designs, but each requiring their own firmware (the Blu-Ray spec doesn't really call for a "BIOS" type firmware design that allows the code to be modular, other than the JVM).
The second problem is the social one. Imagine you insert the disc in your player and it updates the firmware. It means on startup your player must do the update, slowing things down just like unskippable ads (WTF - you can't bypass these ads in a number of recent Blu-Ray releases - you can only fast-forward... popup menu/top menu are prohibited...). Or if one of the update files is bad and bricks your player. Or you have a PS3 and want to enjoy OtheroS.
Highly unlikely. You see, Apple got timing right with the iPod and iTunes Music Store - neither markets were really "for the average person" when Apple inroduced those things (yes, there were MP3 players before the iPod, and music stores before iTMS, but the average user couldn't really use them back then). This led to iTunes' domincance on the online music store scene coupled with the iPod dominance in the portable music player market.
But right now, we have many highly-competitive book readers on the market - Sony, Amazon and B&N on the E-ink side, and Apple on the LCD screen side. They're competing against each other - two are big book sellers, one is veteran selling ebooks (Sony's been doing it for years), and Apple's well, Apple. No one device is taking up the whole market (Sony could've, being the only reader out there more or less at the time), and they're all taking up shares of a tiny market.
Amazon and B&N both have apps for Apple's devices, so you could can use their books on the iPad and the like, which means iBooks is already at a disadvantage. And Amazon and Apple have managed to lock publishers up in such a way that prices cannot be reduced on one store vs. another. The only real way out is if the publishers themselves end up getting fed up of supporting so many formats that they themselves give up and go DRM-free, because there's no dominant player to want to "break out from". Sony, B&N, and Apple have ePub with differing DRM, and Amazon has their own format (mobi-like).
Maybe the way to break out is to support ePub DRM-free, then they'd only support one format instead of 4 separate ones. Perhaps another strong bookseller can come in with their own DRM format and press the issue. The iTunes DRM dominance isn't likely to re-occur here regardless if it's Apple, Amazon, B&N or Sony that is the dominant one.
And perhaps the way to do it is to watermark the books to heck and beyond. Do what Apple does and put personal information in the book - make it visible - perhaps along the edges ("Purchased by John Doe of 123 Main Street, SomeCity, State, 12345. (555) 123-4567. Account jdoe@example.com, credit card Visa xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234"). Which would keep most casual sharing off the Internet - those who pirate would've done so anyhow (and those that really work at it can remove the markings). I'm still amused by those who share their music via BitTorrent and all their Apple details are still visible in the files.
Doesn't work. The user is already pissed off at being locked out, and they'll see this refundable $10 charge as a scame to increase profits. Even if you emphasise "the money will be refunded! HOnest!" the pissed-off user will not believe it. It's human nature - the company makes a mistake, and now you have to pay to fix that mistake. And how often promises of refunds take weeks or months to resolve. (Think mail-in-rebates...)
Hell, even if you offered them 100% of the money on top of what they paid (i.e., Google pays $20 for a mistaken ban, charging $10 for a support call, so banned user gets a free $10), most will still be pissed off at having to pay for a mistake. Or if you take payment details first, don't charge anything unless there's fault.
It's just like online shopping - get a defective product and you have to pay return shipping (very few retailers offer to pay return shipping on defective goods - those that do often seen "defective" marchandise destroyed in an effort to return unwanted goods).
Most engines are licensed from a third party, who's in charge of maintaining it. The game company licenses the engine (which has nice interfaces and the like) and writes the stuff around it. So the engine is well-maintained and not dated (since those companies are interested in continuing to license the engine for next-gen hardware). Very few companies have their own engines - Valve, Bungie and iD come to mind (Valve and iD license their engines, I believe), most use third party ones - Unreal, Unity, and many, many others (too numerous to mention).
The thing is, customers pretty much use one version of the engine and throw it away for the next game, so the code around it is more "get 'er done" style quality than "look good". This also means the engine APIs can change since there's no legacy code to speak of.
Games have no longevity code-wise - once it's shipped, start another game pretty much from scratch. There may be libraries and such reused, but that's a convenience - if it's too messy, it'll be re-written, and copy-and-paste coding rules the day.
Valve and Blizzard are the few exceptions, where games can get updates long after release that fix game issues or other things...
A lot.
It's just like all those jailbroken iPhones, iPod Touches and now iPads who have OpenSSH with default passwords. (Hint: username is "root" or "mobile", password is "alpine"). Why do they have OpenSSH installed? Because they were blithely following some tutorial on getting something they wanted done. Be it modifying some files, installing various .debs and the like. Tutorial says "To do XXXX, go to Cydia, install OpenSSH. Using FileZilla, connect to your device root/alpine, upload the file. Then use Putty to log in (root/alpine), then "dpkg -i file.deb", then "killall springboard". Enjoy your new ability".
Users using Ubuntu are the same as well - "I need to do XXX/try program YYY/I can't find YYY/install this PPA then install/thanks!"
Ditto MacOS X and Windows. It's task-orientation. People need to do a task. They do the necessary prerequesites to do the task, not caring about what happens in-between, they want to get their task done. Just like how people see a car as mere transportation (task: get from A to B), while others see it as a wonderful result of engineering and a joy to tinker with. The groups overlap - someone who enjoys farting around with Linux may switch to "I need to do XXXX" mode in order to get something they need done - though hopefully they actually understand what they're doing.
Carriers can make sure that VoIP is unusable without doing anything special. VoIP has a very nasty requirement that no other usage has - it is very time sensitive. Latency can turn a great VoIP connection into garbage. HTTP and other traffic wouldn't notice it. And not just any latency, but jitter especially.
Imagine a carrier randomly delaying a bunch of packets 50ms, then 0ms, then 50ms then 0ms. The receiver will get no packets, then a pile of packets, then no packets. Do it wildly enough and the VoIP connection can be just awful even though both ends are getting every single packet (as VoIP discards late packets).
Jitter's already pretty bad on cellular networks, so it's hard to tell if a carrier is doing it intentionally or it happens to be natural cellular traffic.
Actually, I think the MP3 header has a copyright bit in it from the very beginning. The old players used to display it, but everyone's pretty much forgotten about it. I think LAME still has an option to set the bit if you really wanted to.
Given that VP8 is really just a minor modification of h.264, and Intel already supports h.264 decoding in hardware, what exactly has to be done to support VP8? Modify the driver to reload the proper DCT constants and other minor things. The only hardware stuff I can see is if the hardware is hardwired for h.264 in which case they need to rewire it to be a little more flexible. But given they support many codecs already with the same pieces, it should be already in place (a lot of other pieces get reused decoding VC-1, for example).
Surely all the h.264 blocks could be re-used as VP8? In which case Theora's practically dead because everything supports h.264 decoding already and can probably be trivially converted to support VP8 as well.
Heck, you probably can do the same with an h.264 encoder to have it spit out a VP8 bitstream...
Oddly, the NAND I deal with (MLC and SLC) tend to have ~1M writes for SLC, and at least 100k writes for MLC. The 10k flash chips I used were high capacity Intel Strataflash (MLC, but NOR), which aren't written as often.
NOR has markedly less endurance because it uses tunnelling one way (erase, I think) and hot electron injection the other way (write). Sending electrons blasting through insulation is a good way to wear it out. NAND flash uses tunnelling, so it doesn't wear as much.
I've also seen this kind of I2C flash with as low as 1k write/erase cycles.
And a little known fact is that these endurance ratings tend to be guaranteed by manufacturer. In practice, it's not unheard of to get 10x as many cycles in. The other thing is, flash gets slower as it wears out - if the cell doesn't die outright (i.e., insulation breakdown), the cell may take so long to program or erase that that internal programming/erasing timer expires and you get a timeout. That too is an error condition.
Have you seen the Android phone requirements for Flash? You need a phone with a 1GHz CPU. No iPhone right now has a 1GHz CPU. The 3GS' is only 600MHz. Which is why if you don't have flash, the Nexus One should blow away the 3GS in everything (and in Android 2.2, it does) - after all, its CPU is 50% faster clock for clock.
Run flash on anything besides a 4G iPhone with its 1GHz A4 (rumored), and everyone will curse Flash more than they already do. Heck, the Flash on Android 2.2 makes the browser dog-slow again. Hardware accelleration only really works on videos (when it's finally implemented), but other flash content won't see much benefit. Advertisers would like it, as you can't scroll away from their ad as quickly, though.
Heck, to be honest, I'd like to see Firefox run acceptably well on any machine sub-1GHz. It ran poorly on my 600MHz PocketPC, it runs poorly on a Tegra dev board I have, and I hear the Android version is good if you like seeing paint dry.
Things aren't a lot more pricey in Europe. It's because prices in the US don't include sales tax, while prices in Europe have to (well, there's an untaxed price for tax-exempt entities, but I digress).
That would translate to a roughly 33% total tax load in Sweden (import taxes plus VAT and others added together could easily amount to 30-odd percent).
Maybe people should start realizing this and that Europe isn't necessarily more expensive because it's fun to ripoff EU countries, but that you're comparing prices with tax vs. prices without tax.
Funny enough, I think the number one check for me is having to go and not having any convenient toilet around - it's as if all the toilets suddenly disappeared and you have to go in the weirdest places, like sinks and water fountains.
The other surefire method is after "going", I still have a need to go. Usually a sure sign that I should wake up and go for real before it gets warm down there.
Actually, it is not illegal to have a monopoly. Natural monopolies aside, if someone is able to garner enough goodwill and purchasing power to be a monopoly in one area, it's not illegal. The only illegality comes when a monopoly is abused.
Microsoft took their Windows monopoly to put IE on the desktop. There was no need for any third-party browser now, and that desktop monopoly became an web browser monopoly as well, something we all are fighting to this day. IE6 will not die, and IE in general still holds a commanding share of web browser "marketshare".
Apple had a monopoly on selling music on iPods, but Amazon came up and took away that monopoly (because iPods play MP3s). In fact, the closest Apple had was when they were leveraging iPod sales and iTunes - this was why the EU was doing investigations into Apple. Now that Apple has gone DRM free, those concerns disappeared (because Apple sold music that only worked on iPods, thus limiting third party MP3 players from being able to play purchased music).
This case is that Apple is using it's "monopoly" on music sales to limit Amazon's ability to sell music. Namely, by demanding that the music labels cannot give preferential pricing to a third party without offering it on Apple's store as well. If a music label wants to make a track of the week 70 cents on Amazon, it also becomes 70 cents on iTunes.
Which seems bad, but remember that Apple and Amazon are also doing the exact same thing with each other on the ebook market. Apple gave publishers an option they liked better than Amazon's option, so publishers went with Apple, and Amazon relented. Apple's agreement with publishers is they don't give anyone but Apple preferential pricing. Amazon caved and went with the same agency model, and also demands that publishers cannot give preferential pricing to anyone else other than Amazon.
And Amazon's not exactly the innocent party as well - having "dealt with" publishers that refuse to go along with its pricing model by trying to "devalue" books from that publisher, or even worse, not offering to sell the book on its marketplace.
Apple's only real leverage is marketshare, and all it takes is someone to make a better iPod and all that advantage disappears. So Apple may have a monopoly on music sales, but it's far from a certain one and the iPod has to compete with everything else out there. Even music sold on Apple's store isn't locked to an iPod anymore, and modern MP3 players will play it just fine as well (say, Microsoft's Zune).