Seems silly to cite iAd as a competitor when it will literally only ever be allowed on iPhones where in Googles case they will push add on any and every phone.
Not to mention, if you want to do an iAd, you have to use HTML5. Because of the way Jobs spurned Adobe, Adobe's busy trying to put Flash on every other phone out there, and it's coming on Android 2.2. If you're a marketing agency, and already have a whole slew of Flash ads running on DoubleClick, would you want to recode your ad for HTML5 for the iPhone, or modify your Flash ad to run under Flash on the Google/AdMob network where it'll run on Android and other phones?
Given all the developer bellyaching about how the iPhone won't do Flash, you think an ad company will learn to redo their ads in HTML5, or just adapt their existing Flash ads and have them work on phones immediately?
The only reason Apple can push iAd and have people accept it, is because of installed base. But once Android phones take over, iAd will die as it's easier to just serve up the same Flash ads on Android phones as regular PCs.
is because ARM systems so far are embedded systems.
PCs are easy because their behavior is very simple and effectively, hasn't changed much since the beginning. But ARMs are a dime a dozen and used in various things from lightweight controllers to cellphones. Your PC might very well have several ARM processors inside it.
As a result, every ARM system is different - the memory map is different, the interrupt controller is different between SoC vendors, peripherals are located at different spots, etc. The only real constant is that ARMs boot at 0x0, but many SoCs have boot ROMs that are mapped at that area, which load a bootloader off storage at some arbitrary memory location and jumps there. End result, on ARM, you need to build a kernel/bootloader that's specific to your hardware.
On a PC, it's pretty much a monoculture and you know where things are in physical memory space. Things are located at well known addresses. On a PC, then, it's effectively the same architecture. That's why there's so many OSes available because the basic kernel needs are all the same across every PC, ranging from low power embedded systems to super 128-core behemoths - you know where RAM starts, how the BIOS will load you and where, how the interrupt controller, timer hardware, etc., work, and how to talk to more advanced peripherals via interfaces like ACPI. Hell, about the biggest change in PCs is the slow move to EFI based firmware, but they implement a BIOS compatibility module for backwards compatibility.
Try writing a program where you don't know where you're going to be located in memory, hardware you don't know where it might be located, interrupt controllers that can change wildly, etc without requiring reconfiguration and recompilation, and it's impossible. That's the current state of ARM systems...
My biggest concern would be IT security guys that will stick a generic USB drive in their computer without scanning it first. Shame on anyone that goes to a security conference and trusts the graft to be virus-free.
Which makes it kinda ironic, isn't it? A security conference with virus laden USB keys given out, and a good proportion of participants get infected. If even the security guys (whose job is to prevent such things) can't secure their machines, what hope does Joe Average have?
I suppose the bigger question is - how come this wasn't reported... earlier? Surely someone at that conference must've seen it and disinfected, and saw others and posted something about it before IBM?
Sony has managed to lose my trust too. I was a very happy customer of PS1-3, but the retroactive otheros thing has put me right off. I rarely used Linux once I installed it, but that they were willing to retrospectively nuke an advertised feature of their product clearly demonstrated to me that they do not put the customer first. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do start crippling the PSN for non-paying customers.
The dumbest thing about the OtherOS removal is that it is probably not even going to help. Now that the hypervisor has been cracked enough to obtain memory dumps, it is far more likely that further hacking is going to rely on bugs that are found in the hypervisor software itself. These will probably be reachable by any application running on the system that takes user or network input. Think that every savegame loader is foolproof? How about that dinky web browser? Nuking OtherOS just pissed off loyal customers and bought them very little.
How true. My PS3 doesn't go on PSN anymore (and for an unrelated reason, I had to backup my Linux data anyways to reformat the hard disk - this was the weekend before the OtherOS removal was announced). But I guess the only thing I can play on it now are single player games (working through Heavy Rain again, then God Of War 1/2/3, then FF XIII), which is fine since I never really saw the appeal of PSN. It had a couple of freebies I grabbed, but that's it. Given I refuse to give Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo my credit card (which has changed enough times the past few years, meant another hassle), I use points cards, and those $20 PSN cards never go on sale (duh. $20), while the Xbox ones do as do the Wii ones (Xbox you can usually find a 10% discount somewhere, and a 25% does show up now and again every few months).
Hey, if Sony really doesn't want me as a customer, fine by them. Multiplayer I don't care about PSN (my friends all have Xboxes anyhow), and I guess I won't be buying special editions of games for PS3 anymore if I can't get the extra content. (Sony - I bought the Limited Edition God of War 3. I also bought the Alan Wake Collector's yesterday. If you don't want me to spend more money on games for PS3, you can just say so rather than doing it the passive-aggressive way).
That, and I guess I won't buy anymore PS3 games since they won't run on my PS3. And no 3D blu-ray. Guess it'll just be a Blu-Ray player from now on.
Then again, I guess between geohot and Dark_Alex, a CFW for PS3 might get me back into the game and buying PS3 stuff. Linux, an ISO loader, enhanced media playback...
After all, you download something from PSN. Then you click the little bubble to "install" it. Up pops an EULA you have to right-arrow through (easier than clicking next, but you still have to do it), then look at the pretty progress bar while it installs.
If it's a system update, you click the update option (a la Windows Update), then it asks if you want to update with the new version, then it gives you a nice EULA. Press right again and it'll download and install automatically.
Some games on Blu-Ray require installation as well, so you run the game, which starts the installer and more EULA.
I don't care if anyone tracks my preferences or shopping history. What I care about is; 'Is that information "Personally Identifiable"?' In other words its not that they know what I do, its do they know, specifically, who I am.
I am all for research and marketing to tune products and advertising, but they don't need to know my name or various identifiers to do it.
As seen time and time again, the answer is yes. That fingerprint you have - did you go shopping with it? Boom, you've just linked your fingerprint to a name, address, phone number, and partial credit card. Or visit Facebook? Or other social networking site?
Remember that Netflix contest? A simple match of that data with IMDB reveals all. And people constantly do things that inadvertently link their personal information with a fingerprint.
It's only a matter of time - businesses often sell your information to third parties, and soon those third parties will pay for the fingerprints as well. It doesn't have to be an exact positive match, even something as crappy as a 50% hit rate is enough to be spooky. And even if YOU don't make yourself identifiable, others do to make it worthwhile to do so.
And even if we strip down tons of browsers to return the same information regardless, there'll be other ways - possibly using Flash to profile your system to generate your fingerprint (they already do with flash cookies). Hell, who knows what Flash can retrieve, especially on phones (the UI to manage flash cookies is crappy enough. The UI to do it on mobile phones supporting flash will probably be non-existent).
Well, this isn't quite as serious as Bank Trojans, but Storm8 is infamous for stealing phone numbers from their customers. And this is with the all-mighty App Store in place.
Which any app on any other platform, save Android, can do. In fact, Apple has a right to pull phone number stealing apps off the market for using "private APIs" because there is (or was) no API to get the phone number.
But if you have a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or Symbian phone, the phone number's an API call away. The "except Android" is because it requires permission when you install it, which is a good and bad thing - good in that it asks, bad in that most users just click OK without reading the list (just like how they don't read dialogs already).
In fact, the odd part of this thing is why is the iPhone unique in starting this? After all, these APIs have been around for years, yet only the iPhone has started the whole steal-private-data thing that every other phone could've done for a long time now.
Ironically, the best protection is a jailbroken app called Firewall IP that lets you selectively control how apps connect and phone home. Oddly, some of the biggest names (Fox Network, for example) have the most egregious uploading of personal information.
Android is linux-based, but that's somewhat like saying OSX is BSD. In many ways that is true, but in others it's an incomplete truth. I'd actually like it more if Android *did* use more of 'nix, but it appears to mainly be the kernel base and some tools. The graphic system doesn't seem to be X-based, and there are a lot of things added/removed compared to a standard linux Distro.
Android is an environment using the Linux kernel as its base. Android is everything above that, covering all of user space. There's really no "Unix" to speak of in it - the C library is a special custom written derivative (Bionic), which is really there only to support Dalvik and other support utilities (like wpasupplicant). This complete control of the environment lets Android do things that would be difficult otherwise, like running apps as separate users and giving a each a chroot-like environment. Other than the kernel, the Android environment has little in common with a standard Linux distribution. If you replaced the Windows kernel with the Linux one, you'd effectively have what Android is - a rewritten from the ground up environment whose only similarity with a standard Linux distro is the kernel.
A more standard Linux environment would be things like Maemo and MeeGo.
At least OS X keeps the more traditional Unix workalikes alive.
Why not provide manual overrides for things like door locks and windows. Even CD drives have that little pinhole reset so you can manually pop the sucker open. It just seems ridiculous to automate everything in a device that is always going to be mechanical in nature.
They should be overridable, actually. The computer tells the *switch* what it wants to do, and it acts like the switch was activated by the user. (The more traditional way for things is the switches all tie back to the computer, and the computer does the action. But locks, windows and brakes need failsafes, so the best the computer can do is suggest to the control what it should do, and it's up to the control to resolve computer and human conflict.
For locks, the little thing that moves activates the lock, and it's possible to override the solenoid behind it. If there's no thing that moves, then the computer controls the electronic lock switch, and that's overriden by pushing it. Windows are similar, with the computer telling the window switch up or down.
Things like thr transmission and throttle are controlled completely by computer - the lever/pedal just goes to a switch/pot and the computer manages the shifting and engine control. But those aren't vital systems since if the computer goes nuts, the brakes are a failsafe (and the computer can't override that - at best, it can "push" the brakes for you by moving the pedal).
It's a far better system - automatic transmissions of old had complex hydraulic fluid valves that governed shifting, and a mis-drilled hole can cause all sorts of havoc. I think there was a recall due to a hole in the valve plates being 1/8" inches off.
As for the article - it makes sense since the computer controls everything, and "hotrod programmers" use the OBDII port to update ane parameters that give you more horsepower, etc.
Where I live(that mystical place called Canada), they figured out that it cost businesses more money if there were meters then 2hr free parking, along with 15min errand spots. When we switched from meters to non, business downtown went up by 40%, and so did the available tax revenue.
Vancouver City Council is actually deciding to extend the parking meter hours to include Sunday as well. Turns out that the meters get moderated traffic, but on Sunday, it becomes a royal PITA to find a parking spot, short of paying at a parking garage.
Good and bad, it seems. Parking meters help encourage short term high-turnover parking, which businesses do like. The flip side is, well, potential loss of customers for those adverse to paying. Free parking, and you get stores angry that some employee working upstairs parked right in front of their store during most of the day, rotating every couple of hours or so.
many little bits have much more surface area which increases friction to cause it to fall to Earth much quicker and have a much much higher chance of burning up completely on the way down.
Problem is, there's a period of time when those little bits are made from that one big bit, and when those little bits deorbit. During that time, those little bits can choose to impact other satellites in the same or lower orbits, which causes the impacted satellites to have more little bits ripped off and sent flying around.
That's one of the big problems we have right now - we could reach a point where space junk contributes to making more space junk by destroying working satellites which cause a nice chain reaction as that new space junk has increased the chances a satellite will get hit.
The other thing is Galaxy 15 is at or near GEO. Which means those pieces will take a long time to deorbit, and with random orbits there's a good change they'll take out other satellites in GEO as well. Best to just let it naturally find a new equilibrium position at one of the Lagrange points. At least if it breaks up there those pieces will tend to stay there.
- An inside job, or some otherwise corporate espionage thing. I don't see what they would gain here other than seeing what Apple's internals look like a few weeks early, which wouldn't help them rush a product to market ahead of Apple.
I would think that corporate espionage people would not rely on random websites on opening and distributing pictures about the internals
Not corporate espionage by competitors, but by journalists.
Face it - Gizmodo pretty much scooped up a pile of money off their iPhone 4G reveal - 2 million+ hits on that article alone, plus all the milking (Giz ran daily "iPhone 4G Saga" summary articles for a few weeks afterwards to milk more hits). It happened with ThinkSecret paying people to violate their NDAs on purpose to get the scoop on rumors. It happened with Gizmodo getting a whole pile of hits from everywhere and coverage in other media outlets.
Exclusives sell. Giz had an excluslve peek at the new iPhone, and you can be sure they made off like bandits because of it. The site making a pile off advertising, and practically the big guys at Giz getting far more name recognition.
Competitors to Apple like Nokia, RIM, HTC, etc. Not a chance to scoop Apple by seeing what's going to be released in a few months. But corporate espionage to scoop advertising bucks and site hits for money, that's gold.
The whole SWAT thing is different - journalist shield laws do not cover illegal (or potentially illegal) actions done by journalists - i.e., you can't use them as a get-out-of-jail-free card. They only protect a journalist who is keeping their source anonymous for whatever reason, not keeping the journalist from getting away with anything from a speeding ticket to murder.
People are still playing everything from Quake's Team Fortress to Tribes 2, with their own dedicated servers and authentication systems.
The problem is Xbox Live's architecture was hobbled by one game. It's not a server issue, it's just that the overwhelming popularity of Halo 2 on Xbox was keeping Microsoft from being able to make more significant changes to Xbox Live because of compatibility reasons. Now, Microsoft was being kind in tolerating it that long (I think Halo 2 really only accounted for about 10K-ish players in total - #1 by far on Xbox, but getting seriously outclassed by Xbox360 games with 50K+ players on easily).
If you look at the top 10 list of Xbox Live players playing Xbox games (not 360), the 9 other games on that list you barely heard a peep from, but they too are offline. In fact, all Xbox Live for original Xbox is gone. It's just that Halo 2 remained the popular Xbox game. (Microsoft never released figures on how many Halo 2 games were played via an original Xbox or via the Xbox360 emulator.)
Sure, Microsoft could've tried to update all the Xboxes with new code, but that's risky and tricky, and possibly with the Xbox's limited resources, quite difficult.
And hardcore Halo 2 players did get a couple of gifts from Microsoft in the end - 3 months free of Live service, 400 Microsoft points ($5), and a code to the Halo Reach freestanding beta (i.e., the one that doesn't require Halo ODST).
It's not Halo 2 online multiplayer Microsoft ended support for - it's all original Xbox games lost Xbox Live. Just Halo 2 was the biggest amongst a shrinking crowd (the majority having moved to Halo 3). Hell, if Microsoft could keep compatibility with the original Xbox, they probably would, but they probably want to break free to allow them to revamp the service
What irked me about Halo was the way Bungie were marketing it as the next best thing since sliced bread... Even more so, how the console gamers lapped it up. It's as if multiplayer FPS's hadn't existed before good ol' Bungie came down on the wings of Heaven and made it so. UT & Q3 owned multiplayer long before Halo's release, and Q3 is still owning it now in the form of Quake Live.
Halo is considered to be the FPS that was actually playable on a console. Sure there were FPS on a console before, but everyone was "take away my keyboard and mouse over my dead body" type attitude. Halo pretty much changed that and demonstrated that yes, you can actually do an FPS on a console with decent controls using a controller. Ditto Halo Wars (Ensemble Studios) which also had pretty decent controls as an RTS on a console.
Hell, even professional gamers (yes, there are people who play games for a living) often "relax" with a game of Halo.
The other thing is, console gaming usually takes place on large screens - a 16-player Halo match only requires 4 xboxes and 4 TVs. A 16-player Quake/etc game requires 16 PC snd 16 monitors (or 16 laptops), which short of BYOC is hard to accomplish. Getting 4 Xboxes/TVs together is much easier.
Halo wasn't the be-all-end-all in FPS games. It was just one of the first that played well on a console with a controller.
It seems given that they run off the same line it would actually be MORE trouble to make a poorer product that looks perfect than to just make exact duplicates in every way.
Not hard.
Just substitute cheaper components everywhere. Where a 1% resistor is ued, use a 5% or 10% resistor. Ditto caps. Where a certain processor is used, use a cheaper slower one. Software will overclock it (very few embedded processors actually have anti-overclock protections), so if it works, great! (Of course, it may crash more often, or run hotter...). Ditto memory - perhaps the A grade chips are used (normal perfect ones), while the factory puts in the "rejects" (may have failed edge cases during testing, but is adequate for times when perfect storage is less important than price - e.g., answering machines).
A number of customers ship manufacturers exact reels of components - if they want 1,000 units made, they'll ship enough parts for 1,000 units. During third shift runs, the factory uses their own parts, which are always cheaper and nearly always never perfect substitutes (after all, if the developer could find a cheaper equivalent part, they would've used it!).
Ditto with the PCB itself - instead of using whatever the company called for, use a cheaper board (sometimes boards are used because they have specific crosstalk/RF abilities).
Power supplies are similarly degraded - company may ship them nice 5% power supplies on all rails, but their conterfeit ones use cheaper 10% ones.
Put them together and see that they work. Swap power supplies around if necessary to raise yields.
Heck, casings are an interesting place to cut back on too - use a lighter weight metal that can flex more (possible enough to short out the circuitboard)
Paying $2/epsiode is not cheap. I would pay $1 for an hour long show (42 minutes in reality) as long as it is commercial free..
Universal Iron rule of the Internet: Everyone would be happy to pay for X, but they're only willing to pay half of what's being asked. Songs are a buck? 50c please. Netflix is $10 a month? I'll only pay $5 a month, and only if there's a bigger selection. An iPad will be $999? Well I'd happily pay $500, and only if it isn't crippled with Apple's retard-o-platform!
It repeats itself over and over in just about all of these conversations... for just about anything people have a choice to buy, there are those that pay it, and those that don't and rationalize their decision with the concept that the price is too high and everything would be unicorns if only the price were 0.5x. And since it isn't, this establishes a platform for griping about collateral issues (usually DRM and license terms),
OTOH, $1 an episode would actually be about the right price. A DVD box set costs probably around $30-35, so a season has anywhere from 22-26 episodes normally. Someone buying them one by one would pay more otherwise and not have a box and discs to go with it. So $1-1.50 an episode would be reasonable for most shows.
More expensive shows may decide to charge higher prices - there are the odd box sets for $50+, so those can probably get away with $2/episode pricing.
Let me guess - in Europe, you'd pay exactly those prices listed? No sales tax added on?
So you'd pay £429 / £499 / £599 / £529 / £599 / £699 for an iPad and not a penny more in sales/VAT?
That's one thing we have in North America - the prices listed ($499/$599/$699/$629/$729/$829) are sans sales tax. So add anywhere from 0% (a few states), to 5-10% to the actual price that Americans pay. Or in Canada, anywhere from 5-15% in sales taxes.
In the UK, the prices tend to be all inclusive - you pay what you see, so all the hidden consumption taxes get built in. VAT of nearly 20%, plus other import taxes and duties and the like. I'm guessing the price gap is a lot smaller than you think.
It's just that governments have used built-in taxes to hide how much taxes are really on products. Happens on this side of the pond with stuff like gas when you actually break down the price.
For example, the 16GB WiFi iPad - £429 is around $630 US. $500 US for the same iPad, plus taxes will probably mean one pays $530-$550 in the US. If we assume the total tax load is (VAT+importation taxes plus duties) 20% for the UK, that $500 iPad becomes $600 instantly.
I promise to personally hand you 1 million dollars after I've died.
When "shit hits the fan", Steam won't be around to make/release those patches.
Unless something really catastrophic happens, it is very unlikely for the "shit to hit the fan" - Steam is a very valuable piece of property simply because it's got a pretty large userbase that buys stuff and has stuff in it. And with more content publishers making stuff available on it, it gets more so. Steam's got critical mass and the network effect going. Should Valve go bankrupt and die, all the big gaming companies will want to scoop up Steam. Simply because customers are opening their wallets and spending money on Steam.
The only real threat is someone buys out Valve and gets greedy by implementing stupid policies that go against the reason why Steam is so popular in the first place (e.g., download limits, subscription fees, etc.). Which is, unfortunately, a far likelier possibility than Steam going tits up outright.
So you implement some protection. Then some prima donna trader comes by and asks that they be disabled and his trades unquestioned. If the company makes good profit off the guy, down the protection goes.
Reminds me of this story on a commodities trader that not only didn't close his position, but actually ended up taking physical delivery of the commodity. Oops. Sure there were protections, but the guy had them disabled.
Hell, for all we know, this is exactly what happened - most traders can't enter in a "b", except a succint few well-trusted individuals. Just one of the "gods" managed to fumble it.
Is it chauvinistic that I find this insane? I wouldn't mind if they used an escape character sequence and then mapped other alphabets to strings of Latin characters, but actually breaking backwards compatibility...
Except there *IS* an escape sequence. And the actual representation is in standard latin alphabets.
The reason is that browsers can detect the escape sequence and interpret the rest of the URL as a unicode string.
The escape is "xn--" - domains using it have xn--domain, TLDs as xn--TLD. Use both and they both have to be escaped - xn--blah.xn--blahtld.
The trick for the Rest of Us is to be able to set that as "off" by default to keep these xn-- sequences from looking like normal latin characters. The good news is the encoding is such that Paypal and the like don't get rendered as xn--paypal.com and such, but xn--junk_that_renders_as_paypal.com.
Internationalized domain names have been around a few years. This is just an internationalized TLD using the same DNS-friendly encoding scheme.
Re:To everyone complaining about the positive revi
on
The Laidoff Ninja
·
· Score: 1
If every book that gets reviewed receives a 7 through 10, what is the point of having a 1-10 scale since you could just as easily express it via a 1-4 scale, or better yet a 0-3 scale and store it directly in a two bit integer.
That will just lead to 3's or so.
The problem is, no one wants to do reviews on crappy books - it's tedious and rather dull work. And you have to justify your reasons for the poor grade, which is still more work. End result is bad books don't normally get reviewed (there are a few, but rare). They just get chucked in the trash and a one-star left on Amazon or somesuch. And then others see that and don't buy the book, so bad books simply don't make it up the review chain, unless it's by some die-hard fanatic or someone with too much time on their hands.
OTOH, a good book is one you want to tell others about, so you do, via submitted reviews and the like.
We may find many reasons to "hate microsoft" but I seriously doubt Microsoft will actually assert charges of patent infringement against anyone... ever. Microsoft's involvement in the software patent arms race was quite reluctant and I suspect that is still the case. Microsoft was first bitten by the software patent trend by the people who held the patent on "double-space" back in the day. There were a lot of people who were quite tickled and delighted to see the giant attacked for this. I was among them. I wasn't then able to see down the road to the hell of software patents that we are seeing today. Had we, the IT community at large, sought to limit and even deny software patents from the beginning, we might have less trouble than we have today.
In any case, we might suspect Microsoft of funding attacks against open source technologies, I doubt Microsoft will ever directly assert software patents themselves.
In my mind, in fact, I see Microsoft joining in the fight against software patents. It is as big a pain in their ass as it is for many others... probably bigger because they have a rather big ass.
More likely, anyone with any possible patents against Theora is waiting for someone with money to implement it. RIght now, there's hardly any money in any of the companies doing Theora, and suing just gets you no money at all. Mozilla? Xiph? Relatively poor, and probably good lawyers to get patents overturned. Not a good result.
But get a Google, Microsoft or Apple supporting Theora, and these guys have cash. Patent infringement? Cha-ching. Either licensing or back profits. Everyone and their dog with patents will be trying to figure out how they can cash in. Or any of the big hardware guys - Intel, ATI, nVIdia, plus all the others - Broadcom, etc.
Not to say H.264 is any better, but there are patent pools and the like, and probably some form of protection against patent infringement.
Maybe that's all that's needed - patent liability coverage - implement Theora and be covered against any potential patent lawsuits. It's one thing to say that no patents were infrtinged, but another to back it up. Hell, it can be funded by a smally royalty (they already pay for h.264).
This was a bare-bones release anyway. I'm waiting for the double-dip release which will inevitably contain a metric assload of extras. I have no desire to watch the movie again (although I did enjoy it strictly from an entertainment point of view)...I do, however, have great interest in watching any making-of featurettes that may be included.
Yeah, I got the release and I'll probably buy the double/triple dip version when it comes out. I will admit though, that the mastering is quite good and the bitrate is high (the movie's 46GB). Perhaps my one and only complaint would be the lack of high-bitrate audio (it's just 48kHz/24bit - not 96/192. And no, the reason for the high bitrate is not because you can hear those high frequencies, it's the aliasing - a brick-wall 20kHz filter causes tons of distortion. But let the filter work from 20-odd to 48/96kHz, and it can be really linear).
It is one blu-ray to use to show off your home theatre setup, though. Also, there's less dynamic range compression, so you'll have to crank it up, literally.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention, if you want to do an iAd, you have to use HTML5. Because of the way Jobs spurned Adobe, Adobe's busy trying to put Flash on every other phone out there, and it's coming on Android 2.2. If you're a marketing agency, and already have a whole slew of Flash ads running on DoubleClick, would you want to recode your ad for HTML5 for the iPhone, or modify your Flash ad to run under Flash on the Google/AdMob network where it'll run on Android and other phones?
Given all the developer bellyaching about how the iPhone won't do Flash, you think an ad company will learn to redo their ads in HTML5, or just adapt their existing Flash ads and have them work on phones immediately?
The only reason Apple can push iAd and have people accept it, is because of installed base. But once Android phones take over, iAd will die as it's easier to just serve up the same Flash ads on Android phones as regular PCs.
is because ARM systems so far are embedded systems.
PCs are easy because their behavior is very simple and effectively, hasn't changed much since the beginning. But ARMs are a dime a dozen and used in various things from lightweight controllers to cellphones. Your PC might very well have several ARM processors inside it.
As a result, every ARM system is different - the memory map is different, the interrupt controller is different between SoC vendors, peripherals are located at different spots, etc. The only real constant is that ARMs boot at 0x0, but many SoCs have boot ROMs that are mapped at that area, which load a bootloader off storage at some arbitrary memory location and jumps there. End result, on ARM, you need to build a kernel/bootloader that's specific to your hardware.
On a PC, it's pretty much a monoculture and you know where things are in physical memory space. Things are located at well known addresses. On a PC, then, it's effectively the same architecture. That's why there's so many OSes available because the basic kernel needs are all the same across every PC, ranging from low power embedded systems to super 128-core behemoths - you know where RAM starts, how the BIOS will load you and where, how the interrupt controller, timer hardware, etc., work, and how to talk to more advanced peripherals via interfaces like ACPI. Hell, about the biggest change in PCs is the slow move to EFI based firmware, but they implement a BIOS compatibility module for backwards compatibility.
Try writing a program where you don't know where you're going to be located in memory, hardware you don't know where it might be located, interrupt controllers that can change wildly, etc without requiring reconfiguration and recompilation, and it's impossible. That's the current state of ARM systems...
Which makes it kinda ironic, isn't it? A security conference with virus laden USB keys given out, and a good proportion of participants get infected. If even the security guys (whose job is to prevent such things) can't secure their machines, what hope does Joe Average have?
I suppose the bigger question is - how come this wasn't reported... earlier? Surely someone at that conference must've seen it and disinfected, and saw others and posted something about it before IBM?
How true. My PS3 doesn't go on PSN anymore (and for an unrelated reason, I had to backup my Linux data anyways to reformat the hard disk - this was the weekend before the OtherOS removal was announced). But I guess the only thing I can play on it now are single player games (working through Heavy Rain again, then God Of War 1/2/3, then FF XIII), which is fine since I never really saw the appeal of PSN. It had a couple of freebies I grabbed, but that's it. Given I refuse to give Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo my credit card (which has changed enough times the past few years, meant another hassle), I use points cards, and those $20 PSN cards never go on sale (duh. $20), while the Xbox ones do as do the Wii ones (Xbox you can usually find a 10% discount somewhere, and a 25% does show up now and again every few months).
Hey, if Sony really doesn't want me as a customer, fine by them. Multiplayer I don't care about PSN (my friends all have Xboxes anyhow), and I guess I won't be buying special editions of games for PS3 anymore if I can't get the extra content. (Sony - I bought the Limited Edition God of War 3. I also bought the Alan Wake Collector's yesterday. If you don't want me to spend more money on games for PS3, you can just say so rather than doing it the passive-aggressive way).
That, and I guess I won't buy anymore PS3 games since they won't run on my PS3. And no 3D blu-ray. Guess it'll just be a Blu-Ray player from now on.
Then again, I guess between geohot and Dark_Alex, a CFW for PS3 might get me back into the game and buying PS3 stuff. Linux, an ISO loader, enhanced media playback...
Not if the console's a PS3!
After all, you download something from PSN. Then you click the little bubble to "install" it. Up pops an EULA you have to right-arrow through (easier than clicking next, but you still have to do it), then look at the pretty progress bar while it installs.
If it's a system update, you click the update option (a la Windows Update), then it asks if you want to update with the new version, then it gives you a nice EULA. Press right again and it'll download and install automatically.
Some games on Blu-Ray require installation as well, so you run the game, which starts the installer and more EULA.
As seen time and time again, the answer is yes. That fingerprint you have - did you go shopping with it? Boom, you've just linked your fingerprint to a name, address, phone number, and partial credit card. Or visit Facebook? Or other social networking site?
Remember that Netflix contest? A simple match of that data with IMDB reveals all. And people constantly do things that inadvertently link their personal information with a fingerprint.
It's only a matter of time - businesses often sell your information to third parties, and soon those third parties will pay for the fingerprints as well. It doesn't have to be an exact positive match, even something as crappy as a 50% hit rate is enough to be spooky. And even if YOU don't make yourself identifiable, others do to make it worthwhile to do so.
And even if we strip down tons of browsers to return the same information regardless, there'll be other ways - possibly using Flash to profile your system to generate your fingerprint (they already do with flash cookies). Hell, who knows what Flash can retrieve, especially on phones (the UI to manage flash cookies is crappy enough. The UI to do it on mobile phones supporting flash will probably be non-existent).
Which any app on any other platform, save Android, can do. In fact, Apple has a right to pull phone number stealing apps off the market for using "private APIs" because there is (or was) no API to get the phone number.
But if you have a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile or Symbian phone, the phone number's an API call away. The "except Android" is because it requires permission when you install it, which is a good and bad thing - good in that it asks, bad in that most users just click OK without reading the list (just like how they don't read dialogs already).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1386337&cid=29585841
In fact, the odd part of this thing is why is the iPhone unique in starting this? After all, these APIs have been around for years, yet only the iPhone has started the whole steal-private-data thing that every other phone could've done for a long time now.
Ironically, the best protection is a jailbroken app called Firewall IP that lets you selectively control how apps connect and phone home. Oddly, some of the biggest names (Fox Network, for example) have the most egregious uploading of personal information.
http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/2009/10/top-gun-top25-paid-app.html
Here's a neat blog that's on haitus at the moment, but details apps on the Top 25 app list and if they phone home or not.
http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/
I guess it's Apple's fault for making unlimited data connections standard and devs can now assume that a phone has a constant internet connection...
Android is an environment using the Linux kernel as its base. Android is everything above that, covering all of user space. There's really no "Unix" to speak of in it - the C library is a special custom written derivative (Bionic), which is really there only to support Dalvik and other support utilities (like wpasupplicant). This complete control of the environment lets Android do things that would be difficult otherwise, like running apps as separate users and giving a each a chroot-like environment. Other than the kernel, the Android environment has little in common with a standard Linux distribution. If you replaced the Windows kernel with the Linux one, you'd effectively have what Android is - a rewritten from the ground up environment whose only similarity with a standard Linux distro is the kernel.
A more standard Linux environment would be things like Maemo and MeeGo.
At least OS X keeps the more traditional Unix workalikes alive.
They should be overridable, actually. The computer tells the *switch* what it wants to do, and it acts like the switch was activated by the user. (The more traditional way for things is the switches all tie back to the computer, and the computer does the action. But locks, windows and brakes need failsafes, so the best the computer can do is suggest to the control what it should do, and it's up to the control to resolve computer and human conflict.
For locks, the little thing that moves activates the lock, and it's possible to override the solenoid behind it. If there's no thing that moves, then the computer controls the electronic lock switch, and that's overriden by pushing it. Windows are similar, with the computer telling the window switch up or down.
Things like thr transmission and throttle are controlled completely by computer - the lever/pedal just goes to a switch/pot and the computer manages the shifting and engine control. But those aren't vital systems since if the computer goes nuts, the brakes are a failsafe (and the computer can't override that - at best, it can "push" the brakes for you by moving the pedal).
It's a far better system - automatic transmissions of old had complex hydraulic fluid valves that governed shifting, and a mis-drilled hole can cause all sorts of havoc. I think there was a recall due to a hole in the valve plates being 1/8" inches off.
As for the article - it makes sense since the computer controls everything, and "hotrod programmers" use the OBDII port to update ane parameters that give you more horsepower, etc.
Vancouver City Council is actually deciding to extend the parking meter hours to include Sunday as well. Turns out that the meters get moderated traffic, but on Sunday, it becomes a royal PITA to find a parking spot, short of paying at a parking garage.
Good and bad, it seems. Parking meters help encourage short term high-turnover parking, which businesses do like. The flip side is, well, potential loss of customers for those adverse to paying. Free parking, and you get stores angry that some employee working upstairs parked right in front of their store during most of the day, rotating every couple of hours or so.
It's a tough call for a city planner.
Problem is, there's a period of time when those little bits are made from that one big bit, and when those little bits deorbit. During that time, those little bits can choose to impact other satellites in the same or lower orbits, which causes the impacted satellites to have more little bits ripped off and sent flying around.
That's one of the big problems we have right now - we could reach a point where space junk contributes to making more space junk by destroying working satellites which cause a nice chain reaction as that new space junk has increased the chances a satellite will get hit.
The other thing is Galaxy 15 is at or near GEO. Which means those pieces will take a long time to deorbit, and with random orbits there's a good change they'll take out other satellites in GEO as well. Best to just let it naturally find a new equilibrium position at one of the Lagrange points. At least if it breaks up there those pieces will tend to stay there.
Not corporate espionage by competitors, but by journalists.
Face it - Gizmodo pretty much scooped up a pile of money off their iPhone 4G reveal - 2 million+ hits on that article alone, plus all the milking (Giz ran daily "iPhone 4G Saga" summary articles for a few weeks afterwards to milk more hits). It happened with ThinkSecret paying people to violate their NDAs on purpose to get the scoop on rumors. It happened with Gizmodo getting a whole pile of hits from everywhere and coverage in other media outlets.
Exclusives sell. Giz had an excluslve peek at the new iPhone, and you can be sure they made off like bandits because of it. The site making a pile off advertising, and practically the big guys at Giz getting far more name recognition.
Competitors to Apple like Nokia, RIM, HTC, etc. Not a chance to scoop Apple by seeing what's going to be released in a few months. But corporate espionage to scoop advertising bucks and site hits for money, that's gold.
The whole SWAT thing is different - journalist shield laws do not cover illegal (or potentially illegal) actions done by journalists - i.e., you can't use them as a get-out-of-jail-free card. They only protect a journalist who is keeping their source anonymous for whatever reason, not keeping the journalist from getting away with anything from a speeding ticket to murder.
The problem is Xbox Live's architecture was hobbled by one game. It's not a server issue, it's just that the overwhelming popularity of Halo 2 on Xbox was keeping Microsoft from being able to make more significant changes to Xbox Live because of compatibility reasons. Now, Microsoft was being kind in tolerating it that long (I think Halo 2 really only accounted for about 10K-ish players in total - #1 by far on Xbox, but getting seriously outclassed by Xbox360 games with 50K+ players on easily).
If you look at the top 10 list of Xbox Live players playing Xbox games (not 360), the 9 other games on that list you barely heard a peep from, but they too are offline. In fact, all Xbox Live for original Xbox is gone. It's just that Halo 2 remained the popular Xbox game. (Microsoft never released figures on how many Halo 2 games were played via an original Xbox or via the Xbox360 emulator.)
Sure, Microsoft could've tried to update all the Xboxes with new code, but that's risky and tricky, and possibly with the Xbox's limited resources, quite difficult.
And hardcore Halo 2 players did get a couple of gifts from Microsoft in the end - 3 months free of Live service, 400 Microsoft points ($5), and a code to the Halo Reach freestanding beta (i.e., the one that doesn't require Halo ODST).
It's not Halo 2 online multiplayer Microsoft ended support for - it's all original Xbox games lost Xbox Live. Just Halo 2 was the biggest amongst a shrinking crowd (the majority having moved to Halo 3). Hell, if Microsoft could keep compatibility with the original Xbox, they probably would, but they probably want to break free to allow them to revamp the service
Halo is considered to be the FPS that was actually playable on a console. Sure there were FPS on a console before, but everyone was "take away my keyboard and mouse over my dead body" type attitude. Halo pretty much changed that and demonstrated that yes, you can actually do an FPS on a console with decent controls using a controller. Ditto Halo Wars (Ensemble Studios) which also had pretty decent controls as an RTS on a console.
Hell, even professional gamers (yes, there are people who play games for a living) often "relax" with a game of Halo.
The other thing is, console gaming usually takes place on large screens - a 16-player Halo match only requires 4 xboxes and 4 TVs. A 16-player Quake/etc game requires 16 PC snd 16 monitors (or 16 laptops), which short of BYOC is hard to accomplish. Getting 4 Xboxes/TVs together is much easier.
Halo wasn't the be-all-end-all in FPS games. It was just one of the first that played well on a console with a controller.
And according to the FAQ, Frictional Games is offering the rest of the Penumbra series to Humble Bundle purchases for $5...
Which means another 2 more games for $5.
Not hard.
Just substitute cheaper components everywhere. Where a 1% resistor is ued, use a 5% or 10% resistor. Ditto caps. Where a certain processor is used, use a cheaper slower one. Software will overclock it (very few embedded processors actually have anti-overclock protections), so if it works, great! (Of course, it may crash more often, or run hotter...). Ditto memory - perhaps the A grade chips are used (normal perfect ones), while the factory puts in the "rejects" (may have failed edge cases during testing, but is adequate for times when perfect storage is less important than price - e.g., answering machines).
A number of customers ship manufacturers exact reels of components - if they want 1,000 units made, they'll ship enough parts for 1,000 units. During third shift runs, the factory uses their own parts, which are always cheaper and nearly always never perfect substitutes (after all, if the developer could find a cheaper equivalent part, they would've used it!).
Ditto with the PCB itself - instead of using whatever the company called for, use a cheaper board (sometimes boards are used because they have specific crosstalk/RF abilities).
Power supplies are similarly degraded - company may ship them nice 5% power supplies on all rails, but their conterfeit ones use cheaper 10% ones.
Put them together and see that they work. Swap power supplies around if necessary to raise yields.
Heck, casings are an interesting place to cut back on too - use a lighter weight metal that can flex more (possible enough to short out the circuitboard)
OTOH, $1 an episode would actually be about the right price. A DVD box set costs probably around $30-35, so a season has anywhere from 22-26 episodes normally. Someone buying them one by one would pay more otherwise and not have a box and discs to go with it. So $1-1.50 an episode would be reasonable for most shows.
More expensive shows may decide to charge higher prices - there are the odd box sets for $50+, so those can probably get away with $2/episode pricing.
Let me guess - in Europe, you'd pay exactly those prices listed? No sales tax added on?
So you'd pay £429 / £499 / £599 / £529 / £599 / £699 for an iPad and not a penny more in sales/VAT?
That's one thing we have in North America - the prices listed ($499/$599/$699/$629/$729/$829) are sans sales tax. So add anywhere from 0% (a few states), to 5-10% to the actual price that Americans pay. Or in Canada, anywhere from 5-15% in sales taxes.
In the UK, the prices tend to be all inclusive - you pay what you see, so all the hidden consumption taxes get built in. VAT of nearly 20%, plus other import taxes and duties and the like. I'm guessing the price gap is a lot smaller than you think.
It's just that governments have used built-in taxes to hide how much taxes are really on products. Happens on this side of the pond with stuff like gas when you actually break down the price.
For example, the 16GB WiFi iPad - £429 is around $630 US. $500 US for the same iPad, plus taxes will probably mean one pays $530-$550 in the US. If we assume the total tax load is (VAT+importation taxes plus duties) 20% for the UK, that $500 iPad becomes $600 instantly.
Unless something really catastrophic happens, it is very unlikely for the "shit to hit the fan" - Steam is a very valuable piece of property simply because it's got a pretty large userbase that buys stuff and has stuff in it. And with more content publishers making stuff available on it, it gets more so. Steam's got critical mass and the network effect going. Should Valve go bankrupt and die, all the big gaming companies will want to scoop up Steam. Simply because customers are opening their wallets and spending money on Steam.
The only real threat is someone buys out Valve and gets greedy by implementing stupid policies that go against the reason why Steam is so popular in the first place (e.g., download limits, subscription fees, etc.). Which is, unfortunately, a far likelier possibility than Steam going tits up outright.
So you implement some protection. Then some prima donna trader comes by and asks that they be disabled and his trades unquestioned. If the company makes good profit off the guy, down the protection goes.
Reminds me of this story on a commodities trader that not only didn't close his position, but actually ended up taking physical delivery of the commodity. Oops. Sure there were protections, but the guy had them disabled.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery.aspx
Hell, for all we know, this is exactly what happened - most traders can't enter in a "b", except a succint few well-trusted individuals. Just one of the "gods" managed to fumble it.
Except there *IS* an escape sequence. And the actual representation is in standard latin alphabets.
The reason is that browsers can detect the escape sequence and interpret the rest of the URL as a unicode string.
The escape is "xn--" - domains using it have xn--domain, TLDs as xn--TLD. Use both and they both have to be escaped - xn--blah.xn--blahtld.
The trick for the Rest of Us is to be able to set that as "off" by default to keep these xn-- sequences from looking like normal latin characters. The good news is the encoding is such that Paypal and the like don't get rendered as xn--paypal.com and such, but xn--junk_that_renders_as_paypal.com.
Internationalized domain names have been around a few years. This is just an internationalized TLD using the same DNS-friendly encoding scheme.
That will just lead to 3's or so.
The problem is, no one wants to do reviews on crappy books - it's tedious and rather dull work. And you have to justify your reasons for the poor grade, which is still more work. End result is bad books don't normally get reviewed (there are a few, but rare). They just get chucked in the trash and a one-star left on Amazon or somesuch. And then others see that and don't buy the book, so bad books simply don't make it up the review chain, unless it's by some die-hard fanatic or someone with too much time on their hands.
OTOH, a good book is one you want to tell others about, so you do, via submitted reviews and the like.
More likely, anyone with any possible patents against Theora is waiting for someone with money to implement it. RIght now, there's hardly any money in any of the companies doing Theora, and suing just gets you no money at all. Mozilla? Xiph? Relatively poor, and probably good lawyers to get patents overturned. Not a good result.
But get a Google, Microsoft or Apple supporting Theora, and these guys have cash. Patent infringement? Cha-ching. Either licensing or back profits. Everyone and their dog with patents will be trying to figure out how they can cash in. Or any of the big hardware guys - Intel, ATI, nVIdia, plus all the others - Broadcom, etc.
Not to say H.264 is any better, but there are patent pools and the like, and probably some form of protection against patent infringement.
Maybe that's all that's needed - patent liability coverage - implement Theora and be covered against any potential patent lawsuits. It's one thing to say that no patents were infrtinged, but another to back it up. Hell, it can be funded by a smally royalty (they already pay for h.264).
Yeah, I got the release and I'll probably buy the double/triple dip version when it comes out. I will admit though, that the mastering is quite good and the bitrate is high (the movie's 46GB). Perhaps my one and only complaint would be the lack of high-bitrate audio (it's just 48kHz/24bit - not 96/192. And no, the reason for the high bitrate is not because you can hear those high frequencies, it's the aliasing - a brick-wall 20kHz filter causes tons of distortion. But let the filter work from 20-odd to 48/96kHz, and it can be really linear).
It is one blu-ray to use to show off your home theatre setup, though. Also, there's less dynamic range compression, so you'll have to crank it up, literally.
Yeah, I ran into issues. Played fine on my PS3, but didn't on my blu-ray equipped HTPC.
Turns out it was BD+ - the Arcsoft folks issued a patch the next day and it worked perfectly.
But those with older players also had BD+ issues and many a firmware update is reuqired to fix it.
BD+... now why did we let Blu-Ray win again? HD-DVD had none of this crap... just the leaked AACS key.