There was a bit of upset about that point when XP mode got reviewed. Since it's based on VPC and not Hyper-V, it shouldn't require x64 and AMD-V or Intel-VT, but for some reason, it does. A lot of people considered that to be all sorts of bullshit because Intel uses their VT feature to differentiate product lines; I.E., moderately priced business desktops don't support XP mode. Of course, that bullshit is actually Intel's fault, so I tend to cast a more glaring eye at them when I think about it
You don't need x64 to have VT. I have an Atom-powered netbook that runs XP mode just fine (the Z520/30/etc have VT, but no x64. Given they only support something like 2GB of RAM, 64-bit is a waste).
And the reason Intel uses VT as a differentiator is because their customers want it. Intel's got so much fab capacity, they can churn out custom chips for anyone, given a large enough order. Like how all Intel Macs have VT built in, or custom chips for the MacBook Air.
AMD though has a fab capacity problem (and always had), so they can't really do the customization and turnaround that Intel can. This is to their advantage, since they can just fab the "best" chips with all features and go for a value proposition. Unfortunately, lack of fab capacity also limits their OEM usage somewhat - Apple, Dell and others do hate short orders, and probably want customized chips. Hell, I'm sure AMD wants to comply, but it would mean sacrificing some markets to meet demand ("Sorry AMD enthusiasts, but due to existing orders for this chip, you'll receive yours in a few months...").
And actually, businesses do want XP mode. The main reason is their line-of-business applications are typically so poorly coded that they only work on XP (if they work on XP...). Budget netbooks though, can often skip VT. Ditto budget laptops with Core series rather than Atom.
Microsoft's site was registered sometime in the early 90's, as a test site for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Back in the days when you had to use Trumpet Winsock to connect, prior to Windows 95 (which came with Microsoft's Winsock stack). Of course, it had to be prepped for Win95's launch, but until then, it was really just test servers. It only went "live" after another Microsoft employee testing TCP/IP found it was live and traced it down the hall.
Another problem here is it says that when Apple counter sued for the 13 patents, they also admitted they are violating Nokia's patents because they didn't want to pay the royalty rates and cross-patent usage. Just because Apple didn't want to pay the rates and patent usages doesn't give them the legal right to use and profit from Nokia's work for free.
Actually, Apple didn't want to agree to Nokia's non-licensing of the patents. Apple is willing to pay, but Nokia doesn't want RAND license fees like everyone else wants to pay. Instead, Nokia wants Apple to pay more than everyone else. Apple wants to pay, Nokia doesn't want to accept the terms that Apple is paying under.
Apple knows of the patents - they have to pay as part of standard agreements, which is why they're all licensed under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) principles. So they're willing to pay Nokia the same fees that every other cellphone maker pays them. Nokia, though, sees potential in what Apple is doing, and demands that they pay more simply because Apple has something Nokia wants, and Apple has no choice but to pay Nokia anyways.
In a car analogy, Nokia is selling engines for cars. Everyone who wants to build a car has to buy a Nokia engine, and they all pay $5,000 for it. Since Nokia is the only company that can sell engines, they agreed to sell anyone who makes cars an engine for $5,000 (RAND). Apple comes along, builds the iCar, and wants to buy the Nokia engine. Nokia sees that the iCar has a nifty dashboard widget, and wants that for their cars. So Nokia charges Apple not just $5,000, but $5,000 plus the dashboard widget.
In this case, no one has clean hands nor is completely innocent.
I'm sorry, but that's just not negotiable. I will pay once, no more.
But, I expect the full game for my $60. If you hold back any of the content, you won't get my $60. I'll still play whatever I want to, I just won't pay you. The presence of DLC causes me to pirate games I would otherwise (joyfully) pay for.
So pay once. You get the product you paid for.
If the publisher offers extra content, feel free to ignore them. They're not asking for more money to play what you already have.
Whether the content is already on the disc, or downloaded is a non-issue. You knew what content you were buying when you bought it. If the publisher left extra content on the disc, that's their perogative. Sometimes it leads to trouble ("Hot Coffee" anyone? Sure it was unlockable via a mod, but the only difference here is free mods vs. paid mods), other times it's assets that just aren't used period.
Or should we also hold Microsoft to account? After all, they ship a "Home Premium" version of Windows 7, but the "Ultimate" version ("content") is unlockable if you pay Microsoft some extra $$$. The "Ultimate" content is right there on the DVD!
Not only making it too hard, but making changes too frequent. If someone has to change their password once a month, they will have trouble remembering it. They'll make it as simple as the security will allow and write it down (maybe multiple places).
Actually, it happens in stages. The first few passwords are nice and secure. Then the next time around they're forgotten and the password is reset, and it's written down. After a few more months of that, the guy will choose a password according to some algorithm
Monthly ones are fun, because you can get upper case, lower case, and numbers easily:
January@010, February2)10, March20!0,... (number is shifted)
Yes, very secure.
A better way would be to use something like apg that generates pronouncable passwords that have numbers/letters/caps, maybe a symbol, and re-issue it to the staff no more often than yearly. Print it out on newsprint or other paper that degrades after a month, by which time muscle memory would store the password. The only time password changes are more frequent is if there's a deliberate attack (which your servers log, right?)
While it's not the same technology, wouldn't a Peltier device achieve that?
No, a Peltier device requires input non-heat energy. No laws of thermodynamics violated. It's just a less efficient heat pump (compared to refridgeration).
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public. At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report. I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration. If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity. I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
Or perhaps it's reflecting on the true nature of Facebook's "privacy"? Given all the crap about Facebook affecting employment, you'd think that even if you had a fully private profile people will still find out. And given the way people re-broadcast stuff you may have marked as "friends only", I'd say the privacy settings are close to nil anyways.
I'd say the privacy changes reflect the true privacy nowadays. Even though your profile is friends only, it's still public since your friends may just up and re-post your "private" stuff. Or since it can be made available to apps too, well.
Facebook's privacy setting is nothing more than telling your friend a secret - you have to trust them to not spread it around. If you didn't want the secret revealed, your best bet is to not tell anyone.
Forget people being a dick, how about people just innocently wandering between transmitter and reciever? Or the user himself accidentally setting something down in the way? Too many ways to screw it up.
I think we had a story about LOS wireless before, and really, same as then, the only use I can see for it is in lab environments, where you usually don't have people wandering around in undefined patterns. Attach unit to roof on a per-row basis, aim all computers in that row at that reciever, and no one can accidentally interrupt the beam. Beyond that, I can't see a common residential use, or much industrial use.
Who says using a light based PHY means it has to be direct line of sight? There's one common technology that uses light, yet for the most part, indirect line of sight works quite well. It's called Consumer IR, and it powers your remote controls. With many modern remotes, you don't have to aim the remote at the device, but you can bounce it off walls and furniture and have it work great.
Don't forget, 802.11b works on two different bands. One is 2.4GHz, another is IR.
HSPA+ rollout in Canada was hurried along by Bell and Telus, who wanted to have GSM-compatible networks in place when the world showed up to Vancouver for a few weeks, not long ago. Could you imagine the stink if Van got the hot new toys while Montreal and Toronto and Calgary had to suffer with the old tech?
Because otherwise, Rogers would get all the heavily sought-after roaming minutes. CDMA just isn't used that widely outside of North America. And with Bell being an Olympic sponsor, that would mean the vast majority of the cash from calls goes to Rogers, one of their competitors. And nothing sucks worse than paying for something, only to benefit your competitor.
It was due anyhow, as CDMA has no 4G migration. GSM has LTE, and the other 4G technology is possibly WiMax. Sprint's going WiMax, Verizon's LTE (as is T-Mo and AT&T). But if it weren't for the Olympics, there'd be no reason to rush out a 3G network.
It'd be nice if sit-down places made nutritional facts available easily, like the fast-food places do, since most of them are fairly asssembly-line cooking now anyway.
The restaurant industry is strongly against this stuff. Because if people actually knew, they'd be shocked. Like dishes containing easily 2000+ calories (basically, an entire day's intake for the average person). Or salt content of 2000+mg (one should limit intake to about 2500mg).
Especially since they can't cheat like the processed food industry where a "portion" can be stupid things like "1 chip" or "1 cookie" or "1/2 cookie". Or single-serving containers that look good, but the nutrition facts saying that single-serve container really is 3 servings.
In Canada, limits placed on sugar intake on cereals had manufacturers complying. Some did reduce their sugar content per bowl. General Mills, did the easy thing - the serving size was reduced - 2/3rds of a bowl, half a bowl...
If it isn't ready for prime-time release to 3rd party developers it can't be compared to what everybody expects a true multitasking OS to be. When they get some engineering talent in there who can write a multi-tasking phone OS that can intelligently handle any number of apps, 3rd party included, simultaneously then it will be able to join the club.
Locking it down to out-of-the-box Apple apps only is tacit admission that if they let any app multi-task the iPhone would be brought to it's knees.
More likely, third party devs are stupid. Yes, stupid. They do stupid things, and we end up in the state we're in for stuff like Windows and IE6 because the devs do stupid stuff. Lots of windows private resources and code have been hijacked because devs took the easy way out - like looking for a window called "Program Manager" (it's the desktop window caption). Or the Display control panel having a special window class just so drivers can do anything they want to it as they try to override stuff. Or programs hard coding "C:\Documents and Settings\" instead of calling the API to get the true name (which is localized!), resulting in the nice pile of hard links and a really messed up \Users\ directory on Vista and 7.
A stupid daemon that polls once a second to do something kills battery life quite significantly, even if you don't turn on the screen. And people complaining about how their Windows Mobile phones seem to have crap battery life and crash, probably due to some installed app doing crap like this.
Laptops allow this because they have huge batteries, so stupid apps and OSes are hidden in the brute force method of having a decent battery life. It's why Linux has the no-tick kernel option, because even the OS scheduler clock tick causes battery life to go down on a phone. (OS X does a variable tick since the beginning - the scheduler looks at when the next event is supposed to happen and schedules the timer to tick once then. Windows and tick Linux have a regularly scheduled timer interrupt).
The reason he had to jailbreak his iPhone, no doubt, is because otherwise it would have been completely impossible to write a firewall for it, or to hide the phone's UDID.
How about you actually read his blog? The apps he was testing are from the AppStore...
And not unique to the iPhone, since there are APIs to get the same thing off of every other phone out there - Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and probably Windows Phone as well. APIs like getting the phone number and/or IMEI, software versions and other things. Android is probably the best at it since you can't get the phone number without permission, but unless there's a way to say yes to some and no to other permissions...
Of course, the real question is why no one's done it on other platforms - the iPhone wasn't the first to have practically an always-on connection to the Internet.
Wi-Fi (how many years has it taken for N to become standard? I've been through three pre-N routers....) Bluetooth (which is infamous for not working between devices by different manufacturers, to the point that no-one bothers with it. Oh and you get spammed).
Well, it's your fault for buying pre-N equipment in the N case. After all, they couldn't get consensus on how N should work, which is why it took so long. Every manufacturer implements their own idea on how to do it, especially if there was no standard. It's just like the pre-v.90 days of modems - everyone had their own idea how to do 56k. With no standard, you end up with that. Now, N took so long (and you got burned) because there were different ways to accomplish the same thing, and there were arguments on which method should be chosen (primarily politics - after all, what method gets chosen gets patent revenue). In the meantime, you decided to go ahead and buy whatever nonstandard equipment was available because it was, well available. Manufacturers are always doing that - releasing unstandardized stuff in order to carve a niche in the market, or how technology progresses.
Bluetooth, let's not go there. It's a horrible standard that's overly complex. And this is the core spec. For the most part, this part does interoperate quite well. It's the high-level stuff that doesn't and leads to all sorts of wierd interop problems. Profiles, especially (HID, SSDP, A2DP, Headset, FTP, OBEX, Dial-up, LAN, etc), and the incompatibility happens when various stacks implement different profiles and different subsets.
Not really. Flying, when done properly will be -a lot- more safe than driving. With flying, unlike driving you go not just left and right but also up and down. Mix this with the fact that there are no roads (meaning to get to the same place two people can easily take routes miles apart) and you have the ability to reduce, eliminate traffic problems that exist in traditional traffic.
Also, never underestimate the fact of self-preservation, when encountered in a life threatening situation, people tend to do the right thing and move away from danger. People are self-regulating when it comes to life and death.
Never underestimate the idiot. The only good thing at the moment is that the people using this will be rich, and probably can afford lessons and proper flying technique.
Once it becomes cheap, people will jump in, get a few lessons , and then on their second flight start talking/texting on their cellphones.
The only good thing is the Big Sky Theory works quite well, except during lowlevel flight and people start smacking into buildings. Unfortunately, time "to do the right ting" might not be present to avoid flying into that brick wall.
If IPEX was tossed out, I'm guessing it was someone at IPEX who was swapping processors out for dummies (for sale elsewhere, I assume) and then sending the fakes to Newegg.
This isn't a mere case of "swapping out". It's outright fraud.
First, the boxes has typos:
This box contains an Intel(R) processor ans a thermal solution for use ina Desktop PC. The full text of a Three-Year Limited Warranty, installation instructions, and the system requirements for Intel(R) Hyper.Threading Technology and Intel(R) Turbo Boost Technology are contained in the booklet enclosed.
Not to mention the French and other languages have similar errors. (The errors are "ans", "ina" and "Hyper.Threading" (dot, not Hyper-Threading)).
Next, the "heatsink fan" was a piece of foam plastic with a paper representation of an Intel fan stuck on it.
Third, the "processor" was a slab of metal shaped like a processor with a sticker on the top to represent the green parts. Not sure if the laser etching is also a sticker or actual laser-etching.
Whoever did this, it wasn't just mere swapping out, they literally manufactured the fakes from scratch. Printed their own boxes, made the blank paper booklets, the pieces inside. I don't know if the barcode stickers were simply copied originals.
to rephrase the mantra: if microsoft had these requirements on developing software for Windows operating systems, you'd be typing up a furious reply condemning "M$."
And I'm sure we can see that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have even more draconian license agreements if you want to develop for their consoles. Except perhaps that there's a security level requirement to ensure NDA'd materials don't leak out (more than just a locked office door), the requirement for separate development offices (apart from developer's normaly residences) etc. The only real exception is Microsoft has an official "indie gamer" exemption (XNA studio).
The iPhone and iPod Touch are Apple's consoles. Same thing.
Hopefully not a long time. However, given that the second run of iPhone 3GS aren't completely jailbroken yet (they require a tethered jailbreak every reboot), Apple may have learned and make the new iPads even more difficult to jailbreak.
Now, given that Apple's developers make stupid bugs, if you're planning on this, I would suggest buying an early revision iPad as it will likely have the buggy boot ROM allowing an easy jailbreak. A few months down the road (when a jailbreak happens) might be too late.
So, the iPad may take suggestions on the iPhone 3GS to be even harder to jailbreak. Or, given it's a new SoC, there may be exploitable bugs that make a more permanent jailbreak possible. It's a tossup at the moment.
Sorry, but at least part of the problem is, why am I expected to buy separate data plans for each mobile device that I have? I have paid for a data plan for my phone, so why should I have to pay for an additional plan for either the iPad or the MiFi?
Most of the world doesn't. If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to. But if you're using GSM/HSPA/EDGE/etc, you don't.
YOu take the SIM out of your phone, stick it in your MiFi. I'd say to stick it in your iPad, but that requires a micro-SIM, in which case you need one of those and an adapter to fit into your phone. But there you go, one phone, one SIM, one plan, one monthly bill.
Of course, it also means if your phone rings, you're stuck answering it on whatever device it's currently inside.
A few years ago, only bittorrent users were using video on the Internet. But now, my 4 and 6 year old kids seem to spend more time watching kids' shows on the Internet than they do on TV, my wife and I use netflix on demand, and my 11 year old watches dozens of youtube videos to learn card tricks and yo-yo tricks.
Video isn't exotic anymore. If the majority of your customers are just checking facebook and email, start the countdown because it won't last.
If you're talking about a cable ISP, downloads are effectively "free". Kids and parents watching Hulu all day doesn't concern them too much.
However, the thing Bittorrent does that does impact a cable ISP is *uploads*. Compared to downstream bandwidth, upstream bandwidth is very limited. You already know if you set your upload too fast your connection gets useless for surfing, gaming and interactive applications. Well a few people doing that takes down an entire node as all the upstream bandwidth is consumed. And that takes out service for many people - web pages take forever to load, gaming is impossible as your ping starts averaging 100ms spiking to 500+, and forget about ssh.
Our ISP has a limit of 60GB (Canada, and quit your comcast 250GB bitching). However, people have routinely doubled that - they don't care if it's mostly downloads. After all, there's tons of downstream bandwidth, and a few users gobbling up data doesn't really impact other's performance. If you start uploading a significant fraction of that, they take notice and send warning notices out. Heavy uploaders are the first targeted in any bandwidth measure.
As much as we hate advertising on the web, there is definitely something to be said for ads as a window into history.
It's definitely a window into history. 10 years ago you could use ordinary batteries in your cell phones. You don't see these ads anymore.
Hell, I saw those things 15+ years ago. While not exactly a cellphone powered by ordinary batteries, it was a battery case that held ordinary batteries you could use instead of your recharable battery. Meant for emergency use, and back in the days of AMPS where standby time was 2 or 3 days on a fresh battery and you had a 2 hour tops talk time. Of course the battery holders lasted longer (AA's have a huge capacity), but then again, the batteries were bigger. You wouldn't want to use it for regular usage, as a set of 6 AA's that maybe lasted up to a week would get expensive quick.
Interesting... did you buy it? Am wondering about the format used, if it's searchable or indexed by issue/year, and whether it insists on installing DRM or some such nonsense. Doesn't seem like a bad deal otherwise, and certainly more space-effective than all that paper... tho not as handy for portable reading, obviously.
Well, the DRM is that it's only readable by the Adobe Air application it's written in, but there is functionality to copy the DVD to a hard disk so you can read it without swapping DVDs.
It's supposed to be searchable, but it's also browsable as-is by year/issue.
Just FYI - you might want to search your local retail store for it - it can be cheaper there. It's everywhere and everyone selling software practically carries it. I overpaid when I bought it though Amazon and it was cheaper at my local Best Buy.
If you want cheap and easy, just get what the cable provider wants to give you.
If you want flexible and powerful, then Tivo's not the option.
No amount patent trollery will change the fact that Tivo's place in the market is rapidly vanishing.
Problem is, if TiVo dies, they will be bought by a patent troll. Who will go after everyone.
Right now, TiVo's only going after Echostar, who willingly violated TiVo's patents (TiVo left Echostar a TiVo series 1 back in the days when it was demonstrating its technology. Hughes then licensed it, but Echostar refused and they brought out their own. ReplayTV (now DirecTV) and TiVo own the majority of patents in the area, and have cross-licensed each other.).
At least TiVo's still trying to remain relevant. Once they're gone, their patents will be ripe litigation resources against everyone.
At this point, I'm far more interested in Vavle's Mac development that they seem to be doing. I'd love to know if I can finally ditch my Windows partition. I'd love to see Steam and the Source Engine on OS X.
Given their solid Direct3D stance, I'm a little worried... but a gamer can dream, right?
Still, Portal 2. Going to have to play that.
And yet, Crossover (which has an announcement a few articles down) has worked with Steam and Source Engine quite well. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 worked fine way back when I tried it (and bought it) on OS X. It was before OS X 10.5 when I tried it and it worked. I'd be shocked if it wasn't working anymore. Portal wasn't around when I tried it, but I'd guess it works.
Sure it's not native, but it worked well enough to be quite usable.
I personally find that it offers better usability -less configuration- than Wine.
Yeah, I never understood the hatred towards CodeWeavers. They are the epitome of open-source business - they fund and support the foundation project (wine) by hiring devs and contributing piles of patches back. Unlike say, TransGaming which forked Wine ages ago.
Personally I have subs for both Linux and MacOS - it seems yearly they have these great specials, and I renew my support then. I think I only paid $35 this year because they had a 50% off special ($35/yr support for each product), and then got a bonus 6 months for being an existing customer, and then they gave me another year because this release took so long.
Heck, it's a great way to play Valve's games on MacOS (at least until Steam comes to native OS X).
Oddly enough, I played World of Warcraft and Fallout 3 quite a bit since upgrading to these drivers, and my performance has been much better than the previous win7 64x driver.
If you read the release notes you'll see big performance gains on a lot of games from this driver. This is something I've never seen from Nvidia. Anyone have the details on what happened? Maybe they found some new way to be efficient or found some long standing bug.
Or someone mentioned elsewhere, you can't run the card at full capability because it uses too much power and generates too much heat, so you throttle the card. (And the hardware protection kicks in when it overheats by clock-skipping and other methods, like the old Pentium 4s). Maybe that's why these drivers work better - an unthrottled card will produce better performance, at the expensive of the heat destroying the card, or the increased power draw destroying the motherboard and/or PSU by demanding more power than it's designed to give.
Thermal dissipation seems to be the limit - there's only so much cooling you can fit into a double-wide card, and with these quad video cards on a double-wide, there's even less. Given how everything is onboard these days, maybe that's what we'll fill those slots up with - a quad-core video card that takes up 4 slots...
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You don't need x64 to have VT. I have an Atom-powered netbook that runs XP mode just fine (the Z520/30/etc have VT, but no x64. Given they only support something like 2GB of RAM, 64-bit is a waste).
And the reason Intel uses VT as a differentiator is because their customers want it. Intel's got so much fab capacity, they can churn out custom chips for anyone, given a large enough order. Like how all Intel Macs have VT built in, or custom chips for the MacBook Air.
AMD though has a fab capacity problem (and always had), so they can't really do the customization and turnaround that Intel can. This is to their advantage, since they can just fab the "best" chips with all features and go for a value proposition. Unfortunately, lack of fab capacity also limits their OEM usage somewhat - Apple, Dell and others do hate short orders, and probably want customized chips. Hell, I'm sure AMD wants to comply, but it would mean sacrificing some markets to meet demand ("Sorry AMD enthusiasts, but due to existing orders for this chip, you'll receive yours in a few months...").
And actually, businesses do want XP mode. The main reason is their line-of-business applications are typically so poorly coded that they only work on XP (if they work on XP...). Budget netbooks though, can often skip VT. Ditto budget laptops with Core series rather than Atom.
Microsoft's site was registered sometime in the early 90's, as a test site for the Windows TCP/IP stack. Back in the days when you had to use Trumpet Winsock to connect, prior to Windows 95 (which came with Microsoft's Winsock stack). Of course, it had to be prepped for Win95's launch, but until then, it was really just test servers. It only went "live" after another Microsoft employee testing TCP/IP found it was live and traced it down the hall.
http://www.microsoft.com/misc/features/features_flshbk.htm
Actually, Apple didn't want to agree to Nokia's non-licensing of the patents. Apple is willing to pay, but Nokia doesn't want RAND license fees like everyone else wants to pay. Instead, Nokia wants Apple to pay more than everyone else. Apple wants to pay, Nokia doesn't want to accept the terms that Apple is paying under.
Apple knows of the patents - they have to pay as part of standard agreements, which is why they're all licensed under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) principles. So they're willing to pay Nokia the same fees that every other cellphone maker pays them. Nokia, though, sees potential in what Apple is doing, and demands that they pay more simply because Apple has something Nokia wants, and Apple has no choice but to pay Nokia anyways.
In a car analogy, Nokia is selling engines for cars. Everyone who wants to build a car has to buy a Nokia engine, and they all pay $5,000 for it. Since Nokia is the only company that can sell engines, they agreed to sell anyone who makes cars an engine for $5,000 (RAND). Apple comes along, builds the iCar, and wants to buy the Nokia engine. Nokia sees that the iCar has a nifty dashboard widget, and wants that for their cars. So Nokia charges Apple not just $5,000, but $5,000 plus the dashboard widget.
In this case, no one has clean hands nor is completely innocent.
I'm sorry, but that's just not negotiable. I will pay once, no more.
But, I expect the full game for my $60. If you hold back any of the content, you won't get my $60. I'll still play whatever I want to, I just won't pay you. The presence of DLC causes me to pirate games I would otherwise (joyfully) pay for.
So pay once. You get the product you paid for.
If the publisher offers extra content, feel free to ignore them. They're not asking for more money to play what you already have.
Whether the content is already on the disc, or downloaded is a non-issue. You knew what content you were buying when you bought it. If the publisher left extra content on the disc, that's their perogative. Sometimes it leads to trouble ("Hot Coffee" anyone? Sure it was unlockable via a mod, but the only difference here is free mods vs. paid mods), other times it's assets that just aren't used period.
Or should we also hold Microsoft to account? After all, they ship a "Home Premium" version of Windows 7, but the "Ultimate" version ("content") is unlockable if you pay Microsoft some extra $$$. The "Ultimate" content is right there on the DVD!
Actually, it happens in stages. The first few passwords are nice and secure. Then the next time around they're forgotten and the password is reset, and it's written down. After a few more months of that, the guy will choose a password according to some algorithm
Monthly ones are fun, because you can get upper case, lower case, and numbers easily:
January2010, Feburary2010, March2010, ..., December2010, January2011, ...
How about a symbol?
January@010, February2)10, March20!0, ... (number is shifted)
Yes, very secure.
A better way would be to use something like apg that generates pronouncable passwords that have numbers/letters/caps, maybe a symbol, and re-issue it to the staff no more often than yearly. Print it out on newsprint or other paper that degrades after a month, by which time muscle memory would store the password. The only time password changes are more frequent is if there's a deliberate attack (which your servers log, right?)
No, a Peltier device requires input non-heat energy. No laws of thermodynamics violated. It's just a less efficient heat pump (compared to refridgeration).
Or perhaps it's reflecting on the true nature of Facebook's "privacy"? Given all the crap about Facebook affecting employment, you'd think that even if you had a fully private profile people will still find out. And given the way people re-broadcast stuff you may have marked as "friends only", I'd say the privacy settings are close to nil anyways.
I'd say the privacy changes reflect the true privacy nowadays. Even though your profile is friends only, it's still public since your friends may just up and re-post your "private" stuff. Or since it can be made available to apps too, well.
Facebook's privacy setting is nothing more than telling your friend a secret - you have to trust them to not spread it around. If you didn't want the secret revealed, your best bet is to not tell anyone.
Who says using a light based PHY means it has to be direct line of sight? There's one common technology that uses light, yet for the most part, indirect line of sight works quite well. It's called Consumer IR, and it powers your remote controls. With many modern remotes, you don't have to aim the remote at the device, but you can bounce it off walls and furniture and have it work great.
Don't forget, 802.11b works on two different bands. One is 2.4GHz, another is IR.
Because otherwise, Rogers would get all the heavily sought-after roaming minutes. CDMA just isn't used that widely outside of North America. And with Bell being an Olympic sponsor, that would mean the vast majority of the cash from calls goes to Rogers, one of their competitors. And nothing sucks worse than paying for something, only to benefit your competitor.
It was due anyhow, as CDMA has no 4G migration. GSM has LTE, and the other 4G technology is possibly WiMax. Sprint's going WiMax, Verizon's LTE (as is T-Mo and AT&T). But if it weren't for the Olympics, there'd be no reason to rush out a 3G network.
The restaurant industry is strongly against this stuff. Because if people actually knew, they'd be shocked. Like dishes containing easily 2000+ calories (basically, an entire day's intake for the average person). Or salt content of 2000+mg (one should limit intake to about 2500mg).
Especially since they can't cheat like the processed food industry where a "portion" can be stupid things like "1 chip" or "1 cookie" or "1/2 cookie". Or single-serving containers that look good, but the nutrition facts saying that single-serve container really is 3 servings.
In Canada, limits placed on sugar intake on cereals had manufacturers complying. Some did reduce their sugar content per bowl. General Mills, did the easy thing - the serving size was reduced - 2/3rds of a bowl, half a bowl...
In Canada:
http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/calorie_confidential/ - Restaurant "nutrition facts"
http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2009/lawless_loans/busted.html - Is there less sugar in kid's cereals?
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/rate-your-plate/fatabase.html - Analysis of Canadian restaurant meals
More likely, third party devs are stupid. Yes, stupid. They do stupid things, and we end up in the state we're in for stuff like Windows and IE6 because the devs do stupid stuff. Lots of windows private resources and code have been hijacked because devs took the easy way out - like looking for a window called "Program Manager" (it's the desktop window caption). Or the Display control panel having a special window class just so drivers can do anything they want to it as they try to override stuff. Or programs hard coding "C:\Documents and Settings\" instead of calling the API to get the true name (which is localized!), resulting in the nice pile of hard links and a really messed up \Users\ directory on Vista and 7.
A stupid daemon that polls once a second to do something kills battery life quite significantly, even if you don't turn on the screen. And people complaining about how their Windows Mobile phones seem to have crap battery life and crash, probably due to some installed app doing crap like this.
Laptops allow this because they have huge batteries, so stupid apps and OSes are hidden in the brute force method of having a decent battery life. It's why Linux has the no-tick kernel option, because even the OS scheduler clock tick causes battery life to go down on a phone. (OS X does a variable tick since the beginning - the scheduler looks at when the next event is supposed to happen and schedules the timer to tick once then. Windows and tick Linux have a regularly scheduled timer interrupt).
And not unique to the iPhone, since there are APIs to get the same thing off of every other phone out there - Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and probably Windows Phone as well. APIs like getting the phone number and/or IMEI, software versions and other things. Android is probably the best at it since you can't get the phone number without permission, but unless there's a way to say yes to some and no to other permissions...
Of course, the real question is why no one's done it on other platforms - the iPhone wasn't the first to have practically an always-on connection to the Internet.
Well, it's your fault for buying pre-N equipment in the N case. After all, they couldn't get consensus on how N should work, which is why it took so long. Every manufacturer implements their own idea on how to do it, especially if there was no standard. It's just like the pre-v.90 days of modems - everyone had their own idea how to do 56k. With no standard, you end up with that. Now, N took so long (and you got burned) because there were different ways to accomplish the same thing, and there were arguments on which method should be chosen (primarily politics - after all, what method gets chosen gets patent revenue). In the meantime, you decided to go ahead and buy whatever nonstandard equipment was available because it was, well available. Manufacturers are always doing that - releasing unstandardized stuff in order to carve a niche in the market, or how technology progresses.
Bluetooth, let's not go there. It's a horrible standard that's overly complex. And this is the core spec. For the most part, this part does interoperate quite well. It's the high-level stuff that doesn't and leads to all sorts of wierd interop problems. Profiles, especially (HID, SSDP, A2DP, Headset, FTP, OBEX, Dial-up, LAN, etc), and the incompatibility happens when various stacks implement different profiles and different subsets.
Never underestimate the idiot. The only good thing at the moment is that the people using this will be rich, and probably can afford lessons and proper flying technique.
Once it becomes cheap, people will jump in, get a few lessons , and then on their second flight start talking/texting on their cellphones.
The only good thing is the Big Sky Theory works quite well, except during lowlevel flight and people start smacking into buildings. Unfortunately, time "to do the right ting" might not be present to avoid flying into that brick wall.
This isn't a mere case of "swapping out". It's outright fraud.
First, the boxes has typos:
Not to mention the French and other languages have similar errors. (The errors are "ans", "ina" and "Hyper.Threading" (dot, not Hyper-Threading)).
Next, the "heatsink fan" was a piece of foam plastic with a paper representation of an Intel fan stuck on it.
Third, the "processor" was a slab of metal shaped like a processor with a sticker on the top to represent the green parts. Not sure if the laser etching is also a sticker or actual laser-etching.
Whoever did this, it wasn't just mere swapping out, they literally manufactured the fakes from scratch. Printed their own boxes, made the blank paper booklets, the pieces inside. I don't know if the barcode stickers were simply copied originals.
And I'm sure we can see that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have even more draconian license agreements if you want to develop for their consoles. Except perhaps that there's a security level requirement to ensure NDA'd materials don't leak out (more than just a locked office door), the requirement for separate development offices (apart from developer's normaly residences) etc. The only real exception is Microsoft has an official "indie gamer" exemption (XNA studio).
The iPhone and iPod Touch are Apple's consoles. Same thing.
Hopefully not a long time. However, given that the second run of iPhone 3GS aren't completely jailbroken yet (they require a tethered jailbreak every reboot), Apple may have learned and make the new iPads even more difficult to jailbreak.
Now, given that Apple's developers make stupid bugs, if you're planning on this, I would suggest buying an early revision iPad as it will likely have the buggy boot ROM allowing an easy jailbreak. A few months down the road (when a jailbreak happens) might be too late.
So, the iPad may take suggestions on the iPhone 3GS to be even harder to jailbreak. Or, given it's a new SoC, there may be exploitable bugs that make a more permanent jailbreak possible. It's a tossup at the moment.
Most of the world doesn't. If you're stuck on a carrier with CDMA, you have to. But if you're using GSM/HSPA/EDGE/etc, you don't.
YOu take the SIM out of your phone, stick it in your MiFi. I'd say to stick it in your iPad, but that requires a micro-SIM, in which case you need one of those and an adapter to fit into your phone. But there you go, one phone, one SIM, one plan, one monthly bill.
Of course, it also means if your phone rings, you're stuck answering it on whatever device it's currently inside.
If you're talking about a cable ISP, downloads are effectively "free". Kids and parents watching Hulu all day doesn't concern them too much.
However, the thing Bittorrent does that does impact a cable ISP is *uploads*. Compared to downstream bandwidth, upstream bandwidth is very limited. You already know if you set your upload too fast your connection gets useless for surfing, gaming and interactive applications. Well a few people doing that takes down an entire node as all the upstream bandwidth is consumed. And that takes out service for many people - web pages take forever to load, gaming is impossible as your ping starts averaging 100ms spiking to 500+, and forget about ssh.
Our ISP has a limit of 60GB (Canada, and quit your comcast 250GB bitching). However, people have routinely doubled that - they don't care if it's mostly downloads. After all, there's tons of downstream bandwidth, and a few users gobbling up data doesn't really impact other's performance. If you start uploading a significant fraction of that, they take notice and send warning notices out. Heavy uploaders are the first targeted in any bandwidth measure.
Hell, I saw those things 15+ years ago. While not exactly a cellphone powered by ordinary batteries, it was a battery case that held ordinary batteries you could use instead of your recharable battery. Meant for emergency use, and back in the days of AMPS where standby time was 2 or 3 days on a fresh battery and you had a 2 hour tops talk time. Of course the battery holders lasted longer (AA's have a huge capacity), but then again, the batteries were bigger. You wouldn't want to use it for regular usage, as a set of 6 AA's that maybe lasted up to a week would get expensive quick.
Well, the DRM is that it's only readable by the Adobe Air application it's written in, but there is functionality to copy the DVD to a hard disk so you can read it without swapping DVDs.
It's supposed to be searchable, but it's also browsable as-is by year/issue.
Just FYI - you might want to search your local retail store for it - it can be cheaper there. It's everywhere and everyone selling software practically carries it. I overpaid when I bought it though Amazon and it was cheaper at my local Best Buy.
Problem is, if TiVo dies, they will be bought by a patent troll. Who will go after everyone.
Right now, TiVo's only going after Echostar, who willingly violated TiVo's patents (TiVo left Echostar a TiVo series 1 back in the days when it was demonstrating its technology. Hughes then licensed it, but Echostar refused and they brought out their own. ReplayTV (now DirecTV) and TiVo own the majority of patents in the area, and have cross-licensed each other.).
At least TiVo's still trying to remain relevant. Once they're gone, their patents will be ripe litigation resources against everyone.
And yet, Crossover (which has an announcement a few articles down) has worked with Steam and Source Engine quite well. Half-Life, Half-Life 2 worked fine way back when I tried it (and bought it) on OS X. It was before OS X 10.5 when I tried it and it worked. I'd be shocked if it wasn't working anymore. Portal wasn't around when I tried it, but I'd guess it works.
Sure it's not native, but it worked well enough to be quite usable.
Officially Supported - http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=3424
Yeah, I never understood the hatred towards CodeWeavers. They are the epitome of open-source business - they fund and support the foundation project (wine) by hiring devs and contributing piles of patches back. Unlike say, TransGaming which forked Wine ages ago.
Personally I have subs for both Linux and MacOS - it seems yearly they have these great specials, and I renew my support then. I think I only paid $35 this year because they had a 50% off special ($35/yr support for each product), and then got a bonus 6 months for being an existing customer, and then they gave me another year because this release took so long.
Heck, it's a great way to play Valve's games on MacOS (at least until Steam comes to native OS X).
Or someone mentioned elsewhere, you can't run the card at full capability because it uses too much power and generates too much heat, so you throttle the card. (And the hardware protection kicks in when it overheats by clock-skipping and other methods, like the old Pentium 4s). Maybe that's why these drivers work better - an unthrottled card will produce better performance, at the expensive of the heat destroying the card, or the increased power draw destroying the motherboard and/or PSU by demanding more power than it's designed to give.
Thermal dissipation seems to be the limit - there's only so much cooling you can fit into a double-wide card, and with these quad video cards on a double-wide, there's even less. Given how everything is onboard these days, maybe that's what we'll fill those slots up with - a quad-core video card that takes up 4 slots...