The MPEG patent thicket is a prime example of the real problem of software patents. If I want to write a video player, it has to play the formats that people encode videos in. The veto power of patents equates to the right to prohibit me, and everyone, from writing a functional video player. I think I already have pretty good info, but there's loads more of this story to tell. Help really appreciated in documenting this:
That's why there are patent consortiums. MPEG-LA is one, 3C Entity (and 5C Entity) are another, etc. If you want to write a h.264 decoder, you license the h.264 patents, and you're free and clear because your royalty payment pays for ALL the patents in h.264 - it's all RAND licensing. Most working groups for various technologies form consortiums because navigating the patent minefield is such a pain. Instead, you get to license all the patents you need for one small fee. Need to do a Blu-Ray player? Blu-Ray Association will point you to the consortium that licenses (and sub-licenses - stuff like h.264) all the patents needed.
Ditto stuff like RAM, media (DVD/Blu-Ray/etc), communications technologies (WiFi/802.11 is covered by tons of patents), etc. Many consortiums license to other consortiums so you can do a one-stop shop for licensing (otherwise instead of dealing with 1,000,000 ocmpanies and patents, you deal with 1,000 consortiums, which isn't much better, so a one-stop shop means you deal with a 1 or 2).
LiON batteries -- what's used in most laptops and netbooks now -- have different kind of failures and limits from the older NiCD and so on. Aside from the catastrophic failures that made the news, what happens with LiON is that there are a limited number of charge cycles per cell no matter what you do. The cells generally go around 300 charge cycles before their capacity drops to about half. The controller in the batteries (which prevents them from just bursting in flames all the time) senses this and reports it back to the os.
True, but few people run their batteries to depletion and then charge it up - the 300-odd cycle rating is for full charge/discharge cycles. Li-Ions last longer if you take a more partial charge-discharge cycle.
However, what Lithium secondary batteries suffer from is aging. They grow old - once they are manufactured, the clock starts ticking. Over time, they will die. Which is why you never buy spare batteries until you need them - a battery kept in ideal conditions, but unused will age the same rate as one in constant use. That three year old spare battery you kept in tip-top storage conditions won't have significantly more capacity than your now dead three year old battery (it may last half an hour, where your battery lasts 5 minutes, but you ain't getting back the old 5 hour life when it was new without buying a fresh new battery).
Literally, freshness counts. And a good chunk of life of batteries may be spent prior to the device being actually sold and in the consumer's hands - think of the cell being manufactured, then sitting on the shelf for a few weeks until someone buys it and manufactures their battery pack, which sits on the shelf a few more weeks until it's paired with a device. Then a few more weeks pass when the device is shipped to a retailer, where it can sit more weeks or months until someone actually buys it. The device may have been made easily 6 months prior, and the parts a month or two before that. If it's a product on the shelf a little while, the date could easily be a year the battery has been sitting idle from when it was manufactured.
For fast-moving products like iPods, this is very unlikely (unless it's a really unpopular model), but for other products (e.g., other media players) it can sit on the shelf for a long time.
Seems true in nearly all industries: The people they hire to staff customer service are so unqualified that they cannot recognize when the caller actually IS qualified. They have no procedures in place to rapidly escalate calls from customers who actually know more than they do. Businesses lose the opportunity to obtain knowledgeable input, because their call centers are staffed by low labor-cost morons. The need to identify technically savvy callers and hand-off those calls to comparably competent staff members.
Two sides to the issue.
1) Most so-called experts aren't. If you handled calls, you'll get people who insist they're smarter than you because they got a Ph.D. in rocket science or is a doctor. Also, the smart ones tend to have found the solution to their problem already through a bit of Googling, and thus never call tech support in the first place. The leftovers are the ones needing warranty service, and rest of the crowd who can't Google.
2) Experts do dumb things. There are many times I've fixed problems for other people that were so brain-dead simple, you wonder why they never bothered doing the check in the first place. Stuff like the power cable working itself loose, loose network cables making intermittent connections, etc. "My computer doesn't work" "Is it plugged in?" "Yes". I walk over, bump the power cable, and either the plug comes flying out of the rat's nest, or the other end pops cleanly off the computer. It happens with surprising frequency.
For every Steve Wozniak who comes to you with a technical issue and solution, there's a million more "experts" claiming something is defective. I've resigned myself to following Tier 1 instructions whenever I need a warranty replacement - it saves the hassles of fighting with Tier 1, gets through the script quicker, and increases your chance of getting to Tier 2 who can do stuff. Tier 1 is script reading - it's annoying, but the faster you get through it, the quicker you can get your problem resolved. And hell, if it was something stupid like a cable not plugged in (or not connected properly), you just saved yourself some embarassment in front of the Tier 1 by arguing it can't be the cable.
What surprises me more is that people are still using the RC. Why would anyone do that? I've seen 7 on my dads alienware(*) laptop. Frankly, I wasn't impressed. Feels like Vista, but a bit faster. XP is not an option since he wants to use the full memory instead of being limited to 3.5Gig. At least it doesn't feel sluggish, but on an i7 I wouldn't expect that.
(*) My dad is a strange creature.... He buys the highest end laptop he can get/pay and then uses it for years.... The laptop the i7 replaced was a P-III 733MHz bought around 2000 or so... 10 years for a laptop.... Never seen anyone do that except my dad;-)
Not unusual. I do the same thing. It's a sore PITA to keep replacing computers - if you go white box, figuring out what parts you want in it is practically a full time job. If you go OEM, well, then you get stuck with parts you aren't happy with.
I gave up, and still run my nearly 10-year-old Celeron 533A (overclocked to 800MHz, back when it was the normal thing to do). I did pick up a couple of better computers along the way - a Mac Pro and a nice Core 2 Extreme laptop, but my old PC still runs fine. Especially since these days, any decent PC will last a really long time if you exclude gaming. CPUs aren't getting much faster quickly, ditto video cards... so even moderate gaming will work on decent high-end machines for years to come.
Really, I don't know who came up with the idea that PCs should be replaced annually or even every two years or so. Moving all that data gets to be a huge chore, as is having to dig up all your installation CDs and setup programs and registration keys, and other crap. If you're well organized, it's easy. But most people aren't, and most people don't backup at all. And I have a small pile of hard drives I've removed from old PCs that may have unrecovered data.
As for Windows 7 RC, it's actually a great solution to two problems. First are those who sold PCs with "Windows 7" prior to release to notify people they don't have a legitimate copy anymore. The second problem is when a PC gets installed with Windows 7 to evaluate, and is promptly forgotten about or even inventoried that it has Win7 RC. Well, hopefully when people get around to seeing that machine again, they'll realize that machine really ought to be re-imaged.
Can you treat your router as if it were running a lightweight Linux? Yes. (I'm assuming you can ssh to them, right? I don't have one.) Can you treat your iPhone as if it were running a lightweight OSX? No.
Back in the pre-App Store days, this was exactly how the app developers wrote their apps for jailbroken devices. They got a GNU Obj-C compiler, and grabbed headers from stock OS X. After all, Apple was insisting no one needed apps, and web apps were "good enough". Thus, no compiler nor headers or other bits were provided from Apple.
Yet the headers were taken straight out of desktop OS X dev tools, as were the API documentation, so the iPhone OS was more or less a cut-down version of OS X. The same libraries existed, the same headers could be used, you just needed a custom-built compiler, some experience developing OS X apps, and remembering which libraries the OS provides. The big difference is that application bundles weren't in bundle format.
The iPhone OS is much closer to OS X than say, Windows Mobile/Phone is to desktop Windows (which don't even share the same kernel or link libraries, or until 7 comes out, has a complete strange slot-style memory and process architecture).
I wear glasses, but I find that most 3d glasses (including Imax glasses and the Avatar ones) fit comfortably over my own pair, which admittedly are fairly small.
IMAX and theatre 3D is done using polarized (circularly) glasses - they have two frame synced projectors simultaneously projecting two views and the glasses select the "right" one for each eye.
3D TVs use a more active system - because they have to use the same screen to display both images, they alternate between the two images. The active glasses black out the eye that's not supposed to see that image. So the TV displays the left image, the glasses black out the right eye, then the TV displays the right image, then the glasses black out the left eye. They have a little IR transmitter that tells the glasses which eye to blank out.
Depending on the glasses/goggles, they may or may not work with prescription lenses. Just remember to change the batteries... Supposedly though, there's a standard for the glasses so you can use one pair for multiple TVs.
This is "proven"? Oh, please. While someone who's smart and alert may be able to handle more distraction than someone who's nearsighted and feeble, that distraction _still increases their risks_ for whoever it happens to.
I like to cite the example of walking and texting/chatting. Walking is a very basic skill that takes almost no brainpower to do. Yet pedestrians easily walk into things (street furniture, lamp posts, etc), and sadly, those include roads with oncoming cars, and many have been killed by oncoming traffic because they forget to look for cars.
The only thing is, a car is vastly more complex to operate, and the penalties for an accident a much higher than killing oneself... namely, possibly killing others.
If there were true competition in the market, the government wouldn't need to do anything. People would flock to the ISPs that give them the best service rather than flocking to the monopoly that offers service in their area.
I don't know about you, but I live in NYC, have a choice of at least three different providers (two cable, one DSL, maybe more since I last checked). The policies imposed are nearly identical between the three, and, as in the case of Comcast, I have no doubt that the stated policy and the de facto policy differ. Exactly which one am I supposed to "flock" to?
I've come to the conclusion that competition fails once an equilibrium has been reached. Take a competitive market, say, gas. In most urban areas, gas stations are a dime a dozen, and each intersection probably has two or three. Yet, you'll find for blocks on end, every gas station has the exact same price, maybe wavering a tiny bit. And that prices always seem to jump in unison, and fall very slowly. Yet this can exist without any form of price cartel among stations.
Simply put, what happens is a station wants more profit, so it bumps up the price. Each station nearby sees that, then decide they want more profit, so they bump up their price in short order as well. There may be times when one station refuses to cooperate and keeps prices low, but the other stations get business simply because the price difference isn't worth having to drive to the other station when you're already at the more expensive station. But eventually they'll give in and raise their price too since there doesn't seem to be any harm to business.
Same goes for Internet service. One ISP comes in, implements stupid policy. Other ISPs see stupid policy, also see no mass exodus, and end up implementing same stupid policy to increase profits.
Instead of the ideal that everyone gets the best price and best features, we end up with harmonization of competition - everyone has the same policies, everyone has the same speeds, and there's not much to be gained by dropping prices or increasing service, so you might as well go and enjoy the same profits everyone else does.
Seems to have happened with other products, like netbooks. Other than clearance, netbooks seemed to hover around $300 on the low end, yet you can get netbooks more expensive quite easily. Even counting the fact that a third party artificially limits the specifications, the price on netbooks hasn't seemed to have dropped, other than getting a better one for $300 now than $300 got you last year.
... everyone on here seems to think the secrecy must be because the government is worried about "the public" finding out about horrific terms. That seems unlikely--remember, IP law doesn't even make the top ten of most US voters' important issues.
Does it occur to you that perhaps they are trying to keep it that way?
The more visible copyright becomes, the more it gets discussed in media, and the more it becomes a well-known "issue" the more likely it is that there will be demand for reform. That's not what the interests behind it want.
Given what we know from ACTA, it's quite likely that currently-legal things involving very popular products will become illegal.
The public will care when you start saying that stuff like iPods are illegal, as is music ripping, and that you can't brin gan iPod across the border because it'll have to be searched for illegal materials. Or your cellphone, since most can play MP3s these days.
Or that timeshifting devices like DVRs will be illegal, too, and the number of programs marked with "no timeshifting" flags will increase. Or even worse, "no recording" flags that don't even let you do DVR things like pause live TV.
Or maybe reading a book out loud, or selling used books (or anything else - ACTA will probably trump first sale doctrine).
Yes, that's why ACTA is secret - common activities we do today are probably being blocked, and if the public knew that politicians around the world were going to take away their iPods and DVRs/VCRs.
Hell, the newspapers put it best - the "Anti-iPod law - your iPod may be illegal tomorrow".
Personal effects transportation limit is 1 cubic meter and 250 kg. I hope your OCable gaming rig is pretty compact. (Yes, even a tower system with all accouterments would fit, but that would be pretty close to all you could take.)
1 cubic meter is pretty large, actually. It's 1000L of volume, and should be adequate for all but the largest cases (which will probably bust one of the dimensional limits. Of course, since it's mostly empty space, you could just bring the parts themselves and assemble it over there and use the space inside the case for other materials you'll need.
The only real downside is that internet access isn't 24/7 there - you have to rely on satellites (and they aren't geosync), so your pings will be crappy. On the plus side, as network admin, you'll probably have full access to the internet... and won't be having to fight for access...
Personally I don't mind the points system at all, it means I'm able to use prepaid cards instead of handing them my credit card information. Never mind the fact that I don't actually have a credit card (they aren't as common outside of the US).
Leftover points don't really bother me. Eventually something cool will come along to spend them on. Of course, Microsoft prefers it if you spend your last 100 points on silly picture packs and then buy a completely new set of points when the next Dragon Age expansion comes along, but I'll just leave the 100 points sitting in my account and put them towards the expansion as well.
As for the original topic, I dislike Microsoft's general business practices as much as the next guy, but they seem pretty okay when it comes to the points thing. A while ago they had an offer where I could buy Braid at a discount, but (presumably due to a bug) I was charged full price. I hadn't actually noticed that I was overcharged though. Still, a few weeks later, I received an email with an apology and the points were refunded, without any action or complaint from my part. I thought that was very decent of them, and honestly I've started buying more arcade games from them since then.
Exactly.
I use points cards (I'm in Canada, and I do have a credit card). Why? Because I never pay full price for a points card! I always buy them when they're 10=25+% off, which is just "free" money. So I get the items at a bigger discount that way. Hell, I've had friends in the US complain loudly about paying for points, then acquiesce when I say that you can buy them at Amazon where they'll send you a code for the download. They acquiesced because the game was the discount of the week, and Amazon charges full price. The "spare" points left over after buying the game meant he could buy something else later, and he spent less than paying Amazon for just the game.
Right now I have a somewhat high balance, and am choosing what to really spend it on - it's hard, and I know I have a pile of points cards (as with Xbox live subscription cards - why pay full price?), and I do give them to friends as presents.
I guess the only way to make people happy is those who would've paid full price get to be billed full price on their credit cards, and those who want points have to buy prepaid cards. Inevitably there's at least a week every month or so where they're on sale at some retailer (online or B&M).
My best deal yet would've been getting an xbox live membership card on "clearance" because it was for the original Xbox, and EBGames thought they didn't work on the Xbox360.
There is a final solution: make sending spam more expensive. Spammers will only spam so long as it's mind-blowingly wealthy. If you can raise their operating costs and bump them down from "mind-blowingly wealthy" to only "obscenely wealthy", they might switch to other lucrative immoral industries like manufacturing printer ink.
OTOH, I suspect most spam is easily blockable, and that's because spammers don't try. They don't have to - they have a pile of customers needing "marketing services" that they can milk for money, who cares if only 2 people actually see it in the end? Spammer sells 1,000,000 emails for $100, gullible people buy it, get their message sent and only a handful of people actually see it.
Why bother working around filters when there are fools to part money from? OF course, the company hiring those services probably finds out it's a waste of money, but there are so many more businesses yet to learn that lesson, so there they go.
No, the ones that care about working around the filters aren't the ones peddling crap, but the ones peddling malware - there they require getting through the filters. Making the botnet so you can make $100 per click of the "send 'marketing'" button is the important part. As is trying to transfer money out of bank accounts, etc.
In a lawsuit with 10,000,000 plaintiffs which pays out $1,000,000,000 dollars, how do you expect the distribution of the money to work out? Do you expect the lawyers to work for free? Or are you suggesting that the defendant should be fined 1 million-bliion-quazillion dollars so that EVERY plaintiff can go out and buy a yacht?
What happens usually is the damaged parties get a $10 coupon off their next copy of Windows, and the lawyers walk away (using your numbers) with $900M cash. Knowing full well that said coupon will probably expire, and most probably won't even use it or even bother to collect it after having to give Microsoft their full personal history for it.
(I'm sure the lawyers could get Microsoft to make them $20 or $50 coupons off Windows, but it reduces their share).
I know there are programs / firefox extensions to download + convert videos off youtube, but this just makes it too damn easy. Especially since you're already using Chrome - right click on the video, choose Inspect Element. It opens the page source, and finds the URL of the video for you. Copy to clipboard, paste to address bar, and it downloads a suprisingly high quality.mp4 - no conversion or crappy flash video players neccesary. Keep up the good work YouTube.
All the much better I say. Especially since the h.264 videos off Youtube are the high-quality high-def ones.
Not that downloading videos was especially hard - using Live HTTP Headers you can easily see the URLs of the videos. Interesting thing is that the FLV low quality versions are trivially downloaded (just wget the flv URL - the one with video/x-flv as MIME type), but the high-quality (video/mp4) ones require a referer header.
Seems to me that if one doesn't open unknown documents from untrusted sources, one is probably pretty well protected from this. Though if you leave the default settings in place - to allow documents to be opened inside of your web browser- then you'd be vulnerable via iframes and malicious advert content. (Actually... is that still the default setting in IE?)
Social engineered malware is a bitch I know someone that downloaded and opened one of those flashy virus cleaning apps off the internet Then was puzzled when her system went screwy
Hell, the common way is to pass around pirated software. The software's clean, but the serial number is stored in an infected (purposely) doc file, or the keygen was wrapped with a trojan. So joe user just blindly double-clicks the keygen or document (which may also be how to install, etc), and can get the serial number he needs.
The Mac, however, has the most unique way yet of hiding malware as part of an application installer bundle (see Microsoft Office and Snow Leopard - a hidden service was put in the image that connected your Mac to a botnet).
Hell, an infected word doc with passwords to porn sites will probably cause half the "don't click on wierd documents" people to eagerly click away. A la Bender.
Is this the same FCC that took a "save the children" stance over some wardrobe malfunction a while back?
I wonder why intelligent people would flee an organization guided by puritanism..
(FCC, free advice, stick to regulating wavelengths and you'll get more support from scientists and engineers)
Except it wasn't the FCC who really wanted to do it, but the fact that a puritanical lobby group got offended, and flooded the FCC with complaints. The Parents Television Council offers ways to easily send in complaints, and it's estimated that 99% of the complaints came from the PTC. Unfortunately, by legislation, the FCC has to act on these complaints, even if they're stupid.
Troll? Really? Someone from Rambus must have gotten mod points. As far as I can tell, Rambus just got one billion dollars from litigating a situation that arose because they sat on patents that they knew were going to be infringed by the new standards being developed. And they knew about the new standards being developed because they sat on the standards board. As for their products, they sucked. No one outside of stupidly rich people, or people with very specific needs who were willing to deal with the Rambus memory drawbacks, bought their crap.
Actually, RDRAM has been used quite extensively. It may not be used anymore in PCs, but there was 32MB of RDRAM in the Sony Playstation2, and there's 256MB of XDR-RDRAM in the PlayStation3 (along with 256MB of GDDR3...). And last I checked, the former could be had quite easily and cheaply (under $100) and the latter makes a great blu-ray player.
So their memory may suck, but they're used in two easily available products today.
This makes no sense they had like what 30% of search in China and 600MM a year in revenue. Yahoo Microsoft et al. have much much less than that and they see no need to walk away from China. They are the second largest search provider in China you don't walk away from that lightly and you don't run away when you are GAINING market share. So that's just tripe I can't see why people think this would be insightful at all.
Remember they want to pull out because they're being hacked, and private data has been accessed. Not necessarily Google's data, but user's data. Stuff like emails in GMail, documents in Google Docs, and who knows what other data they may have gotten.
Google feels that continuing operations in China would cost more (from the efforts in trying to secure the data) than simply pulling out and forgoing the revenue. Or, that if they continue, the continued hacking and theft of user's data would turn people off Google worldwide, hurting them even more. After all, would you continue to use Google if you knew your emails and documents are continually broken into and read by third parties? Now imaging you're using hosted apps by Google as a company - that Chinese competitor of yours might have an itchy finger for whatever emails and documents you have...
So by pulling out, they may forego a huge market, but if it lets them keep users in other markets, it's still a win.
It's less about search, and more about advertising. If people don't trust Google, they won't use Google. And this includes all those emails and documents on their servers.
It looks like this might be a broader issue than just DLink routers. Several comments on TFA seem to suggest that the HNAP remote management interface is a part of the SDK for the board used in these routers. This implies that any router based on this board might have this vulnerability. The DD-WRT hardware incompatibility list happens to have a list of routers that use UBICOM boards.
Given Ubicom makes their own CPU, I would be surprised if it isn't in all Ubicom boards past a certain software revision. Ubicom CPUs are their own architecture (they have hardware multitasking, and you load a scheduler register with the tasks you want to run. Each clock cycle, it executes one instruction from the designated task (each task has its own register file, and the scheduler register basically sets which register file to use every clock), so Ubicom makes their software SDK. It's complex and hard to get enough that only Ubicom makes the software kit, and the OEMs just do basic customization.
And why hardware multitasking? This way they can do *everything* in software, including Ethernet (they have the MII interface, but it's basically a register you have to load and unload in real time). It's the ultimate in hard real time. But it also means the only software stack from software-based Ethernet MACs to the kernel and network protocols is all their code.
Adobe Camera Raw, as well as most of the other commercial software which decodes raw images, used dcraw source and probably still uses much of that code. The license for dcraw permits it, and Dave Coffin is pretty proud of that. He should be- his code is used worldwide by millions of photographers.
No big surprise - dcraw has reverse-engineered *every* RAW file format out there, and new cameras are being added pretty quickly. (The dirty little secret of RAW files is many manufacturers make RAW file formats proprietary so there's no generic RAW file opener. That is, until dcraw came around. Hopefully things will change with the digital negative format (DNF) format which is a standardized RAW file format).
If you want to open a RAW file, dcraw will understand it. He's got a right to be proud of it. Imagine trying to create a workflow if you have a bunch of different equipment and RAW files, and have to use Nikon's tool for once, Canon's for another, Sony's for a third, etc...
Fewer and fewer people are appreciating classical music these days (which is more or less required to be seen "live". It seems that the trend is reversing because modern movie scores (score music, not source/pop), games and other orchestral music are gaining in popularity, probably due to classical's "stuffy" atmosphere.
There was a concert held a few months back here (Vancouver, BC) where they intermixed the traditional classical with the modern - moving from Halo, Star Wars, Final Fantasy and such and doing a seamless segue into a traditional classical piece. The trick is to do it such that the known transitions seamlessly as if the classical piece, written hundreds of years ago, gets "fresh" and "modern". It was a sold out show, too - the younger audience getting huge insights, and the older generation seeing that not all of today's music is noise.
I just wish the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, James Horner and the like would release the scores. I'd learn to play an instrument if I could recreate my favorite movie and game scores.
Are the internals of Windows 2000 and Windows XP so different that Microsoft can't put IE8 on Win2k?
I mean, it seems like that's the obvious solution, and Win2k's on extended support still, so... and XP only identifies itself as NT 5.1 (Win2k is NT 5.0).
Always amuses me to see "You should upgrade to IE8!" then click the "Upgrade" button and say "Just click Download to get IE8!", scroll down, and then it says "IE8 is not available for your operating system". You'd think Microsoft's update site could've done the check earlier...
OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks. If the 24-bit FLAC sounds better than the 16-bit CD, it's because the FLAC has more dynamic range. It may also be at a higher sample rate as well, also generally giving better results.
You're assuming an audio CD actually performs error correction.
Which, it doesn't to a meaningful extent. It's also why the block size on audio is bigger than data (2300-ish vs. 2048 - the extra data is used for more resilient error correction). You have a primitive error detecting code, and a cheap error correcting code. Good players may make use of both, but most don't.
The reason you don't hear pops and crackles is because of the filtering on the analog side - the low-pass filters get rid of the majority of pops and crackles, and you're unlikely to hear LSB errors in the first place that make it beyond the filter.
Most CD players can't do a re-read because the access times are too slow - the anti-skip ones can, but thta's because they hide the re-seeks in the 5 or 10 second buffer, but it's still logic that must be implemented for little benefit.
When you rip a CD to FLAC, though, if you use a good ripper that can do C2 error correcting and detecting, and actually do it, you can get a cleaner rip. After all, if players actually used the data, we wouldn't need things like Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia. And many "copy protection" techniques relied on corrupting either the C2 or the data, leaving it to the traditional players to work fine, but the more advanced ones to mess up, or even regular DVD players.
I think the main question is why would a glorified router have a GPS built-in? I can see no real reason for a GPS being in a router. Phones? Perhaps. Router? No.
Easy. E911.
The thing's got a 3G modem in it, which is the similar to what you'd find in similar phones (since it's CDMA, I'd expect a 3G CDMA phone). Except that instead of being able to make calls, it only handles data.
3G modems, ehether they're the ones embedded in your phone, or in those "internet sticks" are pretty much the same. Heck, they may be exactly the same (there are only a few chipset manufacturers out there), so they'd have similar features.
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That's why there are patent consortiums. MPEG-LA is one, 3C Entity (and 5C Entity) are another, etc. If you want to write a h.264 decoder, you license the h.264 patents, and you're free and clear because your royalty payment pays for ALL the patents in h.264 - it's all RAND licensing. Most working groups for various technologies form consortiums because navigating the patent minefield is such a pain. Instead, you get to license all the patents you need for one small fee. Need to do a Blu-Ray player? Blu-Ray Association will point you to the consortium that licenses (and sub-licenses - stuff like h.264) all the patents needed.
Ditto stuff like RAM, media (DVD/Blu-Ray/etc), communications technologies (WiFi/802.11 is covered by tons of patents), etc. Many consortiums license to other consortiums so you can do a one-stop shop for licensing (otherwise instead of dealing with 1,000,000 ocmpanies and patents, you deal with 1,000 consortiums, which isn't much better, so a one-stop shop means you deal with a 1 or 2).
True, but few people run their batteries to depletion and then charge it up - the 300-odd cycle rating is for full charge/discharge cycles. Li-Ions last longer if you take a more partial charge-discharge cycle.
However, what Lithium secondary batteries suffer from is aging. They grow old - once they are manufactured, the clock starts ticking. Over time, they will die. Which is why you never buy spare batteries until you need them - a battery kept in ideal conditions, but unused will age the same rate as one in constant use. That three year old spare battery you kept in tip-top storage conditions won't have significantly more capacity than your now dead three year old battery (it may last half an hour, where your battery lasts 5 minutes, but you ain't getting back the old 5 hour life when it was new without buying a fresh new battery).
Literally, freshness counts. And a good chunk of life of batteries may be spent prior to the device being actually sold and in the consumer's hands - think of the cell being manufactured, then sitting on the shelf for a few weeks until someone buys it and manufactures their battery pack, which sits on the shelf a few more weeks until it's paired with a device. Then a few more weeks pass when the device is shipped to a retailer, where it can sit more weeks or months until someone actually buys it. The device may have been made easily 6 months prior, and the parts a month or two before that. If it's a product on the shelf a little while, the date could easily be a year the battery has been sitting idle from when it was manufactured.
For fast-moving products like iPods, this is very unlikely (unless it's a really unpopular model), but for other products (e.g., other media players) it can sit on the shelf for a long time.
Two sides to the issue.
1) Most so-called experts aren't. If you handled calls, you'll get people who insist they're smarter than you because they got a Ph.D. in rocket science or is a doctor. Also, the smart ones tend to have found the solution to their problem already through a bit of Googling, and thus never call tech support in the first place. The leftovers are the ones needing warranty service, and rest of the crowd who can't Google.
2) Experts do dumb things. There are many times I've fixed problems for other people that were so brain-dead simple, you wonder why they never bothered doing the check in the first place. Stuff like the power cable working itself loose, loose network cables making intermittent connections, etc. "My computer doesn't work" "Is it plugged in?" "Yes". I walk over, bump the power cable, and either the plug comes flying out of the rat's nest, or the other end pops cleanly off the computer. It happens with surprising frequency.
For every Steve Wozniak who comes to you with a technical issue and solution, there's a million more "experts" claiming something is defective. I've resigned myself to following Tier 1 instructions whenever I need a warranty replacement - it saves the hassles of fighting with Tier 1, gets through the script quicker, and increases your chance of getting to Tier 2 who can do stuff. Tier 1 is script reading - it's annoying, but the faster you get through it, the quicker you can get your problem resolved. And hell, if it was something stupid like a cable not plugged in (or not connected properly), you just saved yourself some embarassment in front of the Tier 1 by arguing it can't be the cable.
Not unusual. I do the same thing. It's a sore PITA to keep replacing computers - if you go white box, figuring out what parts you want in it is practically a full time job. If you go OEM, well, then you get stuck with parts you aren't happy with.
I gave up, and still run my nearly 10-year-old Celeron 533A (overclocked to 800MHz, back when it was the normal thing to do). I did pick up a couple of better computers along the way - a Mac Pro and a nice Core 2 Extreme laptop, but my old PC still runs fine. Especially since these days, any decent PC will last a really long time if you exclude gaming. CPUs aren't getting much faster quickly, ditto video cards... so even moderate gaming will work on decent high-end machines for years to come.
Really, I don't know who came up with the idea that PCs should be replaced annually or even every two years or so. Moving all that data gets to be a huge chore, as is having to dig up all your installation CDs and setup programs and registration keys, and other crap. If you're well organized, it's easy. But most people aren't, and most people don't backup at all. And I have a small pile of hard drives I've removed from old PCs that may have unrecovered data.
As for Windows 7 RC, it's actually a great solution to two problems. First are those who sold PCs with "Windows 7" prior to release to notify people they don't have a legitimate copy anymore. The second problem is when a PC gets installed with Windows 7 to evaluate, and is promptly forgotten about or even inventoried that it has Win7 RC. Well, hopefully when people get around to seeing that machine again, they'll realize that machine really ought to be re-imaged.
Back in the pre-App Store days, this was exactly how the app developers wrote their apps for jailbroken devices. They got a GNU Obj-C compiler, and grabbed headers from stock OS X. After all, Apple was insisting no one needed apps, and web apps were "good enough". Thus, no compiler nor headers or other bits were provided from Apple.
Yet the headers were taken straight out of desktop OS X dev tools, as were the API documentation, so the iPhone OS was more or less a cut-down version of OS X. The same libraries existed, the same headers could be used, you just needed a custom-built compiler, some experience developing OS X apps, and remembering which libraries the OS provides. The big difference is that application bundles weren't in bundle format.
The iPhone OS is much closer to OS X than say, Windows Mobile/Phone is to desktop Windows (which don't even share the same kernel or link libraries, or until 7 comes out, has a complete strange slot-style memory and process architecture).
IMAX and theatre 3D is done using polarized (circularly) glasses - they have two frame synced projectors simultaneously projecting two views and the glasses select the "right" one for each eye.
3D TVs use a more active system - because they have to use the same screen to display both images, they alternate between the two images. The active glasses black out the eye that's not supposed to see that image. So the TV displays the left image, the glasses black out the right eye, then the TV displays the right image, then the glasses black out the left eye. They have a little IR transmitter that tells the glasses which eye to blank out.
Depending on the glasses/goggles, they may or may not work with prescription lenses. Just remember to change the batteries... Supposedly though, there's a standard for the glasses so you can use one pair for multiple TVs.
I like to cite the example of walking and texting/chatting. Walking is a very basic skill that takes almost no brainpower to do. Yet pedestrians easily walk into things (street furniture, lamp posts, etc), and sadly, those include roads with oncoming cars, and many have been killed by oncoming traffic because they forget to look for cars.
The only thing is, a car is vastly more complex to operate, and the penalties for an accident a much higher than killing oneself... namely, possibly killing others.
I've come to the conclusion that competition fails once an equilibrium has been reached. Take a competitive market, say, gas. In most urban areas, gas stations are a dime a dozen, and each intersection probably has two or three. Yet, you'll find for blocks on end, every gas station has the exact same price, maybe wavering a tiny bit. And that prices always seem to jump in unison, and fall very slowly. Yet this can exist without any form of price cartel among stations.
Simply put, what happens is a station wants more profit, so it bumps up the price. Each station nearby sees that, then decide they want more profit, so they bump up their price in short order as well. There may be times when one station refuses to cooperate and keeps prices low, but the other stations get business simply because the price difference isn't worth having to drive to the other station when you're already at the more expensive station. But eventually they'll give in and raise their price too since there doesn't seem to be any harm to business.
Same goes for Internet service. One ISP comes in, implements stupid policy. Other ISPs see stupid policy, also see no mass exodus, and end up implementing same stupid policy to increase profits.
Instead of the ideal that everyone gets the best price and best features, we end up with harmonization of competition - everyone has the same policies, everyone has the same speeds, and there's not much to be gained by dropping prices or increasing service, so you might as well go and enjoy the same profits everyone else does.
Seems to have happened with other products, like netbooks. Other than clearance, netbooks seemed to hover around $300 on the low end, yet you can get netbooks more expensive quite easily. Even counting the fact that a third party artificially limits the specifications, the price on netbooks hasn't seemed to have dropped, other than getting a better one for $300 now than $300 got you last year.
Given what we know from ACTA, it's quite likely that currently-legal things involving very popular products will become illegal.
The public will care when you start saying that stuff like iPods are illegal, as is music ripping, and that you can't brin gan iPod across the border because it'll have to be searched for illegal materials. Or your cellphone, since most can play MP3s these days.
Or that timeshifting devices like DVRs will be illegal, too, and the number of programs marked with "no timeshifting" flags will increase. Or even worse, "no recording" flags that don't even let you do DVR things like pause live TV.
Or maybe reading a book out loud, or selling used books (or anything else - ACTA will probably trump first sale doctrine).
Yes, that's why ACTA is secret - common activities we do today are probably being blocked, and if the public knew that politicians around the world were going to take away their iPods and DVRs/VCRs.
Hell, the newspapers put it best - the "Anti-iPod law - your iPod may be illegal tomorrow".
1 cubic meter is pretty large, actually. It's 1000L of volume, and should be adequate for all but the largest cases (which will probably bust one of the dimensional limits. Of course, since it's mostly empty space, you could just bring the parts themselves and assemble it over there and use the space inside the case for other materials you'll need.
The only real downside is that internet access isn't 24/7 there - you have to rely on satellites (and they aren't geosync), so your pings will be crappy. On the plus side, as network admin, you'll probably have full access to the internet... and won't be having to fight for access...
Exactly.
I use points cards (I'm in Canada, and I do have a credit card). Why? Because I never pay full price for a points card! I always buy them when they're 10=25+% off, which is just "free" money. So I get the items at a bigger discount that way. Hell, I've had friends in the US complain loudly about paying for points, then acquiesce when I say that you can buy them at Amazon where they'll send you a code for the download. They acquiesced because the game was the discount of the week, and Amazon charges full price. The "spare" points left over after buying the game meant he could buy something else later, and he spent less than paying Amazon for just the game.
Right now I have a somewhat high balance, and am choosing what to really spend it on - it's hard, and I know I have a pile of points cards (as with Xbox live subscription cards - why pay full price?), and I do give them to friends as presents.
I guess the only way to make people happy is those who would've paid full price get to be billed full price on their credit cards, and those who want points have to buy prepaid cards. Inevitably there's at least a week every month or so where they're on sale at some retailer (online or B&M).
My best deal yet would've been getting an xbox live membership card on "clearance" because it was for the original Xbox, and EBGames thought they didn't work on the Xbox360.
Considering that Rogers isn't giving you data service anymore, a service that you pay for, could this be used as a way to break out of the contract?
After all, they refuse to provide the data service, they're not holding up their end of the deal, and you're paying for a service you cannot use.
Hell, at least call them and demand a credit for service not provided. Or move the SIM card to an iPhone and demand they activate the data service.
It's not like the data comes with the plan - you're free to buy any voice plan with a data plan.
OTOH, I suspect most spam is easily blockable, and that's because spammers don't try. They don't have to - they have a pile of customers needing "marketing services" that they can milk for money, who cares if only 2 people actually see it in the end? Spammer sells 1,000,000 emails for $100, gullible people buy it, get their message sent and only a handful of people actually see it.
Why bother working around filters when there are fools to part money from? OF course, the company hiring those services probably finds out it's a waste of money, but there are so many more businesses yet to learn that lesson, so there they go.
No, the ones that care about working around the filters aren't the ones peddling crap, but the ones peddling malware - there they require getting through the filters. Making the botnet so you can make $100 per click of the "send 'marketing'" button is the important part. As is trying to transfer money out of bank accounts, etc.
What happens usually is the damaged parties get a $10 coupon off their next copy of Windows, and the lawyers walk away (using your numbers) with $900M cash. Knowing full well that said coupon will probably expire, and most probably won't even use it or even bother to collect it after having to give Microsoft their full personal history for it.
(I'm sure the lawyers could get Microsoft to make them $20 or $50 coupons off Windows, but it reduces their share).
All the much better I say. Especially since the h.264 videos off Youtube are the high-quality high-def ones.
Not that downloading videos was especially hard - using Live HTTP Headers you can easily see the URLs of the videos. Interesting thing is that the FLV low quality versions are trivially downloaded (just wget the flv URL - the one with video/x-flv as MIME type), but the high-quality (video/mp4) ones require a referer header.
Hell, the common way is to pass around pirated software. The software's clean, but the serial number is stored in an infected (purposely) doc file, or the keygen was wrapped with a trojan. So joe user just blindly double-clicks the keygen or document (which may also be how to install, etc), and can get the serial number he needs.
The Mac, however, has the most unique way yet of hiding malware as part of an application installer bundle (see Microsoft Office and Snow Leopard - a hidden service was put in the image that connected your Mac to a botnet).
Hell, an infected word doc with passwords to porn sites will probably cause half the "don't click on wierd documents" people to eagerly click away. A la Bender.
Except it wasn't the FCC who really wanted to do it, but the fact that a puritanical lobby group got offended, and flooded the FCC with complaints. The Parents Television Council offers ways to easily send in complaints, and it's estimated that 99% of the complaints came from the PTC. Unfortunately, by legislation, the FCC has to act on these complaints, even if they're stupid.
Source: One boob == 963,000 FCC complaints
Actually, RDRAM has been used quite extensively. It may not be used anymore in PCs, but there was 32MB of RDRAM in the Sony Playstation2, and there's 256MB of XDR-RDRAM in the PlayStation3 (along with 256MB of GDDR3...). And last I checked, the former could be had quite easily and cheaply (under $100) and the latter makes a great blu-ray player.
So their memory may suck, but they're used in two easily available products today.
Remember they want to pull out because they're being hacked, and private data has been accessed. Not necessarily Google's data, but user's data. Stuff like emails in GMail, documents in Google Docs, and who knows what other data they may have gotten.
Google feels that continuing operations in China would cost more (from the efforts in trying to secure the data) than simply pulling out and forgoing the revenue. Or, that if they continue, the continued hacking and theft of user's data would turn people off Google worldwide, hurting them even more. After all, would you continue to use Google if you knew your emails and documents are continually broken into and read by third parties? Now imaging you're using hosted apps by Google as a company - that Chinese competitor of yours might have an itchy finger for whatever emails and documents you have...
So by pulling out, they may forego a huge market, but if it lets them keep users in other markets, it's still a win.
It's less about search, and more about advertising. If people don't trust Google, they won't use Google. And this includes all those emails and documents on their servers.
Given Ubicom makes their own CPU, I would be surprised if it isn't in all Ubicom boards past a certain software revision. Ubicom CPUs are their own architecture (they have hardware multitasking, and you load a scheduler register with the tasks you want to run. Each clock cycle, it executes one instruction from the designated task (each task has its own register file, and the scheduler register basically sets which register file to use every clock), so Ubicom makes their software SDK. It's complex and hard to get enough that only Ubicom makes the software kit, and the OEMs just do basic customization.
And why hardware multitasking? This way they can do *everything* in software, including Ethernet (they have the MII interface, but it's basically a register you have to load and unload in real time). It's the ultimate in hard real time. But it also means the only software stack from software-based Ethernet MACs to the kernel and network protocols is all their code.
No big surprise - dcraw has reverse-engineered *every* RAW file format out there, and new cameras are being added pretty quickly. (The dirty little secret of RAW files is many manufacturers make RAW file formats proprietary so there's no generic RAW file opener. That is, until dcraw came around. Hopefully things will change with the digital negative format (DNF) format which is a standardized RAW file format).
If you want to open a RAW file, dcraw will understand it. He's got a right to be proud of it. Imagine trying to create a workflow if you have a bunch of different equipment and RAW files, and have to use Nikon's tool for once, Canon's for another, Sony's for a third, etc...
Fewer and fewer people are appreciating classical music these days (which is more or less required to be seen "live". It seems that the trend is reversing because modern movie scores (score music, not source/pop), games and other orchestral music are gaining in popularity, probably due to classical's "stuffy" atmosphere.
There was a concert held a few months back here (Vancouver, BC) where they intermixed the traditional classical with the modern - moving from Halo, Star Wars, Final Fantasy and such and doing a seamless segue into a traditional classical piece. The trick is to do it such that the known transitions seamlessly as if the classical piece, written hundreds of years ago, gets "fresh" and "modern". It was a sold out show, too - the younger audience getting huge insights, and the older generation seeing that not all of today's music is noise.
I just wish the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, James Horner and the like would release the scores. I'd learn to play an instrument if I could recreate my favorite movie and game scores.
Are the internals of Windows 2000 and Windows XP so different that Microsoft can't put IE8 on Win2k?
I mean, it seems like that's the obvious solution, and Win2k's on extended support still, so... and XP only identifies itself as NT 5.1 (Win2k is NT 5.0).
Always amuses me to see "You should upgrade to IE8!" then click the "Upgrade" button and say "Just click Download to get IE8!", scroll down, and then it says "IE8 is not available for your operating system". You'd think Microsoft's update site could've done the check earlier...
You're assuming an audio CD actually performs error correction.
Which, it doesn't to a meaningful extent. It's also why the block size on audio is bigger than data (2300-ish vs. 2048 - the extra data is used for more resilient error correction). You have a primitive error detecting code, and a cheap error correcting code. Good players may make use of both, but most don't.
The reason you don't hear pops and crackles is because of the filtering on the analog side - the low-pass filters get rid of the majority of pops and crackles, and you're unlikely to hear LSB errors in the first place that make it beyond the filter.
Most CD players can't do a re-read because the access times are too slow - the anti-skip ones can, but thta's because they hide the re-seeks in the 5 or 10 second buffer, but it's still logic that must be implemented for little benefit.
When you rip a CD to FLAC, though, if you use a good ripper that can do C2 error correcting and detecting, and actually do it, you can get a cleaner rip. After all, if players actually used the data, we wouldn't need things like Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia. And many "copy protection" techniques relied on corrupting either the C2 or the data, leaving it to the traditional players to work fine, but the more advanced ones to mess up, or even regular DVD players.
Easy. E911.
The thing's got a 3G modem in it, which is the similar to what you'd find in similar phones (since it's CDMA, I'd expect a 3G CDMA phone). Except that instead of being able to make calls, it only handles data.
3G modems, ehether they're the ones embedded in your phone, or in those "internet sticks" are pretty much the same. Heck, they may be exactly the same (there are only a few chipset manufacturers out there), so they'd have similar features.