What really bothers me is that there *is* an IPv4 address famine. It's just that the IPv4 addresses are being rationed well enough that we haven't yet reached the point of outright crisis. If you really think that IPv4 addressed are plentiful, then riddle me this: why can't I get a static IP for my home internet connection? In order to get a static IP, I have to upgrade to a "business" account which costs $200/month more and doesn't really offer any improvements other than a static IP. Yup. $200/month for a static IP.
And guess how much a single static IPv6 address will cost from your ISP? That's right, $200/month because you'll need a business account.
IPv6 gives you more addrss space. ISPs will still nickle and dime you. Even if your ISP is "wasteful" and gets you a/96, they'll just make sure that xxxx:...:xxxx::1 actually reaches you (and everyone else gets the same, too), dsepite giving you a whole IPv4 set of address spaces. Buy another IP address, and they'll also give you xxxx::1 to keep all the routing simple. (Side note: also makes the virus and worm's jobs simpler). Heck, if they need to double their address space, they just use another bit, so your/96 becomes a/97, not that you could've used those 2 billion addresses they "stole".
NAT won't die, unless ISPs are willing to give up the money they're making on extra IPs. At best, while NATv6 is being worked on, everyone has to buy extra IP addresses so everyone's home PC, roaming laptop, etc., can be connected simultaneously. Linksys, D-Link and Netgear will be happy as they get to sell everyone IPv6 firewalls, then IPv6 "IP Sharing" routers that can save everyone money by not having to buy extra IPs.
Ever since I, somewhat reluctantly, started using Facebook, I have followed the simple policy of making everything I post as public as possible, while simply not posting anything I don't want any random web surfer to see. If this change will make more people snap out of their false sense of Facebook privacy, all the better, I say
Same idea here. After all, if people got sacked or lose insurance BEFORE the privacy policy changes, these new changes reinforce the fact that Facebook isn't, well, private.
Facebook may offer a walled garden, but it's on the internet, and everyone's able to scale the wall to have a peep. There are way too many instances where "private" FB info has been published publicly. And putting up your deepest darkest secrets on a public site hoping that the company who controls (and now owns) that information will protect it, is, well, silly.
Everyone is scared of Google tracking them for marketing purposes. Facebook is sitting on a goldmine of that same information that everyone is posting freely, in the hopes that Facebook will do the honourable thing and not use it for monetary gain. And hoping that Facebook won't be hacked.
So the Zune HD can twit. Big deal - there's no WWAN so it's not like you can do it anywhere you want. And it's not like the only way to twit is via a Zune HD. If there's a need to twit 24/7 your every breath, poop, and pee, you'd have gotten a cellphone with that capability already (unless you don't do those things outside the range of WiFi networks).
And the flipside happens too - scientific instruments are used for cooking. In this case, it's for cooking delicate foods using a thermal immersion circulator to cook sous-vide.
Plus it's ironic that Microsoft, the "king" of software development is having all those problems with subcontractors writing code for them.
I think it's a good thing actually. Because it's revealing the problems of subcontracting. What Microsoft is seeing already has happened elsewhere. Just the victim is either too small, or the companies involved are smaller, so that news of stuff like this is lucky to make the news. Only big companies get the attention of the press.
Code gets "reused" all the time, accidentally or maliciously. Just the parties are often too small or settle quickly to be more than a ripple. In fact, I'd guess Microsoft and other companies are looking at the three major code "reuse" issues in recent history - Microsoft and the USB/DVD Downloader Tool, this thing, and the BusyBox thing, to carefully audit their subcontracted code.
Demand matters more. If people are willing to pay more then the company can charge more. It's called free market.
Maybe it's the opposite.
Millions of laptops are sold each month, but the number of actual replacement batteries is extremely small - the average consumer laptop is probably going to be used with just the one battery it came with for its lifetime. Each battery works on a small subset of models, so the number of battery configurations is high. And the demand for an individual battery configuration is small. So they're expensive because demand doesn't really warrant the extra costs in packaging/shipping/warehousing spare batteries that'll be different in half a year, and useless in 3 (because lithium batteries usually die from old age). So the few people that buy spares has to pay for the few that'll be sitting on warehouse shelves only to be tossed because they can't be sold. This is why for most laptops it gets extremely difficult and expensive to buy replacement batteries after 2 years or so. Business laptops tend to have a more standard construction, so batteries for the ThinkPads and the like tend to be fairly standard across a line, and businesses buy more batteries.
An extreme example of the above is how Apple now makes practically no laptops with user-changable batteries (easily, anyhow) - I'm sure they did the math and realized the few users who bought a spare doesn't justify the advantages of going without. And a number of electronics don't come with user-changable batteries anyhow, either - about the only ones that do are where the batteries are standard and used practically across a product line.
OTOH, people who buy tools tend to buy extra batteries often. Plus the battery design doesn't really change with every new model. So warehouse stock tends to cycle through frequently. Higher demand means each spare battery doesn't have to subsidize the ones sitting on the shelf that'll head to the garbage. Contractors will buy at least one extra spare battery (that charges while they work using the other, and swap as necessary) for each tool. Lawnmowers will probably keep using the same battery to save development costs (since there's no real reason to not to other than gouge the consumer - does it matter that the body of the lawnmower is 20% bigger and heavier because they used the same battery as 5 year's ago model? Not really - and the factory would like to have warehouse stock continually depleted).
45 days ship and wait vs within a week in your house. The warranty is generally better than the factory one.
Better yet, the cheaper brands (think house brands like Insignia, Dynex, Apex and the like) warranty terms can be quite horrible. Sure it's a 1 year parts/90 days labor, but after 90 days, it can be $200 just to see what's wrong. Further, you have to ship the product to the factory (if you're lucky, it's in the country, if not, well, have fun shipping it back to China!). Oh yeah, it'll cost you $100 to ship that TV back, so it's already $300 spent before you even can get it fixed. At least some extended warranties allow you to take it back to the store, and they'll ship it back for you. Or hell, sometimes they'll come to you and fix it there.
It's all a benefits vs cost thing. Sometimes it's worth it (or essential - think financing - you want the warranty to cover at least the finance period).
And yes, warranty support is one of the most expensive parts of anything manufactured today. So building it into everyone's product just means someone else will come about and offer a shorter warranty but lower cost.
However, if you start using it as general purpose Internet, to browse whatever you want, to download files, to play games, that breaks down. Suddenly cost goes up a whole lot, and less (or perhaps none) of the activity generates any money. As such it can't be sustained. They have to restrict it, shut it down, or charge.
Actually, they do this the same way you can prevent useful tethering on "smartphone only" plans. You pick a gateway and lock it down - the gateway only allows you to connect to certain sites, or even only allowing access to a proxy server that blocks everything but the content they allow. So even if it's hacked to be open, the "free" access just gets you the same connectivity as the device does, and if that's abused, it's easily shut down by banning the SIM.
Now, maybe B&N didn't do this immediately, but if it gets abusive, it'll probably be locked down like that.
You're joking, right? I'm pretty sure it's very different, if I set facebook to let only my friends see my stuff. I never saw a friend request from the FBI, so why should they be allowed to probe my facebook stuff? That seems like a digital analogue to the feds just storming someone's house without first getting the owner's permission to enter the home.
In other words, they better have a darn good reason and a written warrant with that reason if they want to see my facebook without first being my facebook friend.
On any site, even if it's marked "private", once it's posted, it's public. Those privacy settings are probably a lot shallower than you think, and "friends only" can include a lot more. For example, didn't some group release a quiz that revealed that it not only had access to your complete profile, but the profiles of your friends?
And what about that Manulife case where an insurance recipient was denied after posting pics to their "private" profile?
Truth is, your profile may be marked as private, but it may be more public than you expect. All it would take is someone finding a vulnerability in facebook that unlocks private pfofiles. Or just do a quiz or app that one of your friends do that'll scrape your profile. Or maybe one of your friends is a friend of the FBI and is re-posting your pics?
"Private" means zip. It may imply that only your friends can see stuff in your profile, but it's effectively public.
Better than the American channels who seem to put subtitles for people speaking English with an accent. People with accents aren't that hard to understand.
Depends. I'm neither visually nor hearing impaired, yet I have closed-captioning on all the time, and turn on subtitles on movies (and games). What I've found is sometimes the audio mixing can be so bad the voice gets drowned out by some noise or music. Or sometimes the accent is heavy enough that it's an English-like language, but hard to actually hear. The producers are probably being extra careful because not everyone will have the skills to actually break through an accent (think about all those complaints about Indian call center tech support).
Of course, the sin here is when the subtitling/closed captioning happens at the same time the in-movie subtitles are displayed. Then it becomes an unreadable mess.
But they cannot call it an andriod phone without Google giving permission.
Funny enough, I don't see Android phones for sale. I see phones called HTC Dream, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, etc. So it looks like it's never been a problem - at best, these phones may say "HTC Dream with Google", but other than maybe the Android logo (#1/#2 usage, which isn't covered under the Google branding), that's it.
Sure it runs the Android OS, but they don't advertise that fact. Just like you don't see phones advertised as Windows Mobile - they always have a product. Like Android phones, they run Windows Mobile, but it tends to just be a spec-sheet item. Hell, I suppose a carrier could demand that the Android phone be completely locked down (i.e., no apps can be installed, period) if they wanted.
And like Windows Mobile, carrier requirements can't be bypassed - if the carrier doesn't want something, it goes or they won't sell it. Luckily, being GSM, it doesn't exclude the possibility of someone importing their own phone and using it.
The only manufacturer who gets to bypass most requirements is Apple. And the only reason the carriers acquiesce to Apple's demands is because of demand. Customers wanted it, and they're not afraid to import it themselves if they can't get it. That, and Apple knows most demands are crap, are calling it crap, and refusing to follow them.
The only reason Android is "better" is that it's open source. But unless someone creates something that people want badly, it'll be gimped as much as needed to satisfy the carriers.
In theory, they last a lot longer. Well-built ones could even last more than the life of the owner.
However, LEDs are really sensitive to heat (even more than CFLs), and fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs often trap heat. A lot of manufacturers also build them fast and cheap, so expected lifetime can sometimes be measured in hours.
I wonder if that's why my experience with LED bulbs is so varying. Three bulb-style LED lamps we've had to replace effectively every month (and in a 3-lamp fixture, means 3 a month!). They don't burn out, they just glow normally, then blink out suddenly. But some LED floodlights have lasted the whole duration (6+ months) with no issues at all. Strange.
Giving up on the LED bulbs and going to crack one open to see what actually failed. Going back to CFLs... even the quality ones are cheaper than the LED bulbs.
Why should I buy crap like this? It's obvious they're hostile to the OS they're using and to the Linux community in general. Why did they disable functionality?
Well, if you want a non-iPod media player, Archos is one of the few left that use a hard disk to store lots of music and videos. And they're hostile because they're a hradware company - replacing hard drives means you can buy the far cheaper model and change it yourself, really, TiVoization (though at least TiVo lets you replace the hard drive even when it eats into their "lifetime" business model).
But also because they can't allow you to break the DRM component (PlaysForSure), which violate the license agreement with Microsoft. And NDAs prevent Archos from releasing the OMAP specs so you can use the DSP (which does the heavy lifting in the video decode).
Paypal has foreign transaction fees too. $0.30 + nearly 4%. I found out about this the hard way because I sold a high-value item to someone that had a Florida address, but whose Paypal account was apparently linked to a foreign bank. As a result, I paid about $30 extra in Paypal fees on a hand-made item that only had about $100 in pre-fee profit as it was. (And if you're wondering, the buyer was legit: not a scam.)
As a buyer, you never see these fees (and the seller is prohibited from adding them only to international orders), but rest assured that nearly all sellers take them into consideration when pricing their merchandise if any significant percentage of their sales are foreign.
That's because Paypal is bound by credit card agreements - I believe a vast majority of Paypal transactions are done via credit cards (and Paypal is pretty much the only company where any individual can accept a credit card payment without the hassle of opening a merchant account - why no one else wants to enter the field, I don't know).
And your foreign transaction cases are actually quite common. Given the number of idiotic companies that only ship via crappy carriers like UPS, if you're outside the US, it's either ante up to the ass-raping UPS charges for crossing a border (think easily 30-200% the cost of the item plus shipping, PLUS taxes - $20 on a $10 item, $100 on a $300 item...). Far fewer use services like FedEx ($25/packet), or USPS ($5-8). Plus free shipping to US addresses. Or often US-only shipping. If you're a Canadian, it's easier to open a US mailbox (with a non-PO box address), then either have the service forward or await pickup. You get cheap/free shipping, and only pay taxes. One UPS shipment can often pay for a whole year's mailbox fees because of brokerage.
The second part of the equation is payment - after all, these companies often don't allow foreign credit cards. To which, Paypal ends up winning because they handle the foreign credit card (and often the case where the billing address == shipping address - since Paypal doesn't have a "billing address", you can pay Paypal and have it shipped to a different address).
That's a good thought, but the problem is that tunneling TCP over TCP (such as HTTP over SSH) is subject to the TCP retransmission cascading effect, a.k.a. TCP-over-TCP meltdown, which is particularly likely to be a problem for him given the kind of Internet connections he may be stuck with on his travels.
Except SSH tunneling or SOCKS proxying (over SSH) don't do TCP-over-TCP. Instead, using an SSH tunnel, the application creates a TCP connection to localhost, the SSH program then takes the data from that connection and forwards it to the destination over its own TCP connection, where the SSH daemon makes a connection on your behalf. No TCP-over-TCP, just handing data over multiple TCP links.
Ditto with a proxy - the app connects to the proxy server, the server makes a new connection on your behalf, and bridges the data between your application and the destination.
In fact, if you can properly buffer the connections, this can lead to higher throughput as a high latency link can be hidden by the proxy servers which locally ACK the packets, and the high-latency link can have data blasted through with different TCP settings that allow for high bandwidth-delay products.
The problem has always seen to be that Archos is great at designing hardware, and terrible at writing software. That's why this move (for the most part) is being hailed as a step forward. This gives the community the possibility to make great software for these devices.
True, the Archos software stinks. But their hardware is more a spec-sheet marketing list than anything impressive. It's got great specs, but Archos then uses piss-poor low-quality components.
You interact with the screen, which on the spec sheet is nice (800x480), but I've had to take my Archos back 3-4 times each because they had dead pixels until I got a good one. Make sure you buy from B&M store because you'll have to spend to send it back. Archos won't RMA it unless there's like 5 dead pixels on the screen, so you'll have to have store that does no-question returns. Otherwise all the videos you'll look at have bright spots from all the stuck pixels. And nevermind that one of my replacements came out of the brand-new box, and the hard drive died 2 days later. Powered it up and it was loud and clunking as it booted up the first time.
That, and Archos started locking out hard drives so you can't even replace the hard drive - the firmware won't boot from unauthorized hard drives.
Because of this, I avoided buying the new models (which I heard are even worse - imagine buying a new device and every time you tap/click, you get an ad wanting you to buy some new accessory now). But maybe now I'll go get one, change it 3-4 times (probably empty the store of 'em, at Christmas nonetheless) to get a good one, and then hack it. I wonder if this will also allow hard drive upgrades, as well. A way to get rid of the ads, put on VLC or something on it...
The replies you've got so far seem to think that just because a router has gigabit ports that it can do NAT at gigabit speeds, which of course you've already figured out is nonsense.
True, but there's a number of routers that do have pretty impressive performance - I think the ones pushing 200+Mbps are lying during the test, but a number of not-so-cheap home routers do perfectly fine. (These aren't the $20 specials, but they're half decent, and most are under $200 on sale).
You won't be doing NAT at GigE speeds - you can try, but there'll be bottlenecks in any system before you hit GigE. But a decent home router can be acquired that will handle the load easily.
The only real issue is the router's (or Linux?) limit of 4096 connections, which may be easily saturated if you do a lot of torrenting. (Especially UDP connections - nothing keels over a router faster than having UDP sessions clog up the NAT tables). But these routers often have decent processors and decent amounts of RAM, and many on the top run Linux.
There's still room for error there though, and that is simply unacceptable based upon how we use our computers today.
This is why everybody uses only ECC memory in their desktop machines and all filesystems in common use support checksumming for data integrity.
Or uses floating-point hardware. Regardless of how many bits you use, floating-point computations are always approximate (mostly because the range of numbers that can be represented is larger than the number of possible numbers a given bit length can represent).
Hell, these computers might be more accurate, since there's a number of floating point operations you can do where the precision drops sharply because of the way it works.
Linux was supported on PS3 before the latest model, they could be using the older units...
Or it's quite possible they simply wrote the needed drivers to work with the updated PS3 units.
Neither is cracking the console nor against the law.
FTFA:
ICE is hoping to buy 40 more original PS3s, through auction sites such as eBay.com, to add to the 20 it already has, Davenport said.
They're buying the old PS3s. The $300 figure comes from the fact that you can get a PS3 for $300, but they aren't necessarily buying sub-$300 units. OTOH, I wonder why they don't just clean out GameStop/EBGames?
SO they're running Linux legally. Would be fun if they could force Sony to re-add "Other OS" support to the new PS3 slims.
How much protection does the average consumer need from marketing at this point? You're sliding down a slippery slope when you say that reading the fine print (which in the case of these offers isn't exactly that fine, there are various call outs all over these pages indicating that you are signing up for a service, that you get a month free and then pay money thereafter) is just too onerous for the average consumer and that the government must intervene to protect them. When offering something up like this is the company expected to just put up a big banner at the top saying, "HEY, WE ARE CHARGING YOU FOR SOMETHING IF YOU CLICK YES!" before even trying to sell the person on the product?
People like to say that they didn't know what they were getting into when they clicked through on these things. Well, how did you not know when it is spelled out in great detail on the page?
It's not that, actually. It's the scammy places where you buy your product, then they pop up another page that says "Thank you for shopping at Merchant.com". But scroll down, in fine print, it says "We also signed you up for a $10/month voicemail service. If you don't want this service, you must phone within 24 hours." or other crap like you must click a tiny link "No, I don't want this service" instead of the big shiny "Continue" button presented higher up. Of course, the merchant and the service split the $10/month that you've now signed up for, and the "continue" button serves as "confirmation" that you agreed to the service.
The even scammier sites sign you up for stuff like "messaging products" that charge your phone bill $10/month, knowing it's practically impossible to get your phone company to remove the charge, or prevent future charges, other than changing your phone number. This often plays out in those free sweepstakes offers that people often sign up for - win a free product! or other crap.
I've got a great algorithm for scanning notes with the sensor from an optical mouse; the only thing I can't figure out is how to make sure the mouse knows where it is on the paper...
Actually, you know accurately movement, you're just missing a starting point.
So the simple answer is to assume a square piece of paper whose edge is 2 bills wide - and start at the center. Then you can scan in any bill, regardless of whether it was portrait, landscape, or what corner they started scanning at. Assume that's your starting point, and then notice how the mouse is moved when mapping the images to where in the scanned image the image should go. (The movement detection is identical to how optical mice work, and as long as there's overlap, you can detect movement speed and position, and map the new image appropriately).
Once the scanning is done, you can crop out the areas that aren't scanned.
SATA does have its advantages, though: laptop support, bootability, hot-swap, cross-platform (no drivers needed), etc.
A proper PCIe (miniPCIe) card supports bootability (appears as a regular controller+disk), laptops often boot from miniPCIe SSDs (netbooks notably - Asus eeePC and the SSD Acer Ones, amongst others). Hot swap not so much (I know SATA supports it, but do real world motherboard controllers support it?), though I suppose if someone were to make it an ExpressCard design, possibly. Cross-platform/no drivers if it appears as a regular IDE controller+disk.
Booting of SATA is effectively booting off a PCIe card - the SATA controller hangs off the PCIe bus (or virutal PCIe for on-chipset controllers - but they still enumerate the same as normal PCI(e) devices).
If they want to force people to get rid of old TVs, they won't succeed. Because instead of spending the $1k or more on a new TV, they'll probably buy stuff like an HD-Fury2 so they can continue using their older HDTV set.
The Hauppage HD-PVR has been around a long while now, sure it only does component, but so do many older TVs. Blocking analog out does nothing that an HD-Fury2 can't fix.
It depends when you last jailbroke your iPhone. I did a jailbreak early on. I installed openSSH and changed the default password. I then found out that the phone entered an infinite loop of restarting the home screen and had to be forcibly restored.
The problem appears to be that the passwd binary on the phone is (deliberately?) broken so it generates incorrect hashes for the password entered. If you actually want to change your password then you need to jump through some hoops to change it without using the usual passwd command.
Actually, there is no passwd on the iPhone or iPod Touch. If you had one installed, it's because you installed the BSD utilities that were cross-compiled. Apple's libraries had a nasty bug in them, and to change the password manually, you had to use openSSL to re-encrypt for desired password using a fixed salt. It wasn't long before it was fixed - the problem lied in the BSD utilities that were available via Installer.app. If you installed Cydia (which existed in the 1.x days), it had a BSD utility base that worked just fine. Cydia basically took over everything Installer.app did, and you had to ensure you didn't update the BSD utilities in Installer, but stick with the Cydia ones.
These days it's far easier as Cydia is the sole one in use. (Cydia uses apt-get (and likewaise dpkg/deb files), so it's far easier to put your package online than the wierd XML that Installer used). Heck, it used to be that OpenSSH was required after jailbreaking - so much so it would be installed automatically. But these days, it's optional, so everyone had to install it manually... their own damn fault for installing and not reading where they need to change the password.
Could be one of the best HD DVRs out there...
on
MythTV 0.22 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Given official Hauppage HD-PVR support, this could be one of the best high-def DVRs out there. Especially when you combine it with an HD Fury2 to convert it to HDMI...
I don't know why the HD-PVR is the only capture card capable of high-def (1080i). HD Fury2 adds HDMI (with HDCP). Sure, it's only 1080i, but how many other high-def capture solutions are out there? For just over $500, you can get one that does HDMI/HDCP as well.
(HD Fury2 converts HDMI to Component or VGA. Sure it's analog, but the HD-PVR only has component inputs).
Especially good for those of us in Canada, where we are forced to use the ultra-crappy cableboxes. (It's why people go to TiVo...).
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And guess how much a single static IPv6 address will cost from your ISP? That's right, $200/month because you'll need a business account.
IPv6 gives you more addrss space. ISPs will still nickle and dime you. Even if your ISP is "wasteful" and gets you a /96, they'll just make sure that xxxx:...:xxxx::1 actually reaches you (and everyone else gets the same, too), dsepite giving you a whole IPv4 set of address spaces. Buy another IP address, and they'll also give you xxxx::1 to keep all the routing simple. (Side note: also makes the virus and worm's jobs simpler). Heck, if they need to double their address space, they just use another bit, so your /96 becomes a /97, not that you could've used those 2 billion addresses they "stole".
NAT won't die, unless ISPs are willing to give up the money they're making on extra IPs. At best, while NATv6 is being worked on, everyone has to buy extra IP addresses so everyone's home PC, roaming laptop, etc., can be connected simultaneously. Linksys, D-Link and Netgear will be happy as they get to sell everyone IPv6 firewalls, then IPv6 "IP Sharing" routers that can save everyone money by not having to buy extra IPs.
Same idea here. After all, if people got sacked or lose insurance BEFORE the privacy policy changes, these new changes reinforce the fact that Facebook isn't, well, private.
Facebook may offer a walled garden, but it's on the internet, and everyone's able to scale the wall to have a peep. There are way too many instances where "private" FB info has been published publicly. And putting up your deepest darkest secrets on a public site hoping that the company who controls (and now owns) that information will protect it, is, well, silly.
Everyone is scared of Google tracking them for marketing purposes. Facebook is sitting on a goldmine of that same information that everyone is posting freely, in the hopes that Facebook will do the honourable thing and not use it for monetary gain. And hoping that Facebook won't be hacked.
So the Zune HD can twit. Big deal - there's no WWAN so it's not like you can do it anywhere you want. And it's not like the only way to twit is via a Zune HD. If there's a need to twit 24/7 your every breath, poop, and pee, you'd have gotten a cellphone with that capability already (unless you don't do those things outside the range of WiFi networks).
And the flipside happens too - scientific instruments are used for cooking. In this case, it's for cooking delicate foods using a thermal immersion circulator to cook sous-vide.
http://gizmodo.com/5346014/what-is-this
It's used because it's the best way to do precision temperature control.
I think it's a good thing actually. Because it's revealing the problems of subcontracting. What Microsoft is seeing already has happened elsewhere. Just the victim is either too small, or the companies involved are smaller, so that news of stuff like this is lucky to make the news. Only big companies get the attention of the press.
Code gets "reused" all the time, accidentally or maliciously. Just the parties are often too small or settle quickly to be more than a ripple. In fact, I'd guess Microsoft and other companies are looking at the three major code "reuse" issues in recent history - Microsoft and the USB/DVD Downloader Tool, this thing, and the BusyBox thing, to carefully audit their subcontracted code.
Maybe it's the opposite.
Millions of laptops are sold each month, but the number of actual replacement batteries is extremely small - the average consumer laptop is probably going to be used with just the one battery it came with for its lifetime. Each battery works on a small subset of models, so the number of battery configurations is high. And the demand for an individual battery configuration is small. So they're expensive because demand doesn't really warrant the extra costs in packaging/shipping/warehousing spare batteries that'll be different in half a year, and useless in 3 (because lithium batteries usually die from old age). So the few people that buy spares has to pay for the few that'll be sitting on warehouse shelves only to be tossed because they can't be sold. This is why for most laptops it gets extremely difficult and expensive to buy replacement batteries after 2 years or so. Business laptops tend to have a more standard construction, so batteries for the ThinkPads and the like tend to be fairly standard across a line, and businesses buy more batteries.
An extreme example of the above is how Apple now makes practically no laptops with user-changable batteries (easily, anyhow) - I'm sure they did the math and realized the few users who bought a spare doesn't justify the advantages of going without. And a number of electronics don't come with user-changable batteries anyhow, either - about the only ones that do are where the batteries are standard and used practically across a product line.
OTOH, people who buy tools tend to buy extra batteries often. Plus the battery design doesn't really change with every new model. So warehouse stock tends to cycle through frequently. Higher demand means each spare battery doesn't have to subsidize the ones sitting on the shelf that'll head to the garbage. Contractors will buy at least one extra spare battery (that charges while they work using the other, and swap as necessary) for each tool. Lawnmowers will probably keep using the same battery to save development costs (since there's no real reason to not to other than gouge the consumer - does it matter that the body of the lawnmower is 20% bigger and heavier because they used the same battery as 5 year's ago model? Not really - and the factory would like to have warehouse stock continually depleted).
Better yet, the cheaper brands (think house brands like Insignia, Dynex, Apex and the like) warranty terms can be quite horrible. Sure it's a 1 year parts/90 days labor, but after 90 days, it can be $200 just to see what's wrong. Further, you have to ship the product to the factory (if you're lucky, it's in the country, if not, well, have fun shipping it back to China!). Oh yeah, it'll cost you $100 to ship that TV back, so it's already $300 spent before you even can get it fixed. At least some extended warranties allow you to take it back to the store, and they'll ship it back for you. Or hell, sometimes they'll come to you and fix it there.
It's all a benefits vs cost thing. Sometimes it's worth it (or essential - think financing - you want the warranty to cover at least the finance period).
HD Guru has a writeup on bargain-brand HDTV warranties.
And yes, warranty support is one of the most expensive parts of anything manufactured today. So building it into everyone's product just means someone else will come about and offer a shorter warranty but lower cost.
Actually, they do this the same way you can prevent useful tethering on "smartphone only" plans. You pick a gateway and lock it down - the gateway only allows you to connect to certain sites, or even only allowing access to a proxy server that blocks everything but the content they allow. So even if it's hacked to be open, the "free" access just gets you the same connectivity as the device does, and if that's abused, it's easily shut down by banning the SIM.
Now, maybe B&N didn't do this immediately, but if it gets abusive, it'll probably be locked down like that.
On any site, even if it's marked "private", once it's posted, it's public. Those privacy settings are probably a lot shallower than you think, and "friends only" can include a lot more. For example, didn't some group release a quiz that revealed that it not only had access to your complete profile, but the profiles of your friends?
And what about that Manulife case where an insurance recipient was denied after posting pics to their "private" profile?
Truth is, your profile may be marked as private, but it may be more public than you expect. All it would take is someone finding a vulnerability in facebook that unlocks private pfofiles. Or just do a quiz or app that one of your friends do that'll scrape your profile. Or maybe one of your friends is a friend of the FBI and is re-posting your pics?
"Private" means zip. It may imply that only your friends can see stuff in your profile, but it's effectively public.
Depends. I'm neither visually nor hearing impaired, yet I have closed-captioning on all the time, and turn on subtitles on movies (and games). What I've found is sometimes the audio mixing can be so bad the voice gets drowned out by some noise or music. Or sometimes the accent is heavy enough that it's an English-like language, but hard to actually hear. The producers are probably being extra careful because not everyone will have the skills to actually break through an accent (think about all those complaints about Indian call center tech support).
Of course, the sin here is when the subtitling/closed captioning happens at the same time the in-movie subtitles are displayed. Then it becomes an unreadable mess.
Funny enough, I don't see Android phones for sale. I see phones called HTC Dream, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, etc. So it looks like it's never been a problem - at best, these phones may say "HTC Dream with Google", but other than maybe the Android logo (#1/#2 usage, which isn't covered under the Google branding), that's it.
Sure it runs the Android OS, but they don't advertise that fact. Just like you don't see phones advertised as Windows Mobile - they always have a product. Like Android phones, they run Windows Mobile, but it tends to just be a spec-sheet item. Hell, I suppose a carrier could demand that the Android phone be completely locked down (i.e., no apps can be installed, period) if they wanted.
And like Windows Mobile, carrier requirements can't be bypassed - if the carrier doesn't want something, it goes or they won't sell it. Luckily, being GSM, it doesn't exclude the possibility of someone importing their own phone and using it.
The only manufacturer who gets to bypass most requirements is Apple. And the only reason the carriers acquiesce to Apple's demands is because of demand. Customers wanted it, and they're not afraid to import it themselves if they can't get it. That, and Apple knows most demands are crap, are calling it crap, and refusing to follow them.
The only reason Android is "better" is that it's open source. But unless someone creates something that people want badly, it'll be gimped as much as needed to satisfy the carriers.
I wonder if that's why my experience with LED bulbs is so varying. Three bulb-style LED lamps we've had to replace effectively every month (and in a 3-lamp fixture, means 3 a month!). They don't burn out, they just glow normally, then blink out suddenly. But some LED floodlights have lasted the whole duration (6+ months) with no issues at all. Strange.
Giving up on the LED bulbs and going to crack one open to see what actually failed. Going back to CFLs... even the quality ones are cheaper than the LED bulbs.
Well, if you want a non-iPod media player, Archos is one of the few left that use a hard disk to store lots of music and videos. And they're hostile because they're a hradware company - replacing hard drives means you can buy the far cheaper model and change it yourself, really, TiVoization (though at least TiVo lets you replace the hard drive even when it eats into their "lifetime" business model).
But also because they can't allow you to break the DRM component (PlaysForSure), which violate the license agreement with Microsoft. And NDAs prevent Archos from releasing the OMAP specs so you can use the DSP (which does the heavy lifting in the video decode).
That's because Paypal is bound by credit card agreements - I believe a vast majority of Paypal transactions are done via credit cards (and Paypal is pretty much the only company where any individual can accept a credit card payment without the hassle of opening a merchant account - why no one else wants to enter the field, I don't know).
And your foreign transaction cases are actually quite common. Given the number of idiotic companies that only ship via crappy carriers like UPS, if you're outside the US, it's either ante up to the ass-raping UPS charges for crossing a border (think easily 30-200% the cost of the item plus shipping, PLUS taxes - $20 on a $10 item, $100 on a $300 item...). Far fewer use services like FedEx ($25/packet), or USPS ($5-8). Plus free shipping to US addresses. Or often US-only shipping. If you're a Canadian, it's easier to open a US mailbox (with a non-PO box address), then either have the service forward or await pickup. You get cheap/free shipping, and only pay taxes. One UPS shipment can often pay for a whole year's mailbox fees because of brokerage.
The second part of the equation is payment - after all, these companies often don't allow foreign credit cards. To which, Paypal ends up winning because they handle the foreign credit card (and often the case where the billing address == shipping address - since Paypal doesn't have a "billing address", you can pay Paypal and have it shipped to a different address).
Except SSH tunneling or SOCKS proxying (over SSH) don't do TCP-over-TCP. Instead, using an SSH tunnel, the application creates a TCP connection to localhost, the SSH program then takes the data from that connection and forwards it to the destination over its own TCP connection, where the SSH daemon makes a connection on your behalf. No TCP-over-TCP, just handing data over multiple TCP links.
Ditto with a proxy - the app connects to the proxy server, the server makes a new connection on your behalf, and bridges the data between your application and the destination.
In fact, if you can properly buffer the connections, this can lead to higher throughput as a high latency link can be hidden by the proxy servers which locally ACK the packets, and the high-latency link can have data blasted through with different TCP settings that allow for high bandwidth-delay products.
True, the Archos software stinks. But their hardware is more a spec-sheet marketing list than anything impressive. It's got great specs, but Archos then uses piss-poor low-quality components.
You interact with the screen, which on the spec sheet is nice (800x480), but I've had to take my Archos back 3-4 times each because they had dead pixels until I got a good one. Make sure you buy from B&M store because you'll have to spend to send it back. Archos won't RMA it unless there's like 5 dead pixels on the screen, so you'll have to have store that does no-question returns. Otherwise all the videos you'll look at have bright spots from all the stuck pixels. And nevermind that one of my replacements came out of the brand-new box, and the hard drive died 2 days later. Powered it up and it was loud and clunking as it booted up the first time.
That, and Archos started locking out hard drives so you can't even replace the hard drive - the firmware won't boot from unauthorized hard drives.
Because of this, I avoided buying the new models (which I heard are even worse - imagine buying a new device and every time you tap/click, you get an ad wanting you to buy some new accessory now). But maybe now I'll go get one, change it 3-4 times (probably empty the store of 'em, at Christmas nonetheless) to get a good one, and then hack it. I wonder if this will also allow hard drive upgrades, as well. A way to get rid of the ads, put on VLC or something on it...
True, but there's a number of routers that do have pretty impressive performance - I think the ones pushing 200+Mbps are lying during the test, but a number of not-so-cheap home routers do perfectly fine. (These aren't the $20 specials, but they're half decent, and most are under $200 on sale).
You won't be doing NAT at GigE speeds - you can try, but there'll be bottlenecks in any system before you hit GigE. But a decent home router can be acquired that will handle the load easily.
The only real issue is the router's (or Linux?) limit of 4096 connections, which may be easily saturated if you do a lot of torrenting. (Especially UDP connections - nothing keels over a router faster than having UDP sessions clog up the NAT tables). But these routers often have decent processors and decent amounts of RAM, and many on the top run Linux.
Or uses floating-point hardware. Regardless of how many bits you use, floating-point computations are always approximate (mostly because the range of numbers that can be represented is larger than the number of possible numbers a given bit length can represent).
Hell, these computers might be more accurate, since there's a number of floating point operations you can do where the precision drops sharply because of the way it works.
FTFA:
They're buying the old PS3s. The $300 figure comes from the fact that you can get a PS3 for $300, but they aren't necessarily buying sub-$300 units. OTOH, I wonder why they don't just clean out GameStop/EBGames?
SO they're running Linux legally. Would be fun if they could force Sony to re-add "Other OS" support to the new PS3 slims.
It's not that, actually. It's the scammy places where you buy your product, then they pop up another page that says "Thank you for shopping at Merchant.com". But scroll down, in fine print, it says "We also signed you up for a $10/month voicemail service. If you don't want this service, you must phone within 24 hours." or other crap like you must click a tiny link "No, I don't want this service" instead of the big shiny "Continue" button presented higher up. Of course, the merchant and the service split the $10/month that you've now signed up for, and the "continue" button serves as "confirmation" that you agreed to the service.
The even scammier sites sign you up for stuff like "messaging products" that charge your phone bill $10/month, knowing it's practically impossible to get your phone company to remove the charge, or prevent future charges, other than changing your phone number. This often plays out in those free sweepstakes offers that people often sign up for - win a free product! or other crap.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/cram-this.ars
I suppose the merchants use it as a way for you to get 10% off coupons and such for the next time you shop, too.
Actually, you know accurately movement, you're just missing a starting point.
So the simple answer is to assume a square piece of paper whose edge is 2 bills wide - and start at the center. Then you can scan in any bill, regardless of whether it was portrait, landscape, or what corner they started scanning at. Assume that's your starting point, and then notice how the mouse is moved when mapping the images to where in the scanned image the image should go. (The movement detection is identical to how optical mice work, and as long as there's overlap, you can detect movement speed and position, and map the new image appropriately).
Once the scanning is done, you can crop out the areas that aren't scanned.
A proper PCIe (miniPCIe) card supports bootability (appears as a regular controller+disk), laptops often boot from miniPCIe SSDs (netbooks notably - Asus eeePC and the SSD Acer Ones, amongst others). Hot swap not so much (I know SATA supports it, but do real world motherboard controllers support it?), though I suppose if someone were to make it an ExpressCard design, possibly. Cross-platform/no drivers if it appears as a regular IDE controller+disk.
Booting of SATA is effectively booting off a PCIe card - the SATA controller hangs off the PCIe bus (or virutal PCIe for on-chipset controllers - but they still enumerate the same as normal PCI(e) devices).
If they want to force people to get rid of old TVs, they won't succeed. Because instead of spending the $1k or more on a new TV, they'll probably buy stuff like an HD-Fury2 so they can continue using their older HDTV set.
The Hauppage HD-PVR has been around a long while now, sure it only does component, but so do many older TVs. Blocking analog out does nothing that an HD-Fury2 can't fix.
So what, exactly, does this do again?
Actually, there is no passwd on the iPhone or iPod Touch. If you had one installed, it's because you installed the BSD utilities that were cross-compiled. Apple's libraries had a nasty bug in them, and to change the password manually, you had to use openSSL to re-encrypt for desired password using a fixed salt. It wasn't long before it was fixed - the problem lied in the BSD utilities that were available via Installer.app. If you installed Cydia (which existed in the 1.x days), it had a BSD utility base that worked just fine. Cydia basically took over everything Installer.app did, and you had to ensure you didn't update the BSD utilities in Installer, but stick with the Cydia ones.
These days it's far easier as Cydia is the sole one in use. (Cydia uses apt-get (and likewaise dpkg/deb files), so it's far easier to put your package online than the wierd XML that Installer used). Heck, it used to be that OpenSSH was required after jailbreaking - so much so it would be installed automatically. But these days, it's optional, so everyone had to install it manually... their own damn fault for installing and not reading where they need to change the password.
Given official Hauppage HD-PVR support, this could be one of the best high-def DVRs out there. Especially when you combine it with an HD Fury2 to convert it to HDMI...
I don't know why the HD-PVR is the only capture card capable of high-def (1080i). HD Fury2 adds HDMI (with HDCP). Sure, it's only 1080i, but how many other high-def capture solutions are out there? For just over $500, you can get one that does HDMI/HDCP as well.
(HD Fury2 converts HDMI to Component or VGA. Sure it's analog, but the HD-PVR only has component inputs).
Especially good for those of us in Canada, where we are forced to use the ultra-crappy cableboxes. (It's why people go to TiVo...).