Even in Texas, a judge is probably going to be bright enough to know that he should treat responses written by lawyers differently than those written by some working stiff.
True, but a judge is also smart to realize that the respondent isn't a child, and should have the appropriate literacy skills to write a formal letter using formal language conventions. It won't be as lawyerly as a response written by a lawyer, so it may diverge from "proper" legal language (e.g., emotional appeals may creep in) as well as inappropriate requests.
Even if the case is frivolous, it's always a good thing to not get on the judge's bad side right at the beginning.
Peak oil isn't a crisis either. We can replace every erg of energy from oil with nuclear if we're motivated to do so. Even if we don't, during my lifetime peak oil will mean as an American I might, at some point, have to pay almost as much for gas as the Europeans are paying now, plus a few commodities will cost more.
I think peak oil is real, but we won't get any warning. It'll just happen that we run out of oil.
Think about it for a little while - we've already seen that when gas prices jump, people change their habits, and as more supplies come online, gas prices fall, and people revert back to their old habits, somewhat (not everyone who adapted reverts).
It's the same with alternative energy sources.
It's a very carefully balanced supply-demand curve. When gas prices rise, people change habits, but not many. Likewise, money gets spent in alternative energy research. Oil-rich countries see the opportunity to make money, and pump out more oil (and go on expeditions finding more oil), which has the effect of lowering gas prices again, and alternative energy research stalls because it can't compete with cheap gas. The oil producing countries start cutting output (e.g., oilsands) because they margin isn't there because now there's more oil on the market and lower prices.
The end result is oil prices will stay within a certain range - in fact, I'd guess we don't know if we've hit peak oil yet (mostly because we don't know where all the resources are, the only deal is that it gets harder and harder to extract), and probably won't. We'll draw more oil out when prices are high, and draw less when prices are low. No, the only real warning would be when prices jump, then people discover that there really is no more oil, and prices jump again, people discover even difficult to extract sources are all tapped out, and prices will skyrocket. All this will probably take place over a few years at most, far from a gradual rise of prices as traditional peak oil theory holds.
There may be signs that these cycles are starting to fall apart, but I'm guessing they're too subtle to actually generate any useful warnings. It'll be one of those "we'll know it when we hit it". Part of it comes from those who adapt and don't revert, lowering consumption again which puts prices back to where they were prior to the spike.
I think everyone that thinks music should be given away for free and should only be allowed to make money from t-shirts and trinkets should consider this model for themselves. How about your boss doesn't have to pay you. And instead you can sell T-shirts and other goods at your work to make money. It's only fair right? Connect with your customer. Give them your services for free and try to make your money outside of your work.
This model works for items that have a near-zero marginal distribution cost, i.e., "intellectual property". If you make widgets which cost money to make and money to distribute, this obviously doesn't work. But for things like books, software, pictures/paintings, audio, etc., it's a potential business model that works, and people give away stuff all the time.
And it has been shown that it does work. People seem to give away software, even whole operating systems for free, including source code. Yet companies like Red Hat seem to be doing well enough, even though their product has a free competitor. Companies like IBM, Apple, RedHat, Novell and others hire people that "give their stuff away". These people seem to have gotten others to buy their "trinkets" enough to make it their main stay of their business.
Heck, Apple hires FreeBSD developers, gives away WebKit to the point where it's used in competitor's products (Chrome for desktop, Nokia cellphones, Android-based cellphones), yet they also sell a closed-source OS and hardware, that competes against other OSes and hardware. Perhaps Apple has figured out the "Connect with Fans" part and "Reason to Buy".
Don't worry, as soon as 802.11n is finalized, technology will have progressed to 802.11o so we'll have to wait another 3 years until that is finalized. At which point, we'll have 802.11p.:)
802.11o looks to be free, but 802.11p is used. But given the way 802.11, 802.11a-k,m,n,p,r-z are allocated, they've already gone into the double letters. I'm guessing the missing letters were from committees that didn't quite make it or disbanded.
Will the final version be (backwards?) compatible with Draft-N routers and wireless cards?
Quite likely, actually. As long as your wireless devices are WiFi Draft N capable. There are two "waves" of Draft N devices (2.5, if you want to go technical). The first was released sometime around 2006 or so, and they were early revision Draft N, the ones that everyone basically said "Avoid at all costs" because of incompatibilities, interference, etc. These are most likely NOT going to work with 802.11n. The "half" wave came shortly after, where we had a flood of 802.11g routers with "extended range" and "MIMO" - they are basically early revision N wireless except re-badged as working with 802.11b/g, and using the N bits to give better range and speed.
Then in late 2007/2008, came what we know currently as Draft N, when the WiFi Alliance (no relation to IEEE - the WiFi Alliance is a consortium of manufacturers to ensure interoperability) decided to start testing and approving devices based on the final draft spec. These will have the WiFi logo with Draft N in it, being approved for Draft N "standard" and compliance. Part of the requirement was that it was firmware upgradable to 802.11n when it finally came out. Whether or not a firmware upgrade will come out, though is another question.
Depending on how the WiFi Alliance holds out, they may require that all WiFi-N devices must support Draft N. Or they may just say "screw you all" and make them incompatible.
The IEEE is the stadnards body behind the spec, 802.11 being the wireless part, 802.3 being Ethernet, etc. They write the spec. Thus, standards compliance includes 802.11b/g/n, which are documents on how these devices are to work.
WiFi is a trademark of the WiFI Alliance, so technically, calling 802.11? devices "WiFi" is incorrect, as only tested an approved devices carry the WiFi trademark stamp. They approve devices after doing interoperability testing, figuring out that consumers would be best served if devices actually interoperate (and thus everyone can sell more). Thus they created the WiFi trademark, and the approval stamps you see WiFI A, WiFi-B, WiFi G, WiFi Draft N, and soon, WiFi N.
True... So we will have to continue linking to the mythbusters episode until they shut up
I'm still wondering what the conspiracy theorists say about the retroreflector experiments that have been conducted daily since Apollo 11. Considering the difference in reflectivity between the moon's surface and the retroreflectors, surely there have been some attempts to explain it.
Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can't record HD signals out of them -- many won't even downgrade the signal, it'll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore "tunerless" VCRs and DVD burners can't be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn't do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven't tuners being sold separately with HD outputs that can be sent to any COTS recording equipment. This is intentional, purposeful, and frankly conspiratorial on the part of the manufacturers.
Piracy is the only way the market for HD video recordings will survive.
Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.
First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR, about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!
Now, for pesky HDMI... you buy a HD Fury 2, which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.
Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.
Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I've seen 'em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn't), but most satellite boxes don't have this, unfortunately.
I've released a few apps on the app store, and have met with some success with them. However, the single most frustrating thing is the approval process for getting an app released in the first place, and publishing updates on a continuing basis.
I recently updated one of my apps, and it took Apple 16 days to review the executable and publish it. I then updated my other app, and it took 14 days.
Seriously? 2 weeks? There is nothing more frustrating than to have users contacting me saying "when will feature xyz arrive?" and my response have to be along the lines of "I've submitted it to apple 2 weeks ago. They'll approve it when they approve it. There is nothing I can do to speed it up.
Well, it's probably a manpower issue at Apple. There's no doubt the App Store is a success, but that's probably the problem - it's too successful. Apple basically created a platform, and within a year, 50,000 distinct apps have been created for that platform. And that's distinct apps - if you counted individual versions of apps, that could easily have been a quarter million or more apps they've checked.
There haven't been much precedent in the past where within a year, you have 50,000 "products" for a completely brand new platform. It's something the competition has noticed. Apple comes onto the market, then a year later, makes an SDK available, and a year later, have 50,000 apps available - most other platforms have taken years to get to that point.
It's caught Apple offguard definitely - they started very strict and loosened their app requirements, which has only made things even worse as now more people can submit apps. Then they have to hire approvers en-masse, which results in consistency problems (see all the app rejects), people who don't realize the app review process also checks online content accessible through the app, etc.
Then you also get the idiot developers who release one app, modify it a little bit, then release it again... I'm talking about those weather/stock/ebook apps, where instead of one app, Apple has to review 100 of them. Eventually we'll reach a point where the apps waiting for approval and Apple can keep up. 50,000 apps is just under 137 new apps a day (going 24/7/365), or if you count many versions (like Pocket God, on its 21st release) of apps, it could be the better part of 1000 new app submissions a day that have to be reviewed.
I'm not surprised it takes only 2 weeks. It's probably improved from the months it used to take. Heck, it's probably why all the other app stores aren't trying to do the same thing - there's not enough manpower to review a potential flood of apps (at the very least, Palm can't afford it, Nokia, Microsoft and RIM probably can). Which has a nice side effect of appearing more "open" than Apple. (I guess during peak periosd its worse - holidays and the like as people make "special editions").
Probably because the SATA power connector plus SATA data connectors are so physically large, that you can get the PATA drives in a smaller form factor? (PATA drives use a 44-pin ZIF socket that's really small and low profile. It's also a touch fragile...).
I wish I could find SSDs easily in a PATA connector - 1.8" drives usually have PATA interfaces and I'd like to upgrade one of my computers to SSD. BUt the Intel ones are SATA only, and the only ones I find ohterwise are some noname chinese ones on eBay...
You just answered your own question: If a rocket isn't safe enough to carry humans, it's not safe enough to carry a billion-dollar satellite without paying a large fraction of a billion dollars in insurance premiums.
'Human-rating' is mostly bogus: the primary difference between a satellite launcher and a 'human-rated' launcher is that there's no abort system on a satellite launcher so if you're going to lose the payload anyway you might as well just crash and burn. A human-launching system needs to ensure that it will fail nicely so the crew can escape... something with the shuttle, of course, has singularly failed to do.
Lastly, I believe the total development cost of the Space-X launcher is a small fraction of the cost of a single shuttle launch, so they expected a few failures in development.
I dunno. This isn't really news, because private entities have long been sending satellites into space. It's not really a hard problem anymore. Sea Launch tends to be the ones sending satellites into space these days. And they've been at it for many years now. Though, their future is a bit uncertain, so having an alternative would be good.
And yes, there is an abort mechanism on these vehicles. Except in a "human rated" one, abort means returning them safely to earth. Aborting a satellite launch means blowing it up into little pieces. Sea Launch is useful here since the pieces are unlikely to land on someone's head miles away. You can't let the vehicle crash and burn, or even fall in large pieces because of the danger to the surroundings. Sure if it falls within a containment zone, it's easy, but you really want to avoid sending debris crashing through the roof of someone's house 20 miles away.
And yes, the insurance premiums are huge - even if the launch goes successfully, there's always a chance for space junk to screw your satellite up requiring a deorbit immediately. However, the launch success rate is high enough that people are willing to insure...
OK, maybe not completely magic, but close enough to magic for an approximate engineering schematic. That's the big difference I've seen between engineers and scientists. Engineers will typically accept a little bit of magic as long as the result is a functional schematic. Scientists will deny the existence of any magic in the system and dig ridiculously deep into any system showing magical symptoms.
Actually, an oscillator is a fairly simple circuit conceptually. You have a greater than unity gain inverting amplifier, with a feedback filter circuit. The feedback filter is usually the crystal oscillator, but it can be an RC circuit, a tuned microwave channel (e.g., atomic clock where the cesium atoms vibrations reinforce the microwave excitation signal) or other filtering mechanism. On startup, the amplifier picks up on the background noise, amplifies it and passits it to the output. The feedback circuit filters it, passing through the desired frequency, which overwhelms the noise and causes the oscillator to "lock" and stabilize on that frequency.
It is, however, annoyingly difficult to analyze because it requires noise or imperfections to actually work. Ring oscillators especially so since a lot of their behavior is determined by propagation delays and characteristics of the interconnections and process. It's one of the few useful circuits where imperfections, noise and other usually undesired variables actually help make s useful product.
Yeah, wasn't there a nice port of SheepShaver or something specially for Intel Macs?
Not sure how fast it is, though - but maybe Quark running in Rosetta might be the problem. I seem to remember Office for Mac being a real dog until the last major release.
And there are still plenty of PowerPC Macs around - old PowerBooks and Mac Minis still populate eBay regularly.
Without hardware accelerated h.264 playback, I'm not going back to VLC.
Still, it's a great do it all player / streamer
Actually, that's one reason why I use VLC - because I know it's not going to use any accelleration except minor ones that don't affect much (e.g., DirectX video surfaces). It's important when you remove the DRM that you actually removed the DRM, and sometimes testing it with Windows Media Player doesn't help (you can check through the properties, but I'd like to be sure). With VLC not using the OS components, I know if it plays there, there isn't any DRM on it.
Of course, having the option to use hardware accelleration, or disabling it, is better...
The system looks similar to Microsoft's Project Natal, but instead of driving with an imaginary steering wheel, players can use an everyday item like a plate.
You can hold "everyday item's like a plate" with Natal too. The difference is that you don't have to for it to work.
An interesting question - considering Natal also tracks body motion and location, could the "everyday item" be something like your hand/fist? One of the Natal demo videos showed a family holding their fists above their upturned palm of the other to use as a gameshow buzzer (by lowering their fist to their hand).
It's going to be interesting times between Sony's patent and Natal...
So, to go to the extreme, if someone decided to leak our nuclear launch codes, you would be OK with that? Or how about leaking information that could end up making it easier to take out the President?
Nothing in your support for wikileaks discounts that. You would be relying on them to judge whether is would be an appropriate leak.
Where do you draw the line? What is your process for deciding? Do they have one? What is it? Who makes the final call?
Our current system has answers for all of that, even though people may not like the answer, there is still a process.
If the nuclear launch codes was leaked, I'd expect them to be changed pronto. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't changed prior to posting - the mere hint of a leak should kick in place a process that scrambles the launch codes (randomly), at which point they're reset to something else over the course of minutes at the worst. It's the process in place in case the secret is lost.
If there's information that makes it easier to attack the President (of the US, I assume), then that information reveals a deficiency in security, and because that information exists, it means people know about it but haven't done a single thing to improve it. The information exists, but people failed to act on it.
The fact is, there's a document somewhere describing these things like deficiencies in security. It means someone knows about it. The worst thing that can happen is no one acts on it. If it's corrected, then leaking the document has no effect. If it's not corrected, and remains that way for a period of time, then something is seriously wrong. It's like a security flaw in software - if the vendor takes years to fix something, do you give them more time?
Something of importance had better have countermeasures in place should the secret be leaked. If Presidential security is important, then the document describing said deficiency should take longer to write than attempts to correcting it. Ditto with launch codes and other thing.
However, if I can use a netbook (rather than a $2000 15 pound gaming notebook) paired with in-flight wi-fi and play my 360 games on the airplane, it might be worth it.
Not bloody likely. Unless you're playing Bejeweled or something. Current in-flight WiFi has horrendous latency, because of the uplink (satellite or via ground station, the latter can easily be 100+ms). And it's not likely to change soon since 100+ms latency doesn't impact much on browsing or IM, but kills things like VoIP. And forget about it if they use satellite uplinks.
The interesting thing I find with a gaming service like this is lag. 20ms may not be too bad, but cable customers already complain when their latency spikes from 20ms to 50ms (I've seen the complaints that they lose when they switch from DSL...). Unless DOCSIS 3 changes things dramatically, I don't see how a connection with widely varying latency will be very good, given people already complain when it's just gaming packets, not remote "desktops".
Dont' forget Flash support. I don't personally *like* Flash, but it's a pretty important part of the modern web. The fact that the iPhone lacks it (and don't give me any of Jobs' crap as to why; lower-spec ARM devices support it) could be a big deal in promoting this thing. Additionally, the larger (and presumably much higher-res) display should make a big difference... except it's too big for a pocket.
Yeah, they support it poorly. Jobs has a point.
I have two ARM-based devices (Archos 605, Nokia N810) which support Flash. The worst thing is to actually go to a web page with flash crap on it, because it causes the machine to drag. Bad flash ads cause the browser to virtually lock up, and while you can play YouTube videos (Archos cheats and use their own player once it recognizes it's trying to play a FLV, while Nokia plays it by running the Flash player natively), some other sites cause it drag again - at one point the Archos only played the audio, while the Nokia virtually locked up, but you could get 1 frame every 30 seconds, and audio that plays for 2 seconds every 5. And you can't scroll, close the browser, etc., because the CPU is busy doing the flash, and there's not enough CPU time to handle the browser UI.
Effectively, you'll need a browser with a built-in FlashBlock, but unlike FlashBlock, it needs to work when the page is rendered, not when the plugin recognizes an embedded flash video in the DOM. Because it really sucks when you're surfing the web, and then hit a page with flash (ad, or other flash thing) that causes your browsing to come to a halt as the CPU is busy doing the Flash playback, instead of rendering the page or letting you do UI things like page scrolling.
I will note that both devices actually run Linux inside. Flash is cool, but really, the implementation of the browser with flash needs to be improved significantly.
Also, a 12" display, the CPU really needs at least a 2D graphics accellerator. 1024x768 is painful on a framebuffer only display.
I just can't come to grips with the fact that people will actually order stuff like this off the net. It would be no different than taking random drugs you bought off the street corner. It just seems insane to me.
I'm also curious if any countries take steps to actively stamp these out? It seems like it should be fairly simple to figure out where these are based. I can only assume they are based in counties with no extradition laws?
There is another possibility - dumb businesses. A spammer's business model is to send out X spam for $Y. That's it. Business wants to do "marketing" by email, they'll pay say, $1000 for a campaign of 10,000,000 addresses (number made up). Spammer does it, and goes on with his next customer.
Business doing the marketing may never make back that $1000 (and never use such services again), but it doesn't matter to the spammer. All the spammer sees is row upon row of people wanting "marketing" services. As long as people are lining up and paying him, he doesn't care if 99.9999% of the people never see the email, and of the remaining, all but one delete it, and the last one purchases.
As long as people believe it works and are willing to pay good money for it, it'll continue happening.
I assume you mean on x86 architecture. There are architectures where it's faster to do a shift, ARM being a very popular one in number of cores sold. On ARM, operands pass through a barrel shifter that allows them to be shifted almost any which way during instruction execution.
Thus, a lone shift operation actually wastes time on ARM because it's translated to a move instruction. But a shift+add can be done in one instruction (rather than 2) because the shift is done as part of operand fetching. This may even make certain optimizations "bad":
E.g., given the code sequence:
a = (b 4) + 1;
c = (b 4) + 3;
can be improperly optimized to a shift, then two adds. A proper optimization is to not do any - generate two adds directly, because the shift can be handled during prefetch.
Sony execs aren't dumb. They aren't going to announce price cuts until they happen.
The problem is, Sony is in a tough spot.
Firstly, the PS3 is among the best future-proof Blu-Ray player out there. Since release, it got upgraded from Profile 1.0 to 1.1 to 2.0 (BD-Live). And now Blu-Ray is getting managed copy sometime in 2010, it looks like the PS3 will be one of the few Blu-Ray players that will get it as an upgrade. (Managed copy lets you rip a Blu-Ray officially to a media player, DRM encrusted and whatnot, but there it is). It started as the first cheap Blu-Ray player, then it now it represents the ceiling price for a consumer level Blu-Ray player.
Secondly, the PS3 s a gaming system, one of the more expensive ones. It's feeling pressure to cut prices to better compete with the Xbos360 and Wii.
The problem is, Sony needs to decide if they want to concentrate on the Blu-Ray side of things, or the gaming side. Because a good positive price cut (say, $100) means that it puts a bunch of Blu-Ray players into the "why bother" price categtory (practically all Profile 2.0 players are $250+...), and I'm sure Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp, etc., will be really happy to have to be forced to cut prices in order to sell product. This could seriously impact Blu-Ray sales if people start to believe it's not only "just a Sony format", but a "Sony PS3 format" as people think you must have a PS3 to play them (as they're the only player left on the market).
So Sony needs to keep the price high to keep other manufacturers making Blu-Ray players, but they need to reduce prices to compete with the other game consoles.
Blu-Ray vs. Gaming - what does Sony want to promote more?
Maybe what Sony should do is release a "slim PS3" for $200 that only plays games, no movies. Its not like there aren't enough PS3 models and features that differ between them...
I can understand that SLI has always sounded like a super expensive way to get a little more performance, which may not be cost efficient or desirable.
Actually, I recall several times where an SLI solution would perform pretty damn close to the high-end card, for less price. Or even in one case, the SLI cards outperformed the super-expensive high-end card. Sometimes one has to step back and see if two (or more!) mid-range cards can outdo a single high-end card, which costs 2-3x more money.
The GP references CrossfireX as ATI's version of SLI. True, and you can link two crossfireX capable cards like SLI. Unlike SLI, you can link an onboard GPU with a dedicated GPU in CrossfireX, which enables you to use that otherwise disabled card. Requires a capable motherboard and GPU of course, but it's not available (as far as I know) on Nvidia cards.
Actually, I believe nVidia cards can do a similar thing - work with different chips. This is typically done with their onboard graphics chipsets plus an offboard GPU. The reason I know this - there was a *HUGE* uproar when it was discovered the MacBook Pros didn't have this in MacOS X. Not sure if it works under Windows on the same machine (i.e., is it a hardware problem, or just a software driver issue?).
Yea, I started development on a game for iPhone. It would play in the car. It has hypermiling and stunt mode. aka it might promote reckless driving (in a sense). I know people will buy it, but I doubt iTunes would sell it. Is there any place to promote underground iPhone apps that people see?
Check out Cydia and jailbreaking. I believe Cydia supports payment for apps as well, as an unofficial app store.
Of course, given what iTunes has these days, there is a chance they'll carry it, especially with the parental ratings system in place.
But if not, Cydia is your friend. The market's smaller since it requires jailbreaks, but it's easy enough to do, and Cydia is easy enough to use. For a developer, it's a pretty front end to apt-get.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
No, it'll be an excuse for an ISP to give you a/64, but firewall out all but the number of addresses you get unless you pay for more.
And servers will still be banned - there's not enough bandwidth upstream from most connections to handle everyone serving something (last mile problem).
Everyone thinks IPv6 is the magic savior - it'll enforce net neutrality, it'll prevent your PC from getting infected, it'll solve the public IP issue, it'll solve NAT issues, it'll have QoS for real, blah blah blah.
Sure IPv6 has it all. But I doubt any ISP will do business any differently with IPv6 than otherwise. In fact, they'll just salivate that any caps will be reached a bit quicker because of the increased IPv6 header size. Mobile operators are probably salivating as well - 5 cents per kilobyte (not kiB), which includes the OTA headers, plus increased IPv6 header size, means the real payload per packet goes down, and more data usage results (== more $$$ - the incremental network cost for IPv6 is low to the network to support IPv6, but not you the user have to pay more for the same traffic since the amount of data you need to transfer increased).
I see IPv6 as allowing an ISP to ding people for more. "You set 20% of your packets last month to have QoS high priority, while your plan only allows 10%". While worms will have to do more work to infect hosts, they'll just be a lot smarter about checking hosts. And the home user, even if they got 1:1 IP mappings, will probably stick a nice firewall in front of their modem that blocks incoming packets. Cablemodems (not sure about ADSL) can also be blocked from recognizing more than N MAC addresses per boot, too, so you'll have to alias your NIC to have more IPs (how many home users can do THAT? And it makes routing so much more fun!).
Nothing will change, really, other than not being able to run out of IP addresses. Business as usual.
Hell, NAT has had one benefit - it's made firewalls a lot easier to configure because you don't have to open 20 ports to play a game like you used to just over a decade ago. Torrent clients seem to work fine using one port rather than one port per torrent like they used to. Online gaming seems to work just fine with 2 or 3 ports opened (or none - it was ironically easier to configure my PS3, Xbox360 and Wii to play online than my PC - and I have UPnP disabled!), and many protocols that required incoming connectivity got phased out or adapted (e.g. FTP). And the prevalence of ssh makes life a lot easier for remote access and poor-man's VPN stuff.
The Halo wiki has a list of a bunch of "vacations" you can take in Campaign mode to explore. Though, I think some of them are intentionally put there by Bungie knowing people will exploit every trick to try. Though, there are some that are kinda stupid and really just exploit the fact that once you're in Theatre mode, you have full access to the level and thus it's trivial to see every last bit by flying around. Though there are good ones available during play.
The nice thing in H3 is actually being able to get skulls at a mortal level of difficulty. I suck at games, but like Halo (and Half-Life), so the best I can do is Normal which I find can be... difficult. Though I think Halo3 seems to be slightly easier - I finished the campaign the first time and going through getting skulls, I don't die so often.
(I guess I've seen every Master Chief death animation already, though there are a few amusing ones like being thrown twirling halfway across the map).
It's just that most board games are pretty dumbed down. You also cant get the real good board games/ Card games at most stores you have to go to specialty geky places to get them.
Car Wars, is an awesome board game. settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Munchkin (Yes it's a board game now) etc....
I have personally corrupted many a youth with The above games. The thing is, you NEED 4 or more players that will be very vocal for them to be fun. With Settlers I try to encourage collusion and to try to bend the rules trading, Munchkin the same..
That's about the real problem - non-mass-market board games tend to be only available at either game stores, or online. These days, online is your best bet - the game store I frequent is quite popular as it's one of the few online for Canada (Craving for a Game) - especially since it's one of the few on the West Coast.
In the US, Amazon.com tends to have the games, and if not, eBay and the like. BoardGameGeek tends to have links to eBay searches that have those games. However, nothing online can really replace (I found) the B&M store. Craving for a Game is near me, so I visit it often enough that the proprietor knows me and what I like, so I have a personal recommendation engine (and he has game rentals plus in-store trials, so you can see if a game is to your liking, or wait for game night and play against others - he supplies the games (or you can too), and everyone comes and plays.
Also, if you're in the high-tech field, it's a good way to spend a lunch hour "offline" and away from the screen - depending on the size of your company, you can easily get the requisite 4+ people (at one point we often had to have two games going). The only downside is this eliminates every game that claimes to take 45 minutes or longer (we find that if a game claims 60 minutes per game, it's probably closer to 75-90).
The good news is that the bigger games (Catan, Carcassonne, etc) tend to be available at larger stores (especially large comic book/toy stores). But there are a lot of real gems that you'll only find at dedicated stores.
Our group has settled on two games consistently (but we do try others to mix it up) - The Seven Seals (aka Zing! in English, but its German/French name is Seven Seals), and Frank's Zoo (a delightfully simple game that has a good element of strategy, and is close to Big 2).
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True, but a judge is also smart to realize that the respondent isn't a child, and should have the appropriate literacy skills to write a formal letter using formal language conventions. It won't be as lawyerly as a response written by a lawyer, so it may diverge from "proper" legal language (e.g., emotional appeals may creep in) as well as inappropriate requests.
Even if the case is frivolous, it's always a good thing to not get on the judge's bad side right at the beginning.
I think peak oil is real, but we won't get any warning. It'll just happen that we run out of oil.
Think about it for a little while - we've already seen that when gas prices jump, people change their habits, and as more supplies come online, gas prices fall, and people revert back to their old habits, somewhat (not everyone who adapted reverts).
It's the same with alternative energy sources.
It's a very carefully balanced supply-demand curve. When gas prices rise, people change habits, but not many. Likewise, money gets spent in alternative energy research. Oil-rich countries see the opportunity to make money, and pump out more oil (and go on expeditions finding more oil), which has the effect of lowering gas prices again, and alternative energy research stalls because it can't compete with cheap gas. The oil producing countries start cutting output (e.g., oilsands) because they margin isn't there because now there's more oil on the market and lower prices.
The end result is oil prices will stay within a certain range - in fact, I'd guess we don't know if we've hit peak oil yet (mostly because we don't know where all the resources are, the only deal is that it gets harder and harder to extract), and probably won't. We'll draw more oil out when prices are high, and draw less when prices are low. No, the only real warning would be when prices jump, then people discover that there really is no more oil, and prices jump again, people discover even difficult to extract sources are all tapped out, and prices will skyrocket. All this will probably take place over a few years at most, far from a gradual rise of prices as traditional peak oil theory holds.
There may be signs that these cycles are starting to fall apart, but I'm guessing they're too subtle to actually generate any useful warnings. It'll be one of those "we'll know it when we hit it". Part of it comes from those who adapt and don't revert, lowering consumption again which puts prices back to where they were prior to the spike.
This model works for items that have a near-zero marginal distribution cost, i.e., "intellectual property". If you make widgets which cost money to make and money to distribute, this obviously doesn't work. But for things like books, software, pictures/paintings, audio, etc., it's a potential business model that works, and people give away stuff all the time.
And it has been shown that it does work. People seem to give away software, even whole operating systems for free, including source code. Yet companies like Red Hat seem to be doing well enough, even though their product has a free competitor. Companies like IBM, Apple, RedHat, Novell and others hire people that "give their stuff away". These people seem to have gotten others to buy their "trinkets" enough to make it their main stay of their business.
Heck, Apple hires FreeBSD developers, gives away WebKit to the point where it's used in competitor's products (Chrome for desktop, Nokia cellphones, Android-based cellphones), yet they also sell a closed-source OS and hardware, that competes against other OSes and hardware. Perhaps Apple has figured out the "Connect with Fans" part and "Reason to Buy".
802.11o looks to be free, but 802.11p is used. But given the way 802.11, 802.11a-k,m,n,p,r-z are allocated, they've already gone into the double letters. I'm guessing the missing letters were from committees that didn't quite make it or disbanded.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standard_and_amendments
I suggest for confusion's sake, 802.11bb...
Quite likely, actually. As long as your wireless devices are WiFi Draft N capable. There are two "waves" of Draft N devices (2.5, if you want to go technical). The first was released sometime around 2006 or so, and they were early revision Draft N, the ones that everyone basically said "Avoid at all costs" because of incompatibilities, interference, etc. These are most likely NOT going to work with 802.11n. The "half" wave came shortly after, where we had a flood of 802.11g routers with "extended range" and "MIMO" - they are basically early revision N wireless except re-badged as working with 802.11b/g, and using the N bits to give better range and speed.
Then in late 2007/2008, came what we know currently as Draft N, when the WiFi Alliance (no relation to IEEE - the WiFi Alliance is a consortium of manufacturers to ensure interoperability) decided to start testing and approving devices based on the final draft spec. These will have the WiFi logo with Draft N in it, being approved for Draft N "standard" and compliance. Part of the requirement was that it was firmware upgradable to 802.11n when it finally came out. Whether or not a firmware upgrade will come out, though is another question.
Depending on how the WiFi Alliance holds out, they may require that all WiFi-N devices must support Draft N. Or they may just say "screw you all" and make them incompatible.
The IEEE is the stadnards body behind the spec, 802.11 being the wireless part, 802.3 being Ethernet, etc. They write the spec. Thus, standards compliance includes 802.11b/g/n, which are documents on how these devices are to work.
WiFi is a trademark of the WiFI Alliance, so technically, calling 802.11? devices "WiFi" is incorrect, as only tested an approved devices carry the WiFi trademark stamp. They approve devices after doing interoperability testing, figuring out that consumers would be best served if devices actually interoperate (and thus everyone can sell more). Thus they created the WiFi trademark, and the approval stamps you see WiFI A, WiFi-B, WiFi G, WiFi Draft N, and soon, WiFi N.
I'm still wondering what the conspiracy theorists say about the retroreflector experiments that have been conducted daily since Apollo 11. Considering the difference in reflectivity between the moon's surface and the retroreflectors, surely there have been some attempts to explain it.
Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.
First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR, about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!
Now, for pesky HDMI... you buy a HD Fury 2, which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.
Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.
Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I've seen 'em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn't), but most satellite boxes don't have this, unfortunately.
Well, it's probably a manpower issue at Apple. There's no doubt the App Store is a success, but that's probably the problem - it's too successful. Apple basically created a platform, and within a year, 50,000 distinct apps have been created for that platform. And that's distinct apps - if you counted individual versions of apps, that could easily have been a quarter million or more apps they've checked.
There haven't been much precedent in the past where within a year, you have 50,000 "products" for a completely brand new platform. It's something the competition has noticed. Apple comes onto the market, then a year later, makes an SDK available, and a year later, have 50,000 apps available - most other platforms have taken years to get to that point.
It's caught Apple offguard definitely - they started very strict and loosened their app requirements, which has only made things even worse as now more people can submit apps. Then they have to hire approvers en-masse, which results in consistency problems (see all the app rejects), people who don't realize the app review process also checks online content accessible through the app, etc.
Then you also get the idiot developers who release one app, modify it a little bit, then release it again... I'm talking about those weather/stock/ebook apps, where instead of one app, Apple has to review 100 of them. Eventually we'll reach a point where the apps waiting for approval and Apple can keep up. 50,000 apps is just under 137 new apps a day (going 24/7/365), or if you count many versions (like Pocket God, on its 21st release) of apps, it could be the better part of 1000 new app submissions a day that have to be reviewed.
I'm not surprised it takes only 2 weeks. It's probably improved from the months it used to take. Heck, it's probably why all the other app stores aren't trying to do the same thing - there's not enough manpower to review a potential flood of apps (at the very least, Palm can't afford it, Nokia, Microsoft and RIM probably can). Which has a nice side effect of appearing more "open" than Apple. (I guess during peak periosd its worse - holidays and the like as people make "special editions").
Probably because the SATA power connector plus SATA data connectors are so physically large, that you can get the PATA drives in a smaller form factor? (PATA drives use a 44-pin ZIF socket that's really small and low profile. It's also a touch fragile...).
I wish I could find SSDs easily in a PATA connector - 1.8" drives usually have PATA interfaces and I'd like to upgrade one of my computers to SSD. BUt the Intel ones are SATA only, and the only ones I find ohterwise are some noname chinese ones on eBay...
I dunno. This isn't really news, because private entities have long been sending satellites into space. It's not really a hard problem anymore. Sea Launch tends to be the ones sending satellites into space these days. And they've been at it for many years now. Though, their future is a bit uncertain, so having an alternative would be good.
And yes, there is an abort mechanism on these vehicles. Except in a "human rated" one, abort means returning them safely to earth. Aborting a satellite launch means blowing it up into little pieces. Sea Launch is useful here since the pieces are unlikely to land on someone's head miles away. You can't let the vehicle crash and burn, or even fall in large pieces because of the danger to the surroundings. Sure if it falls within a containment zone, it's easy, but you really want to avoid sending debris crashing through the roof of someone's house 20 miles away.
And yes, the insurance premiums are huge - even if the launch goes successfully, there's always a chance for space junk to screw your satellite up requiring a deorbit immediately. However, the launch success rate is high enough that people are willing to insure...
Actually, an oscillator is a fairly simple circuit conceptually. You have a greater than unity gain inverting amplifier, with a feedback filter circuit. The feedback filter is usually the crystal oscillator, but it can be an RC circuit, a tuned microwave channel (e.g., atomic clock where the cesium atoms vibrations reinforce the microwave excitation signal) or other filtering mechanism. On startup, the amplifier picks up on the background noise, amplifies it and passits it to the output. The feedback circuit filters it, passing through the desired frequency, which overwhelms the noise and causes the oscillator to "lock" and stabilize on that frequency.
It is, however, annoyingly difficult to analyze because it requires noise or imperfections to actually work. Ring oscillators especially so since a lot of their behavior is determined by propagation delays and characteristics of the interconnections and process. It's one of the few useful circuits where imperfections, noise and other usually undesired variables actually help make s useful product.
Yeah, wasn't there a nice port of SheepShaver or something specially for Intel Macs?
Not sure how fast it is, though - but maybe Quark running in Rosetta might be the problem. I seem to remember Office for Mac being a real dog until the last major release.
And there are still plenty of PowerPC Macs around - old PowerBooks and Mac Minis still populate eBay regularly.
Actually, that's one reason why I use VLC - because I know it's not going to use any accelleration except minor ones that don't affect much (e.g., DirectX video surfaces). It's important when you remove the DRM that you actually removed the DRM, and sometimes testing it with Windows Media Player doesn't help (you can check through the properties, but I'd like to be sure). With VLC not using the OS components, I know if it plays there, there isn't any DRM on it.
Of course, having the option to use hardware accelleration, or disabling it, is better...
An interesting question - considering Natal also tracks body motion and location, could the "everyday item" be something like your hand/fist? One of the Natal demo videos showed a family holding their fists above their upturned palm of the other to use as a gameshow buzzer (by lowering their fist to their hand).
It's going to be interesting times between Sony's patent and Natal...
If the nuclear launch codes was leaked, I'd expect them to be changed pronto. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't changed prior to posting - the mere hint of a leak should kick in place a process that scrambles the launch codes (randomly), at which point they're reset to something else over the course of minutes at the worst. It's the process in place in case the secret is lost.
If there's information that makes it easier to attack the President (of the US, I assume), then that information reveals a deficiency in security, and because that information exists, it means people know about it but haven't done a single thing to improve it. The information exists, but people failed to act on it.
The fact is, there's a document somewhere describing these things like deficiencies in security. It means someone knows about it. The worst thing that can happen is no one acts on it. If it's corrected, then leaking the document has no effect. If it's not corrected, and remains that way for a period of time, then something is seriously wrong. It's like a security flaw in software - if the vendor takes years to fix something, do you give them more time?
Something of importance had better have countermeasures in place should the secret be leaked. If Presidential security is important, then the document describing said deficiency should take longer to write than attempts to correcting it. Ditto with launch codes and other thing.
Not bloody likely. Unless you're playing Bejeweled or something. Current in-flight WiFi has horrendous latency, because of the uplink (satellite or via ground station, the latter can easily be 100+ms). And it's not likely to change soon since 100+ms latency doesn't impact much on browsing or IM, but kills things like VoIP. And forget about it if they use satellite uplinks.
The interesting thing I find with a gaming service like this is lag. 20ms may not be too bad, but cable customers already complain when their latency spikes from 20ms to 50ms (I've seen the complaints that they lose when they switch from DSL...). Unless DOCSIS 3 changes things dramatically, I don't see how a connection with widely varying latency will be very good, given people already complain when it's just gaming packets, not remote "desktops".
Yeah, they support it poorly. Jobs has a point.
I have two ARM-based devices (Archos 605, Nokia N810) which support Flash. The worst thing is to actually go to a web page with flash crap on it, because it causes the machine to drag. Bad flash ads cause the browser to virtually lock up, and while you can play YouTube videos (Archos cheats and use their own player once it recognizes it's trying to play a FLV, while Nokia plays it by running the Flash player natively), some other sites cause it drag again - at one point the Archos only played the audio, while the Nokia virtually locked up, but you could get 1 frame every 30 seconds, and audio that plays for 2 seconds every 5. And you can't scroll, close the browser, etc., because the CPU is busy doing the flash, and there's not enough CPU time to handle the browser UI.
Effectively, you'll need a browser with a built-in FlashBlock, but unlike FlashBlock, it needs to work when the page is rendered, not when the plugin recognizes an embedded flash video in the DOM. Because it really sucks when you're surfing the web, and then hit a page with flash (ad, or other flash thing) that causes your browsing to come to a halt as the CPU is busy doing the Flash playback, instead of rendering the page or letting you do UI things like page scrolling.
I will note that both devices actually run Linux inside. Flash is cool, but really, the implementation of the browser with flash needs to be improved significantly.
Also, a 12" display, the CPU really needs at least a 2D graphics accellerator. 1024x768 is painful on a framebuffer only display.
There is another possibility - dumb businesses. A spammer's business model is to send out X spam for $Y. That's it. Business wants to do "marketing" by email, they'll pay say, $1000 for a campaign of 10,000,000 addresses (number made up). Spammer does it, and goes on with his next customer.
Business doing the marketing may never make back that $1000 (and never use such services again), but it doesn't matter to the spammer. All the spammer sees is row upon row of people wanting "marketing" services. As long as people are lining up and paying him, he doesn't care if 99.9999% of the people never see the email, and of the remaining, all but one delete it, and the last one purchases.
As long as people believe it works and are willing to pay good money for it, it'll continue happening.
I assume you mean on x86 architecture. There are architectures where it's faster to do a shift, ARM being a very popular one in number of cores sold. On ARM, operands pass through a barrel shifter that allows them to be shifted almost any which way during instruction execution.
Thus, a lone shift operation actually wastes time on ARM because it's translated to a move instruction. But a shift+add can be done in one instruction (rather than 2) because the shift is done as part of operand fetching. This may even make certain optimizations "bad":
E.g., given the code sequence:
a = (b 4) + 1;
c = (b 4) + 3;
can be improperly optimized to a shift, then two adds. A proper optimization is to not do any - generate two adds directly, because the shift can be handled during prefetch.
The problem is, Sony is in a tough spot.
Firstly, the PS3 is among the best future-proof Blu-Ray player out there. Since release, it got upgraded from Profile 1.0 to 1.1 to 2.0 (BD-Live). And now Blu-Ray is getting managed copy sometime in 2010, it looks like the PS3 will be one of the few Blu-Ray players that will get it as an upgrade. (Managed copy lets you rip a Blu-Ray officially to a media player, DRM encrusted and whatnot, but there it is). It started as the first cheap Blu-Ray player, then it now it represents the ceiling price for a consumer level Blu-Ray player.
Secondly, the PS3 s a gaming system, one of the more expensive ones. It's feeling pressure to cut prices to better compete with the Xbos360 and Wii.
The problem is, Sony needs to decide if they want to concentrate on the Blu-Ray side of things, or the gaming side. Because a good positive price cut (say, $100) means that it puts a bunch of Blu-Ray players into the "why bother" price categtory (practically all Profile 2.0 players are $250+...), and I'm sure Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp, etc., will be really happy to have to be forced to cut prices in order to sell product. This could seriously impact Blu-Ray sales if people start to believe it's not only "just a Sony format", but a "Sony PS3 format" as people think you must have a PS3 to play them (as they're the only player left on the market).
So Sony needs to keep the price high to keep other manufacturers making Blu-Ray players, but they need to reduce prices to compete with the other game consoles.
Blu-Ray vs. Gaming - what does Sony want to promote more?
Maybe what Sony should do is release a "slim PS3" for $200 that only plays games, no movies. Its not like there aren't enough PS3 models and features that differ between them...
Actually, I recall several times where an SLI solution would perform pretty damn close to the high-end card, for less price. Or even in one case, the SLI cards outperformed the super-expensive high-end card. Sometimes one has to step back and see if two (or more!) mid-range cards can outdo a single high-end card, which costs 2-3x more money.
Actually, I believe nVidia cards can do a similar thing - work with different chips. This is typically done with their onboard graphics chipsets plus an offboard GPU. The reason I know this - there was a *HUGE* uproar when it was discovered the MacBook Pros didn't have this in MacOS X. Not sure if it works under Windows on the same machine (i.e., is it a hardware problem, or just a software driver issue?).
Check out Cydia and jailbreaking. I believe Cydia supports payment for apps as well, as an unofficial app store.
Of course, given what iTunes has these days, there is a chance they'll carry it, especially with the parental ratings system in place.
But if not, Cydia is your friend. The market's smaller since it requires jailbreaks, but it's easy enough to do, and Cydia is easy enough to use. For a developer, it's a pretty front end to apt-get.
No, it'll be an excuse for an ISP to give you a /64, but firewall out all but the number of addresses you get unless you pay for more.
And servers will still be banned - there's not enough bandwidth upstream from most connections to handle everyone serving something (last mile problem).
Everyone thinks IPv6 is the magic savior - it'll enforce net neutrality, it'll prevent your PC from getting infected, it'll solve the public IP issue, it'll solve NAT issues, it'll have QoS for real, blah blah blah.
Sure IPv6 has it all. But I doubt any ISP will do business any differently with IPv6 than otherwise. In fact, they'll just salivate that any caps will be reached a bit quicker because of the increased IPv6 header size. Mobile operators are probably salivating as well - 5 cents per kilobyte (not kiB), which includes the OTA headers, plus increased IPv6 header size, means the real payload per packet goes down, and more data usage results (== more $$$ - the incremental network cost for IPv6 is low to the network to support IPv6, but not you the user have to pay more for the same traffic since the amount of data you need to transfer increased).
I see IPv6 as allowing an ISP to ding people for more. "You set 20% of your packets last month to have QoS high priority, while your plan only allows 10%". While worms will have to do more work to infect hosts, they'll just be a lot smarter about checking hosts. And the home user, even if they got 1:1 IP mappings, will probably stick a nice firewall in front of their modem that blocks incoming packets. Cablemodems (not sure about ADSL) can also be blocked from recognizing more than N MAC addresses per boot, too, so you'll have to alias your NIC to have more IPs (how many home users can do THAT? And it makes routing so much more fun!).
Nothing will change, really, other than not being able to run out of IP addresses. Business as usual.
Hell, NAT has had one benefit - it's made firewalls a lot easier to configure because you don't have to open 20 ports to play a game like you used to just over a decade ago. Torrent clients seem to work fine using one port rather than one port per torrent like they used to. Online gaming seems to work just fine with 2 or 3 ports opened (or none - it was ironically easier to configure my PS3, Xbox360 and Wii to play online than my PC - and I have UPnP disabled!), and many protocols that required incoming connectivity got phased out or adapted (e.g. FTP). And the prevalence of ssh makes life a lot easier for remote access and poor-man's VPN stuff.
The Halo wiki has a list of a bunch of "vacations" you can take in Campaign mode to explore. Though, I think some of them are intentionally put there by Bungie knowing people will exploit every trick to try. Though, there are some that are kinda stupid and really just exploit the fact that once you're in Theatre mode, you have full access to the level and thus it's trivial to see every last bit by flying around. Though there are good ones available during play.
The nice thing in H3 is actually being able to get skulls at a mortal level of difficulty. I suck at games, but like Halo (and Half-Life), so the best I can do is Normal which I find can be ... difficult. Though I think Halo3 seems to be slightly easier - I finished the campaign the first time and going through getting skulls, I don't die so often.
(I guess I've seen every Master Chief death animation already, though there are a few amusing ones like being thrown twirling halfway across the map).
That's about the real problem - non-mass-market board games tend to be only available at either game stores, or online. These days, online is your best bet - the game store I frequent is quite popular as it's one of the few online for Canada (Craving for a Game) - especially since it's one of the few on the West Coast.
In the US, Amazon.com tends to have the games, and if not, eBay and the like. BoardGameGeek tends to have links to eBay searches that have those games. However, nothing online can really replace (I found) the B&M store. Craving for a Game is near me, so I visit it often enough that the proprietor knows me and what I like, so I have a personal recommendation engine (and he has game rentals plus in-store trials, so you can see if a game is to your liking, or wait for game night and play against others - he supplies the games (or you can too), and everyone comes and plays.
Also, if you're in the high-tech field, it's a good way to spend a lunch hour "offline" and away from the screen - depending on the size of your company, you can easily get the requisite 4+ people (at one point we often had to have two games going). The only downside is this eliminates every game that claimes to take 45 minutes or longer (we find that if a game claims 60 minutes per game, it's probably closer to 75-90).
The good news is that the bigger games (Catan, Carcassonne, etc) tend to be available at larger stores (especially large comic book/toy stores). But there are a lot of real gems that you'll only find at dedicated stores.
Our group has settled on two games consistently (but we do try others to mix it up) - The Seven Seals (aka Zing! in English, but its German/French name is Seven Seals), and Frank's Zoo (a delightfully simple game that has a good element of strategy, and is close to Big 2).