Paramount views Star Trek as a money mint...
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Star Trek Fragrances
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Star Trek lately has all been about the money, so I'm not terribly surprised. Especially since Star Trek is a wholly-owned property of Paramount. After all, why does everyone seem to have a different Starfleet "uniform" even though they're practically in the same time period? Or how even one series can change uniforms. It gets fans to buy more licensed goods.
Anyhow... any good fan would know what my/. userid means... so they need these fragrances:
"Scent of a Klingon" (useful to get some spare cubes around you, and other places where there is just too many people invading your personal space). eau de Worf" - lilacs, naturally!
I'm sorry, I just don't buy this whole thing. x86 in the browser? Ugh... Because all that we need is to further promote an archaic instruction set that won't die because of all the pre-existing code compiled for it. An instruction set that was finally starting to loosen its grip as the industry worked toward more abstract solutions.
Better yet, we don't have any existing code for this system yet. It won't run ActiveX, so there's no code loss there. And now we're going to have to put the equivalent of Bochs or Qemu now into every browser on mobile devices? If you thought no Flash on the iPhone was bad, now all mobile browsers have to have Bochs/Qemu so they can run these plugins.
LLVM would be better. Or since these mobile systems are predominantly ARM, and ARM is more or less the predominant architecture everywhere (outselling x86 CPUs mostly because ARM is highly embeddable), why not make x86 emulate the ARM? x86 systems run faster than the vast majority of ARM systems, and would tax the x86 CPU less than a 400MHz one in say, the iPhone.
And really - why? Do we really need another Java equivalent?
I wouldn't be surprised if the Atom profit margin is higher than an average desktop CPU (obviously not the $1000+ i7s, but I doubt margins are high on the typical low-clocked dual-cores that compete with Athlons). Sure, the profit per sale is lower, but it they sell more then that compensates.
I have one Atom system here already, and I'm thinking of building a couple more in the next year because they're cheap, run Linux decently and use relatively little power; I wouldn't buy three Core 2s in a year.
Actually, Atom chips in quantity are really cheap. We're talking in the range of $12 each for the low-end models, and maybe $70 for the super high-end ones. The margins aren't huge.
In fact, Ars Technica speculates the reason for outsourcing to TSMC is that fabs are expensive, and making large volumes of low-margin parts (that may or may not sell) may not pay for the expensive shiny new 32nm fab Intel is rolling out. Instead, Intel will let TSMC do the investment in their fabs, and have them amortize the cost of the fabs among all its customers. Intel's 32nm fab will be used to make higher margin chips. If the new 32nm Atoms sell poorly, then Intel just reduces the quantity ordered from TSMC. If they take off and Intel finds their 32nm fab has spare capacity, hey, make more.
Basically, Intel's betting that people will want higher-margin higher end chips, and that the whole market won't suddenly collapse into purchasing Atoms only. Thus, rather than risk making Atoms on an expensive new fab line that may not sell, make chips that will probably sell and pay off the fab sooner. TSMC's 32nm fabs will be paid for partly by Intel, and mostly by all the other customers of TSMC.
I could be terribly wrong, but for playing media you won't need video acceleration. Last time I tested, geexbox worked like charm using mplayer with Framebuffer on retarded 800MHz motherboards and came with mere 8MB distro..(that was 3 years ago).
For playing back SDTV, probably - you only needed a 300MHz processor to do DVD decoding entirely in software. But start amping it up to 720p/1080p video, and you're talking serious power. The simpler formats (e.g., MPEG4 ASP) may do just fine with a couple of GHz, but Blu-Ray and the like require serious hardware.
At the very least, the video card should support color-space conversion (video surfaces) - so the player only needs to output YUV video to the surface, and the video translates that to normal RGB for you. This is probably adequate for the majority of torrented videos and flash video out there. Blu-Ray pretty much requires a good video card as the players tend to do all the h.264 decoding in hardware - a CPU just can't keep up.
Alas, color-space conversion isn't possible with a normal framebuffer. Even players like VLC and mplayer will take advantage of a video surface if they can.
Other than the cellphone thing, can you give any examples? Otherwise, I would it consider the above explanation to be an Apple Apologist's explanation.
It's a photo of a Japanese cellphone, complete with a ton of photos showing the UI. I think the homescreen says it all - 20 icons (and more if that thing on the edge is a scroll bar), but nothing other than an icon showing what function that icon will invoke.
In the case of the G1 you can just buy the app using a non-dev phone with a root exploit installed, then copy the files off and install them on your dev phone. Viola - DRM bypassed. Sure, they could make it harder, but you could always patch the app. You could make the phone require signed apps, but then you could patch the firmware. There is always an expoit - even if it involves an electron microscope. The device is implemented in actual physical hardware, and if you have the means to take it apart you can do so. The only thing you can do is make it so hard that it isn't worth it for some $5 application.
Actually, it's more a case of "Let's buy this app for $5, copy it off my phone, then return it." Voila, no breaking of DRM, and one free app!
The issue is really the intersection of "24 hour return period" (pretty much unique to the Android Store) and users being able to basically get apps for free by buying them, copying them off, then returning them. DRM that protects copying the app from one phone to another won't work, since it runs on the same phone. Heck, if you properly diff the OS, even if the "return" removed the key, you can probably restore the key back. Or just grab the entire image off the device prior to returning, return, then restore the OS.
It should be noted that this exact thing happened to iTunes as well - people deauthorized their computers, then restored their iTunes keys from a backup, and could listen to their DRM-protected music just fine.
As for why ARM would do both - the RVDS is a high-performance ARM compiler and ARM's code, so they'll put a lot of optimizations into it. (Ignore the ARM/GNU compatibility - it's because ARM wisely thought up of an ABI and calling convention that most people subscribe to - unlike the x86 where you can have cdecl, stdcall, fastcall, pascal, among others - there's only one real one in ARM).
But ARM also realizes that there's a competitive advantage to having GCC as well - having an easily available set of development tools can only encourage others to adopt your platform. (Which is probably how ARM catapulted from "just another CPU architecture" into more or less the top-selling processor architecture around, outselling even x86 - heck, an x86 PC probably already has a few ARM cores in it).
That said, GCC 2.9.x on ARM basically sucked as a compiler - when a speed up can be obtained by changing a test for zero (i.e., "if (variable == 0)") into the more usual form ("if (!variable)"), something's wrong. I believe GCC 3.x and 4.x are now very much improved these days because of it. (In the end, I actually managed to rewrite the code to get rid of that...).
They fell into the same trap as Microsoft with the original Xbox: the modded console is so much better in every way that it becomes almost mandatory to mod it, and once there piracy is just a click or two away.
Less than a click away.
The #1 feature I use of a modded PSP? The ability to run UMD dumps off memory stick rather than the slow, noisy UMD drive. Sure I dump my games, then compress them to fit more per memory stick, but now it's a triviality to go from legit-dumped games to piracy.
(And modern modded firmware makes it really easy to dump - USB mode with the drive selected, and up shows a nice.ISO file ready for copying).
Sony should admit it, and let people dump games legitimately from UMD to a memory stick. Wrap it up in tons of DRM so it can't work on another PSP (they can always dump it again), and require the original disc, a la the Xbox360. Then again, we have a bastardization of this on the PS3, where games have to be "installed" onto the hard disk.
-It's still Navy property that they've never bothered to finish recovering (the excuse that's being used after a North Carolina man recovered pieces of an FG-1, a Goodyear-built Corsair. Never mind that the Navy last visited the crash site in 1945.)
I don't know for certain, but unlike regular seafaring vessels that sink (and thus become the property of whomever finds it), vessels owned by a country (e.g., military) remain the property of their respective governments. Even if you find some British sucken vessel, if it belonged to the Crown, it and all the contents (gold, etc) are still the property of the Crown.
And they retain that ownership indefinitely. So even if it turns into a pile of rust, that pile of rust still belongs to the government.
Did they though? Their technology is not exactly widely used...
RDRAM may not be widely used, but the technologies they claim patents on have, which include stuff like DDR and QDR signalling, which are used everywhere.
And let's not forget that one of the world's best selling consoles uses RDRAM as well - Playstation 2 has 32MB of RDRAM. Its successor also has 256MB of RDRAM as well.
As for the memory manufacturers forcing prices down - given the price discrepancy between DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM, there was no way the memory dumping could've easily forced RDRAM prices to be significantly (4x-8x) higher than the equivalent DDR-SDRAM. A better part of a grand for 128MB of RDRAM (while the DDR version sold for under $200) around 10 years ago? DDR prices were much in line with old SDRAM pricing in the days - while RDRAM prices were really out of this world.
Firstly, it just bypasses iTunes in loading new music onto your phone - there seems be a not-inconspicuous "BUY NOW" button, which I would guess would take you to the iTunes Store so you can... purchase the song!
I've seen similar apps on the store, GameRock being the one I use. It seemed appealing enough - access to all the music game's library of music (Guitar Hero (1..n), Rock Band 1/2, etc), but honestly, it sucks.
Firstly, you can listen to the setlists contained in each game, yes, but they're shuffled. You can only go next track and pause (and the pause only works for a little while - pause too long and you'll lose the song). Oh yeah, there's a nice big BUY NOW button so you can purchase the track. You can browse the setlist, but that's only if you want to buy a different track than the one currently playing. It's slow switching tracks (several seconds to pull new track information, then several more seconds to start playing), ugh. And the quality's fairly crappy too - like 128kbps (or lower) MP3.
It's a great way to sample an artist's other works, I'll admit, but it certainly doesn't beat actually having the song loaded on your iPod. The random shuffle, the slow next track make it useful as say, a radio that plays one artist only (or in my case, music from one game), but not much more.
The BUY NOW would explain why Apple freely approves these kinds of programs - more iTunes store revenue.
Storylines: Half Life 2 and its various episodes had a good story. But to be honest, I spent most of the cutscenes where I still had control jumping around bored to tears because I either wanted to get on and kill the scum, or I wanted the lift/door to activate so I could move on. And every "surprise" where you suddenly come under attack, I'm sitting there from the start of the cutscene poised in a nice safe position waiting while the character reel through thirty seconds of plot before the action starts... I *know* that those tunnels are going to fill up with a bunch of aliens at any moment, but they kept on yabbering. The fun of swinging a crane to take out the baddies, or the fear of seeing those stalkers come over the tops of the trees did ten times more than all the plot elements put together for me. Gameplay over story, wins every time.
Perhaps it's different audiences - it looks like the FPS genre has really split into two subgenres. There's the mindless "lets kill/snipe/hunt/shoot the bad guys" (e.g., Doom, Quake) and "let's do a story about why you're killing/sniping/hunting/shooting bad guys" (e.g., Half-Life series, Halo). Optionally, the latter might add a bit of strategy and tactics to it.
Me, I got over the mindless shooting around the Quake 2/3 era - it was fun for a while to blow off steam, but then I got sick shooting the same things over and over again. From then, I never really cared about the FPS genre (partly becausae it ended up being a mere benchmark for video card supremacy). I then picked up an Xbox really late into the game, and found Halo in the bargain bin. I have to admit, I was skeptical, but hey, it was $10 and people said it was good for an FPS. I enjoyed that quite well and became a Halo fan. Then I got a good PC and a coworker told me to get Half-Life 2, and I started enjoying that as well. And heck, you can probably classify HL2:e1 and HL2:e2 as "more of the same", but the story is intriguing and enjoyable (to me, and many others).
For me, story is important - not only do the pauses help one catch their breath (I can't take continuous action, sorry), but it helps me relate.
To each one's own. Some want to blast bad guys all day, others want a meaning to their blasting. I don't consider myself an FPS player at all, but the Half-Life series and Halo I'd play again and again because I enjoyed their storylines, and it appealed to my senses that it wasn't a 100% shoot-fest. (And yes, I found Portal very interesting.)
I was recently in Las Vegas and it seems to me that an application like this would only find use in the smaller casinos. The bigger ones use card shuffling machines that I think continuously reshuffle the deck. After a hand the dealer puts the cards back into the machine which reshuffles the decks (I think they hold several decks). Anybody else know if this is how the machine works? Some of the smaller casinos offer 1 deck Black Jack with no machine used for better player odds. The smaller casinos need to draw more players in and have to offer better odds. These would help here.
There are several shufflers around - one is a "continuous shuffler" - basically a circular rake (or one on a belt) that can take cards that moves back and forth randomly. Dealer inserts cards at the top, and they get inserted into the rake one by one, and pulls cards from the bottom, whatever happens to be there. Another kind simply takes cards and shuffles them periodically.
But the usual trick is to simply shuffle after every round - the tables only have one deck in play (and a pre-shuffled deck standing ready to keep play fast). When the round ends, that old deck is tossed into the shuffler, and the new deck dealt. This completely screws up counting. Smaller casinos simply use less decks - turns out more decks in the shoe make card counting more successful.
Also, while card counting itself isn't illegal, using an aid is (mechanical, electronic, etc). But it's easy to spot card counters (the people monitoring the eyes in the sky can count cards too). Heck, I'm surprised they haven't equipped the tables with RFID readers and use cards with RFID in them so a computer at the table can maintain the count and watch the bets and point out potential card counters.
And Blackjack is one of the worst games for a casino - the odds are very low. They only carry it because it's popular. Someone doing basic strategy already has cut down the house advantage to less than half a percent - a very poor return. Card counting tips that into the player's favor.
Finally - do casinos allow cellphones to be used at tables? At best, this warning is just a heads up to people who'll use the application that aids to card counting is illegal, but I suppose if one was trying to learn, they could use it at home or in small groups.
The problem of communicating the count has remained though - but since card counting is a probability play anyways, communicating the rough hotness and coldness of the deck is sufficient.
In short, the iPhone app is nothing new - many people have done this in the past, often with more elaborate contraptions suitable for the lower level of technology in the day...
Lunar range finder. Get a green laser pointer and modulate it with a digital stream. Mount a beamsplitter on a little telescope and point it at one of the Apollo landing sites. Send the laser pointer beam out the telescope, pick up the return signal with a photodiode at the eyepiece. With digital correlation, you can measure the distance to the Moon in only a few minutes of integration. This may be a little ambitious for a 36 hour project, but it makes a dandy six-week independent project. As a side bonus, have them calculate the strength of the return signal. It turns out that the experiment wouldn't work without the retroreflectors planted there by the astronauts.
I believe that is quite out of reach for a first-year physics undergrad - mostly because the laser power needed is extremely high (I've heard easily in the kW range, or 10's of kW), and the amount of photons you get back, literally, is countable by hand (on the order of hundreds of photons), and that's by hitting the retroreflectors. If you aimed elsewhere, the photons you get back can be counted on one hand.
Perhaps a good idea is, if you have s ham handy, is to build from components (resistors, diodes, capacitors, inductors, etc.) a VHF radio rig and use that to talk to the ISS. 36 hours is enough for a small group of people to research the necessary basics (radio plans are common - adapt them as necessary), build it and associated equipment (antennas...), and test. There's nothing complex about it, but it's an interesting project. And a reasonably equipped physics lab has all the necessary equipment for testing. The good part is that it can be scaled easily - if VHF seems too daunting, go for a simple QRP CW rig and try to contact someone on another continent. If that's too easy, go for a SSB design and slightly more power, and do phone. Or if VHF is doable, but the ISS seems daunting, contact a local VHF repeater.
Yup, that would be good, or at least require them to include an adaptor in the box. The other thing that they should sort out is getting these phones to be able to recharge with any USB power plug. The iPhone and the iPod are guilty here, requiring you to buy special 'iPod' capable power adapters. Then again it could be the plug manufacturers for not wiring all the lines up in the USB portion of the plug.
Actually, that is the problem. A USB charger doesn't just supply 5V on Vbus and that's it. A USB device that's properly spec'ed can't draw more than 500mA from a USB port, but given some USB devices, that could mean it takes days to charge via USB, or even, it doesn't charge at all. (There are devices out there that draw more than 500mA when busy, so it's actually possible to drain the battery while in use.)
To cope with this, there is a "USB Charging Specification" that specifies how to identify the charger, so devices can do a quick detection, and if it is a charger, start drawing 800mA, 1A, 2A or however much they want to to ensure a fast charge, or even slow charging while busy. This is done via a specially selected set of resistors hooked to Vbus and ground to the D+ and D- lines. The charger itself shorts D+ to D-, and whe connected, instead of the idle state that is expected (D+/D- low - pulled by weak pulldowns from the host), it detects a "1" state on both pins. The device then knows it's safe to draw whatever it wants.
Oh yeah, unconfigured USB devices can only draw 100mA for a limited time - long enough to charge its battery so it can identify itself, at which point it must disconnect, boot up, and identify itself, at which point, it can draw 100mA or 500mA from the port (depending on what the bus can supply).
Cheap devices can use just 5V on Vbus and charge. Proper USB drives that pass USB certification can't, and if they attempt to draw more than 500mA from a host port on a PC, it's a fail. Hence schemes like these so they can pass certification, but still be able to "fast charge" properly. It's surprisingly difficult to do USB power "properly."
USB 3.0 devices can have 150mA unconfigured or 900mA (I believe) configured.
On a similar note, I think it's wrong that Apple is making so much advertising off of iPhone apps. If a particular app in a commercial sells the iPhone, shouldn't they get some of the profits? And have you seen the walls of an Apple Store?
Actually, it's probably closer to quid-pro-quo. Apple sells more iPhones/iPod Touches, and the app featured in the ad (which was probably wholly developed and paid for by Apple) gets free marketing and they actually do sell significantly more.
I'm sure the app authors have right of first refusal to have their app show up in an Apple ad, but it appears to go both ways - Apple sells more, and the app's developer sells more. There's probably a huge queue now for people who want their app featured in an Apple ad. And all the developer had to do was pay Apple $100. Given the amount of flotsam and jetsam in the iTunes store, anything that gets your app out helps...
It's been a while since I was reading about the iPhone SDK but IIRC it's both possible and recommended to write your apps in a resolution-independent manner although I'm sure there are people out there doing things that would make Apple's engineers wonder if they're deliberately trying to make sure their apps AREN'T resolution independent...
That's practically a definitive. One thing that's a truism in the developer world is, developers are stupid. They will do things you don't wnat them to. Windows has a huge pile of application patches (yes, Windows may patch binaries!) in order to make it run, because the developer does something stupid. It's so bad that Microsoft has teams dedicated to testing applications because developers are so bad. And that's not including stuff like i18n compatibility.
Apple has the same issue, but their traditional stance is basically "if you're doing stupid things, you deserve it when things stop working". They will make sure that if you do things properly, it should go fine, but taking shortcuts or not doing stuff you need to do, and they won't bend over backwards to make it work.
The Intel SSD (and all SSDs) are made up of big addressable blocks. On the Intel SSD these are 64KiB in length. When you read or write to the drive the internal controller actually reads or writes an entire 64KiB block. A simple change to 1 byte means a read of the entire 64KiB block that byte is in, a change of the data and then a write of 64KiB. If the filesystem isn't flash-aware you can suffer a theoretical performance hit of being 65536 times slower because of this.
So what you really need is a filesystem that stores files in 64KiB blocks and groups reads and writes to the same blocks together as 1 operation.
Actually, NAND flash comes in 2 block sizes - small block (16kiB/block, 512bytes/page, 32 pages/block), and large block (128kiB/block, 2048bytes/pages, 64 pages/block).
Also, in NAND flash, a "write" operation can turn a "1" bit to a "0" bit. An "erase" operation turns a "0" bit into a "1" bit. Writes can work at the bit level, erases at the block level. (Though, large block NAND can NOT be partial-page programmed, so you must write 2048 bytes at once, but you can read all 2048 bytes, flip one bit, then write it all back). This characteristic is used by the flash management routines in order to manage the flash block. Marking pages as "discard" or "ready for erase" is done by flipping a 1 bit to 0 since that's easy. You can write a block partially, so you don't have to incur a huge 128kiB write always.
Given this, it's a block device, so you can't write 1 byte anyhow - you must write the sector size, which is emulated as 512 bytes. What normally happens is that the SSD will mark a page as "dirty" to indicate it's not to be used, and remap that page's contents onto a new page elsewhere, thus only performing a 2048 byte write (plus 64 out of band bytes).
Now, what happens when all the blocks are used? The flash routines have to erase a block, but before erasing a block, it has to make sure all the pages within it are "dirty". If there are non-dirty pages, they're copied to another block, and when all non-dirty pages are copied, that block is erased. If your access pattern is such that all the blocks have non-dirty pages, it takes a little while to actually move all the data around to get blocks that can be erased. Do enough random I/O, and this can happen quite easily.
IMHO, if the game has a timer and you lose when it runs out then 30 seconds is long time to be stuck. But if it is a game with specific puzzles where when you have solved it once you know the solution and no timer, then spending 30 seconds thinking should be minimum for solving a level.
But consider the play environment - unless you're playing your iPhone for hours at a time, you will probably have use periods of anywhere from 10-30 minutes (during commuting) or 1-5 minutes (waiting for something). For the commuters, they probably spend several minutes trying to find the solution, but for the rest trying to play a quick game, getting stuck for 30 seconds is all the time you have. Then you come up against another quick break, and spend another 10-15 seconds reviewing the stuff you did in the last 30 second break. Frustration builds fast when you're stuck on the same spot for the past week if you're only playing in quick breaks.
The iPhone has an interesting set of use cases - there will be periods where people can spend hours on it, periods where there'll be short breaks, and periods where there are quick breaks.
Offer variable hints - easy - hit it as often as you want. Medium - N hints every M minutes (real-time - so if you get stuck now, maybe in an hour you can get a hint (the next time you take a break). Hard - no hints at all.
Probably because of confusion? Palm and PalmOS have gone together (and make sense together). Now they introduce a new device running a new OS. Next Palm announces the death of PalmOS. Unless you're techie enough to know that the Pre runs "WebOS" and not "PalmOS", it would appear that Palm is abandoning their OS.
Anyhow, I think it realy means Palm is abandoning PalmOS. PalmOS is maintained by Access and is part of the Access Linux Platform nowadays... and Access has a nice VM to run PalmOS on the Nokia tablets. Great for those of us stuck with some irreplacable PalmOS apps. (And while there's probably a billion replacements for them, they lack stuff like the speed or other things...).
Am I the only one who remembers the "ANY" stickers that were usually placed on the ENTER key and were specifically designed for (l)users who kept asking that question? When I first saw them, someone had to explain to me that yes it's a serious product, it's not a joke item or a gag gift. I think I looked at the world a bit differently after that.
If I ever marvel at how even otherwise intelligent people sometimes shut down all common sense and ability to reason when they are in front of a computer, this is an example of what I'm talking about. That they wouldn't even consider whether "any" might be an adjective, or that the sentence should be written differently if it were intended to mean a key bearing the label of "ANY" just blows my mind.
Well, you have to remember that computers also have buttons people have never seen before - especially on a keyboard. Think keys like "Ctrl", "Alt", "PrtSc", "SysRq", "NumLk", "ScrLk" and the like. It's entirely possible believe that "ANY" refers to some computer-y term rather than literally, any (and in most cases, any key won't work - keys like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, the locks, other modifiers (Windows, Menu, AltGr, Compose, blah blah blah) probably won't make the message go away). A slightly better wording might be "Press a key co continue". The literalists will probably type "a", the pedants will try the modifiers and complain, and the rest of us will hit space or something.
Indeed. That's why the article says "The problem for ARM", not "the problem for everyone".
Happy though you are running Linux, ARM themselves would love for the other 99% of the market to be able to run their OS of choice on an ARM processor.
You could argue that it would be nice if this could be achieved by moving people to Linux. ARM, however, just want people to buy their chips in large quantities, and don't particularly care why they're doing it.
I'd actually argue otherwise. I'd suspect the vast majority of code out there is for ARM. Also, I'm fairly certain for every x86 CPU sold, 3 or 4 ARM based CPUs are sold.
ARM is quite pervasive these days (one of most successful offshoots of the Newton - while ARM existed before Newton, Apple made it really, really, popular). Your PC probably has several ARM processors in it - running everything from the Bluetooth and WiFi chipsets to the controllers on your hard and optical drives. Your cellphone probably has two of 'em, one providing the UI and the other running the radio part.
No, the problem isn't ARM. The problem with ARM is it isn't x86, and people want x86 to run full desktop Windows, not cut-down OSes Windows CE or Windows Mobile. Then want to run Office, their games, blah blah blah and forget about alternatives. We've seen this with netbooks already - the Linux ones, while initally popular, gave way to XP Home as people started trying Linux, finding out it didn't run their programs (despite already having functional equivalents, e.g., OO.o), and returning them. For the vast majority of people, if it doesn't run Windows, they don't want it. ARM-based Linux machines can run practically everything x86 Linux does (except closed-source stuff), but if people already refuse x86 Linux...
It should be noted that VPForums.ORG is not the official forums (which until the server died, was VPForums.COM). The ORG site is run by someone trying to capitalize on the confusion - it was only created very recently (when the COM site went down). In fact, the community is quite hostile against it because of the confusion factor - it looks official, but isn't, especially since it popped up quickly after COM died.
Stick with the Pinball Nirvana site instead - most of the COM members have moved somewhat over there.
I do not have iTunes or Quicktime installed on my computer because apparently Windows 2000 is not shiny enough for watching mov files./me thinks it is drm related
1) www.apple.com 2) Click on "iPod + iTunes" button at the top 3) Click on "Download iTunes" 4) Scroll down, just under the Spanish option, you see, OMG - "Windows 2000 Users". If you have NoScript enabled, the link may be obscured behind the text, but it's at the left column at the bottom. Not at the very bottom of the page, though. If javascript is enabled, it's plainly visible.
It's not iTunes 8, but they're apparently still supporting iTunes 7.5.2.
Anyhow, remember to right-click on the QuickTime icon and set your QuickTime preferences to not startup at windows startup to eliminate that annoying process.
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Star Trek lately has all been about the money, so I'm not terribly surprised. Especially since Star Trek is a wholly-owned property of Paramount. After all, why does everyone seem to have a different Starfleet "uniform" even though they're practically in the same time period? Or how even one series can change uniforms. It gets fans to buy more licensed goods.
Anyhow... any good fan would know what my /. userid means... so they need these fragrances:
"Scent of a Klingon" (useful to get some spare cubes around you, and other places where there is just too many people invading your personal space).
eau de Worf" - lilacs, naturally!
Better yet, we don't have any existing code for this system yet. It won't run ActiveX, so there's no code loss there. And now we're going to have to put the equivalent of Bochs or Qemu now into every browser on mobile devices? If you thought no Flash on the iPhone was bad, now all mobile browsers have to have Bochs/Qemu so they can run these plugins.
LLVM would be better. Or since these mobile systems are predominantly ARM, and ARM is more or less the predominant architecture everywhere (outselling x86 CPUs mostly because ARM is highly embeddable), why not make x86 emulate the ARM? x86 systems run faster than the vast majority of ARM systems, and would tax the x86 CPU less than a 400MHz one in say, the iPhone.
And really - why? Do we really need another Java equivalent?
Actually, Atom chips in quantity are really cheap. We're talking in the range of $12 each for the low-end models, and maybe $70 for the super high-end ones. The margins aren't huge.
In fact, Ars Technica speculates the reason for outsourcing to TSMC is that fabs are expensive, and making large volumes of low-margin parts (that may or may not sell) may not pay for the expensive shiny new 32nm fab Intel is rolling out. Instead, Intel will let TSMC do the investment in their fabs, and have them amortize the cost of the fabs among all its customers. Intel's 32nm fab will be used to make higher margin chips. If the new 32nm Atoms sell poorly, then Intel just reduces the quantity ordered from TSMC. If they take off and Intel finds their 32nm fab has spare capacity, hey, make more.
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/03/atom-cant-feed-rd-monster-intel-outsources-chips-to-tsmc.ars
Basically, Intel's betting that people will want higher-margin higher end chips, and that the whole market won't suddenly collapse into purchasing Atoms only. Thus, rather than risk making Atoms on an expensive new fab line that may not sell, make chips that will probably sell and pay off the fab sooner. TSMC's 32nm fabs will be paid for partly by Intel, and mostly by all the other customers of TSMC.
For playing back SDTV, probably - you only needed a 300MHz processor to do DVD decoding entirely in software. But start amping it up to 720p/1080p video, and you're talking serious power. The simpler formats (e.g., MPEG4 ASP) may do just fine with a couple of GHz, but Blu-Ray and the like require serious hardware.
At the very least, the video card should support color-space conversion (video surfaces) - so the player only needs to output YUV video to the surface, and the video translates that to normal RGB for you. This is probably adequate for the majority of torrented videos and flash video out there. Blu-Ray pretty much requires a good video card as the players tend to do all the h.264 decoding in hardware - a CPU just can't keep up.
Alas, color-space conversion isn't possible with a normal framebuffer. Even players like VLC and mplayer will take advantage of a video surface if they can.
How about this? http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-come-from-japan
It's a photo of a Japanese cellphone, complete with a ton of photos showing the UI. I think the homescreen says it all - 20 icons (and more if that thing on the edge is a scroll bar), but nothing other than an icon showing what function that icon will invoke.
Actually, it's more a case of "Let's buy this app for $5, copy it off my phone, then return it." Voila, no breaking of DRM, and one free app!
The issue is really the intersection of "24 hour return period" (pretty much unique to the Android Store) and users being able to basically get apps for free by buying them, copying them off, then returning them. DRM that protects copying the app from one phone to another won't work, since it runs on the same phone. Heck, if you properly diff the OS, even if the "return" removed the key, you can probably restore the key back. Or just grab the entire image off the device prior to returning, return, then restore the OS.
It should be noted that this exact thing happened to iTunes as well - people deauthorized their computers, then restored their iTunes keys from a backup, and could listen to their DRM-protected music just fine.
ARM may have put money into GCC, but... ARM also sells their own compiler - RealView Development Suite (RVDS).
As for why ARM would do both - the RVDS is a high-performance ARM compiler and ARM's code, so they'll put a lot of optimizations into it. (Ignore the ARM/GNU compatibility - it's because ARM wisely thought up of an ABI and calling convention that most people subscribe to - unlike the x86 where you can have cdecl, stdcall, fastcall, pascal, among others - there's only one real one in ARM).
But ARM also realizes that there's a competitive advantage to having GCC as well - having an easily available set of development tools can only encourage others to adopt your platform. (Which is probably how ARM catapulted from "just another CPU architecture" into more or less the top-selling processor architecture around, outselling even x86 - heck, an x86 PC probably already has a few ARM cores in it).
That said, GCC 2.9.x on ARM basically sucked as a compiler - when a speed up can be obtained by changing a test for zero (i.e., "if (variable == 0)") into the more usual form ("if (!variable)"), something's wrong. I believe GCC 3.x and 4.x are now very much improved these days because of it. (In the end, I actually managed to rewrite the code to get rid of that...).
Less than a click away.
The #1 feature I use of a modded PSP? The ability to run UMD dumps off memory stick rather than the slow, noisy UMD drive. Sure I dump my games, then compress them to fit more per memory stick, but now it's a triviality to go from legit-dumped games to piracy.
(And modern modded firmware makes it really easy to dump - USB mode with the drive selected, and up shows a nice .ISO file ready for copying).
Sony should admit it, and let people dump games legitimately from UMD to a memory stick. Wrap it up in tons of DRM so it can't work on another PSP (they can always dump it again), and require the original disc, a la the Xbox360. Then again, we have a bastardization of this on the PS3, where games have to be "installed" onto the hard disk.
I don't know for certain, but unlike regular seafaring vessels that sink (and thus become the property of whomever finds it), vessels owned by a country (e.g., military) remain the property of their respective governments. Even if you find some British sucken vessel, if it belonged to the Crown, it and all the contents (gold, etc) are still the property of the Crown.
And they retain that ownership indefinitely. So even if it turns into a pile of rust, that pile of rust still belongs to the government.
RDRAM may not be widely used, but the technologies they claim patents on have, which include stuff like DDR and QDR signalling, which are used everywhere.
And let's not forget that one of the world's best selling consoles uses RDRAM as well - Playstation 2 has 32MB of RDRAM. Its successor also has 256MB of RDRAM as well.
As for the memory manufacturers forcing prices down - given the price discrepancy between DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM, there was no way the memory dumping could've easily forced RDRAM prices to be significantly (4x-8x) higher than the equivalent DDR-SDRAM. A better part of a grand for 128MB of RDRAM (while the DDR version sold for under $200) around 10 years ago? DDR prices were much in line with old SDRAM pricing in the days - while RDRAM prices were really out of this world.
Firstly, it just bypasses iTunes in loading new music onto your phone - there seems be a not-inconspicuous "BUY NOW" button, which I would guess would take you to the iTunes Store so you can... purchase the song!
I've seen similar apps on the store, GameRock being the one I use. It seemed appealing enough - access to all the music game's library of music (Guitar Hero (1..n), Rock Band 1/2, etc), but honestly, it sucks.
Firstly, you can listen to the setlists contained in each game, yes, but they're shuffled. You can only go next track and pause (and the pause only works for a little while - pause too long and you'll lose the song). Oh yeah, there's a nice big BUY NOW button so you can purchase the track. You can browse the setlist, but that's only if you want to buy a different track than the one currently playing. It's slow switching tracks (several seconds to pull new track information, then several more seconds to start playing), ugh. And the quality's fairly crappy too - like 128kbps (or lower) MP3.
It's a great way to sample an artist's other works, I'll admit, but it certainly doesn't beat actually having the song loaded on your iPod. The random shuffle, the slow next track make it useful as say, a radio that plays one artist only (or in my case, music from one game), but not much more.
The BUY NOW would explain why Apple freely approves these kinds of programs - more iTunes store revenue.
Perhaps it's different audiences - it looks like the FPS genre has really split into two subgenres. There's the mindless "lets kill/snipe/hunt/shoot the bad guys" (e.g., Doom, Quake) and "let's do a story about why you're killing/sniping/hunting/shooting bad guys" (e.g., Half-Life series, Halo). Optionally, the latter might add a bit of strategy and tactics to it.
Me, I got over the mindless shooting around the Quake 2/3 era - it was fun for a while to blow off steam, but then I got sick shooting the same things over and over again. From then, I never really cared about the FPS genre (partly becausae it ended up being a mere benchmark for video card supremacy). I then picked up an Xbox really late into the game, and found Halo in the bargain bin. I have to admit, I was skeptical, but hey, it was $10 and people said it was good for an FPS. I enjoyed that quite well and became a Halo fan. Then I got a good PC and a coworker told me to get Half-Life 2, and I started enjoying that as well. And heck, you can probably classify HL2:e1 and HL2:e2 as "more of the same", but the story is intriguing and enjoyable (to me, and many others).
For me, story is important - not only do the pauses help one catch their breath (I can't take continuous action, sorry), but it helps me relate.
To each one's own. Some want to blast bad guys all day, others want a meaning to their blasting. I don't consider myself an FPS player at all, but the Half-Life series and Halo I'd play again and again because I enjoyed their storylines, and it appealed to my senses that it wasn't a 100% shoot-fest. (And yes, I found Portal very interesting.)
There are several shufflers around - one is a "continuous shuffler" - basically a circular rake (or one on a belt) that can take cards that moves back and forth randomly. Dealer inserts cards at the top, and they get inserted into the rake one by one, and pulls cards from the bottom, whatever happens to be there. Another kind simply takes cards and shuffles them periodically.
But the usual trick is to simply shuffle after every round - the tables only have one deck in play (and a pre-shuffled deck standing ready to keep play fast). When the round ends, that old deck is tossed into the shuffler, and the new deck dealt. This completely screws up counting. Smaller casinos simply use less decks - turns out more decks in the shoe make card counting more successful.
Also, while card counting itself isn't illegal, using an aid is (mechanical, electronic, etc). But it's easy to spot card counters (the people monitoring the eyes in the sky can count cards too). Heck, I'm surprised they haven't equipped the tables with RFID readers and use cards with RFID in them so a computer at the table can maintain the count and watch the bets and point out potential card counters.
And Blackjack is one of the worst games for a casino - the odds are very low. They only carry it because it's popular. Someone doing basic strategy already has cut down the house advantage to less than half a percent - a very poor return. Card counting tips that into the player's favor.
Finally - do casinos allow cellphones to be used at tables? At best, this warning is just a heads up to people who'll use the application that aids to card counting is illegal, but I suppose if one was trying to learn, they could use it at home or in small groups.
The problem of communicating the count has remained though - but since card counting is a probability play anyways, communicating the rough hotness and coldness of the deck is sufficient.
In short, the iPhone app is nothing new - many people have done this in the past, often with more elaborate contraptions suitable for the lower level of technology in the day...
I believe that is quite out of reach for a first-year physics undergrad - mostly because the laser power needed is extremely high (I've heard easily in the kW range, or 10's of kW), and the amount of photons you get back, literally, is countable by hand (on the order of hundreds of photons), and that's by hitting the retroreflectors. If you aimed elsewhere, the photons you get back can be counted on one hand.
Perhaps a good idea is, if you have s ham handy, is to build from components (resistors, diodes, capacitors, inductors, etc.) a VHF radio rig and use that to talk to the ISS. 36 hours is enough for a small group of people to research the necessary basics (radio plans are common - adapt them as necessary), build it and associated equipment (antennas...), and test. There's nothing complex about it, but it's an interesting project. And a reasonably equipped physics lab has all the necessary equipment for testing. The good part is that it can be scaled easily - if VHF seems too daunting, go for a simple QRP CW rig and try to contact someone on another continent. If that's too easy, go for a SSB design and slightly more power, and do phone. Or if VHF is doable, but the ISS seems daunting, contact a local VHF repeater.
Actually, that is the problem. A USB charger doesn't just supply 5V on Vbus and that's it. A USB device that's properly spec'ed can't draw more than 500mA from a USB port, but given some USB devices, that could mean it takes days to charge via USB, or even, it doesn't charge at all. (There are devices out there that draw more than 500mA when busy, so it's actually possible to drain the battery while in use.)
To cope with this, there is a "USB Charging Specification" that specifies how to identify the charger, so devices can do a quick detection, and if it is a charger, start drawing 800mA, 1A, 2A or however much they want to to ensure a fast charge, or even slow charging while busy. This is done via a specially selected set of resistors hooked to Vbus and ground to the D+ and D- lines. The charger itself shorts D+ to D-, and whe connected, instead of the idle state that is expected (D+/D- low - pulled by weak pulldowns from the host), it detects a "1" state on both pins. The device then knows it's safe to draw whatever it wants.
Oh yeah, unconfigured USB devices can only draw 100mA for a limited time - long enough to charge its battery so it can identify itself, at which point it must disconnect, boot up, and identify itself, at which point, it can draw 100mA or 500mA from the port (depending on what the bus can supply).
Cheap devices can use just 5V on Vbus and charge. Proper USB drives that pass USB certification can't, and if they attempt to draw more than 500mA from a host port on a PC, it's a fail. Hence schemes like these so they can pass certification, but still be able to "fast charge" properly. It's surprisingly difficult to do USB power "properly."
USB 3.0 devices can have 150mA unconfigured or 900mA (I believe) configured.
Actually, it's probably closer to quid-pro-quo. Apple sells more iPhones/iPod Touches, and the app featured in the ad (which was probably wholly developed and paid for by Apple) gets free marketing and they actually do sell significantly more.
I'm sure the app authors have right of first refusal to have their app show up in an Apple ad, but it appears to go both ways - Apple sells more, and the app's developer sells more. There's probably a huge queue now for people who want their app featured in an Apple ad. And all the developer had to do was pay Apple $100. Given the amount of flotsam and jetsam in the iTunes store, anything that gets your app out helps...
That's practically a definitive. One thing that's a truism in the developer world is, developers are stupid. They will do things you don't wnat them to. Windows has a huge pile of application patches (yes, Windows may patch binaries!) in order to make it run, because the developer does something stupid. It's so bad that Microsoft has teams dedicated to testing applications because developers are so bad. And that's not including stuff like i18n compatibility.
Apple has the same issue, but their traditional stance is basically "if you're doing stupid things, you deserve it when things stop working". They will make sure that if you do things properly, it should go fine, but taking shortcuts or not doing stuff you need to do, and they won't bend over backwards to make it work.
Actually, NAND flash comes in 2 block sizes - small block (16kiB/block, 512bytes/page, 32 pages/block), and large block (128kiB/block, 2048bytes/pages, 64 pages/block).
Also, in NAND flash, a "write" operation can turn a "1" bit to a "0" bit. An "erase" operation turns a "0" bit into a "1" bit. Writes can work at the bit level, erases at the block level. (Though, large block NAND can NOT be partial-page programmed, so you must write 2048 bytes at once, but you can read all 2048 bytes, flip one bit, then write it all back). This characteristic is used by the flash management routines in order to manage the flash block. Marking pages as "discard" or "ready for erase" is done by flipping a 1 bit to 0 since that's easy. You can write a block partially, so you don't have to incur a huge 128kiB write always.
Given this, it's a block device, so you can't write 1 byte anyhow - you must write the sector size, which is emulated as 512 bytes. What normally happens is that the SSD will mark a page as "dirty" to indicate it's not to be used, and remap that page's contents onto a new page elsewhere, thus only performing a 2048 byte write (plus 64 out of band bytes).
Now, what happens when all the blocks are used? The flash routines have to erase a block, but before erasing a block, it has to make sure all the pages within it are "dirty". If there are non-dirty pages, they're copied to another block, and when all non-dirty pages are copied, that block is erased. If your access pattern is such that all the blocks have non-dirty pages, it takes a little while to actually move all the data around to get blocks that can be erased. Do enough random I/O, and this can happen quite easily.
But consider the play environment - unless you're playing your iPhone for hours at a time, you will probably have use periods of anywhere from 10-30 minutes (during commuting) or 1-5 minutes (waiting for something). For the commuters, they probably spend several minutes trying to find the solution, but for the rest trying to play a quick game, getting stuck for 30 seconds is all the time you have. Then you come up against another quick break, and spend another 10-15 seconds reviewing the stuff you did in the last 30 second break. Frustration builds fast when you're stuck on the same spot for the past week if you're only playing in quick breaks.
The iPhone has an interesting set of use cases - there will be periods where people can spend hours on it, periods where there'll be short breaks, and periods where there are quick breaks.
Offer variable hints - easy - hit it as often as you want. Medium - N hints every M minutes (real-time - so if you get stuck now, maybe in an hour you can get a hint (the next time you take a break). Hard - no hints at all.
Probably because of confusion? Palm and PalmOS have gone together (and make sense together). Now they introduce a new device running a new OS. Next Palm announces the death of PalmOS. Unless you're techie enough to know that the Pre runs "WebOS" and not "PalmOS", it would appear that Palm is abandoning their OS.
Anyhow, I think it realy means Palm is abandoning PalmOS. PalmOS is maintained by Access and is part of the Access Linux Platform nowadays... and Access has a nice VM to run PalmOS on the Nokia tablets. Great for those of us stuck with some irreplacable PalmOS apps. (And while there's probably a billion replacements for them, they lack stuff like the speed or other things...).
Well, you have to remember that computers also have buttons people have never seen before - especially on a keyboard. Think keys like "Ctrl", "Alt", "PrtSc", "SysRq", "NumLk", "ScrLk" and the like. It's entirely possible believe that "ANY" refers to some computer-y term rather than literally, any (and in most cases, any key won't work - keys like Shift, Ctrl, Alt, the locks, other modifiers (Windows, Menu, AltGr, Compose, blah blah blah) probably won't make the message go away). A slightly better wording might be "Press a key co continue". The literalists will probably type "a", the pedants will try the modifiers and complain, and the rest of us will hit space or something.
I'd actually argue otherwise. I'd suspect the vast majority of code out there is for ARM. Also, I'm fairly certain for every x86 CPU sold, 3 or 4 ARM based CPUs are sold.
ARM is quite pervasive these days (one of most successful offshoots of the Newton - while ARM existed before Newton, Apple made it really, really, popular). Your PC probably has several ARM processors in it - running everything from the Bluetooth and WiFi chipsets to the controllers on your hard and optical drives. Your cellphone probably has two of 'em, one providing the UI and the other running the radio part.
No, the problem isn't ARM. The problem with ARM is it isn't x86, and people want x86 to run full desktop Windows, not cut-down OSes Windows CE or Windows Mobile. Then want to run Office, their games, blah blah blah and forget about alternatives. We've seen this with netbooks already - the Linux ones, while initally popular, gave way to XP Home as people started trying Linux, finding out it didn't run their programs (despite already having functional equivalents, e.g., OO.o), and returning them. For the vast majority of people, if it doesn't run Windows, they don't want it. ARM-based Linux machines can run practically everything x86 Linux does (except closed-source stuff), but if people already refuse x86 Linux...
Now I wonder if there's a chapter covering the top ten things never heard in an internet forum...
It should be noted that VPForums.ORG is not the official forums (which until the server died, was VPForums.COM). The ORG site is run by someone trying to capitalize on the confusion - it was only created very recently (when the COM site went down). In fact, the community is quite hostile against it because of the confusion factor - it looks official, but isn't, especially since it popped up quickly after COM died.
Stick with the Pinball Nirvana site instead - most of the COM members have moved somewhat over there.
Or you can't read... here's a clicky-clicky link.
Here's how I got there:
1) www.apple.com
2) Click on "iPod + iTunes" button at the top
3) Click on "Download iTunes"
4) Scroll down, just under the Spanish option, you see, OMG - "Windows 2000 Users". If you have NoScript enabled, the link may be obscured behind the text, but it's at the left column at the bottom. Not at the very bottom of the page, though. If javascript is enabled, it's plainly visible.
It's not iTunes 8, but they're apparently still supporting iTunes 7.5.2.
Anyhow, remember to right-click on the QuickTime icon and set your QuickTime preferences to not startup at windows startup to eliminate that annoying process.