I feel that manned space flight for the last thirty years or so has been more or less stagnant. I'm hoping the introduction of private sector space initiatives will change this. Only time will tell though.
At which point, we have to ask - what has the private sector been doing the past 30 years? Did it really take them 30 years to lobby the government to allow private space flight? And if so, why? Surely there are countries willing to let a private enterprise go into space if they wanted (especially smaller ones which no hope of any formal space program).
Why has there only been interest in the past 10 years?
According to TFA the music industry are now depended on Apples iTunes Store due to the major revenue. How come none of the labels have launched a similair service (it's not really the most original idea of all times)? I doubt they're lacking funds. If the itch is too annoying, why are they entangling themselves into more dependency? I it's not like it gets easier to detach from iTunes Store with time. I don't know, but to me it seems that everybody that touches Apple becomes stuck to it in some way or the other. Sure it's great for business, if your name is Apple. For everyone else: please bend over and cough.
That's because the music industry demanded DRM. And guess what, they did try to open their own music store. But, like all music stores, they failed for one simple reason - there was no way people would buy music if they couldn't load it on their device. And the device that most people had? iPods. Whose DRM was proprietary to Apple. Which meant they could take a piece out of the non-iPods out there (along with the millions other stores), but that's it.
The last gasp at trying to break into the iPod (and to get Apple to bend over to the music labels, rather than the labels bending over to Apple) was Amazon. Alas, while Amazon is popular (and #2), it still didn't hold a candle to iTunes' popularity. And Jobs knows that since the music industry was already wavering on DRM, now would be the time to also make iTunes DRM-free (Amazon is DRM-free, so iTunes should be able to demand same).
This is an industry where a very limited customer base was considered a Good Thing(tm). Yes, Jobs went to the music labels, and promoted the limited marketshare of Mac users as a benefit in the experiment of selling music online.
Heh. I've had the opposite experience here. The PS3 system updates are for the f*cking DRM on Bluray that they keep changing. Home is an MMOG (not RPG); It is NOT a simple game. Downloading the SAME GAME for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in very similar speeds actually. The PS3 felt faster, but you never know, maybe it was because I was playing on it while it downloaded.
Maybe it's just what is updated? It seems that everytime there's a system update for the PS3 (monthly, practically), you'll be sitting there waiting for a 10-50MB download, while the Xbox gets a much tinier update. About the biggest "wait" I had on the xbox was the NXE update which probably took 30 minutes to download and install.
Nothing's more irritating than inserting a game disc, and having to sit through another 20MB+ of updates (which seems to happen often on the PS3). On the Xbox, they seem to take maybe 30 seconds. Or maybe Microsoft spent time and effort in a patch mechanism that really avoids the big waits?
I don't know - it just seems that the Xbox downloads "feel faster". Either smarter caching and prefetching, or just perception.
I do know Home was excruciating to use. A 70+MB download that took forever (can't be backgrounded), then a bunch of "hidden" downloads while you set up your avatar (which took forever, as well - it appears to download only what you hovered your cursor on when "trying out" stuff like hairstyles, rather than tried to download more previews and everything), followed by more download screens. You'd think because it's a tutorial, you could get started and have tons more background downloads take place since you know where the user is going next...
As an unpublished writer myself, I think what this means is that writers are going to have to get their starts by posting their stories on the Internet. If they write well, perhaps they will build a following, and that will make it easier for them to get published by more regular means (which pay better, but beginners never made that much money anyway).
The problem is, it's like indie music. First, publishing on the Internet doesn't mean you'll get noticed. You may have written mankind's best SF story, but if it sits in some dark corner of the Internet that no one ends up going to, well, it sits, stagnant. You can get a few hits by using blogs and what not, but driving traffic that way gets difficult, fast. If you're lucky you'll get hit with some article in a newspaper or popular website.
That's why the magazines got people discovered - you had the usual brand-name authors beside the more obscure ones. Flipping through the mag trying to get to a story, you may stop by the obscure author's few closing words, get intrigued, and read from the beginning. Others do the same, and some obscure author gets boosted. Or heck, being stuck with the mag and having nothing else to do, you may read some of the other stories to pass time.
A website trying to emulate this behavior won't have the same effect - if you stick with the standard Table Of Contents model, people reading a certain author will just click straight to that author's story and stop. Then they'd go off for their next distraction (another website), while the more obscure authors go unclicked.
While the mag's story has a few lines to possibly hook a reader, a website only has the title/subtitle to do so (leading to the "Short Catchy Title - Long explanatory subtitle" titling format we see today).
But I suppose the demise of the mags comes from the fact that quality is going down - good authors don't need mags - they'll just post it online and get other blogs to generate traffic for them. The so-so kind either try to submit into a mag and hope, or expect to post it on the Internet and have it magically generate publicity to them. Unfortunately, getting noticed on the Internet is difficult, because with literally everyone publishing, there's way too much content out there.
Note that 16m is the smallest chunk I can partition on my SSD - exactly one block - I only "need" an 8m partition however.
It depends highly on the BIOS. Some BIOSes like their partition tables to be laid out in a paricular format and sorted in a particular way (there is no standard - some fdisk programs do it first-last, others last-first, others sort them beginning-end, etc). Others check to see if the first partition is a particular type (even though it can be in the middle of the disk).
As for the SSD - it's not one block - it's one cylinder. PC partitions are made on cylinder boundaries. A typical block size for MLC NAND flash is 128kB/block (64 pages of 2K each, emulating 4 sectors per page). There are 128 blocks to one cylinder according to how your SSD is reporting its CHS geometry, which I'd guess is */4/32. (It's completely arbitrary how these figures are reported since almost no one uses CHS anymore (and no modern storage device actually has), but it's something that the PC partition table spec calls for, hard drives and SSDs emulate (through CHS to sector translation), and something we're stuck with until BIOSes and Windows start supporting GUID Partition Tables or other formats.
Honestly we NEED a led light bulb that will DIM acceptably for people.
most people want to be able to use dimmers and every customer I have wants to use lighting automation.
They need to work on that second right after figuring out how to get the lumens up to that of CFL lamps.
As long as your dimmers are the electronic PWM based kind, LEDs will work with them. (CFL's have issues when they're only given part of the sinewave). If you use the crappy rheostat dimmers LEDs won't work with them.
The only thing I question about LEDs is... will they give us headaches from the flicker? It's my current annoyance with LED christmas lights - they can flicker quite horribly. CFLs not so much, and neither the standard flourescent lamps (flicker at 120Hz, plus smoothed out by phosphors).
I forsee cheap LED lamps not using a full bridge rectifier (= 120Hz flickering), and just hooking them straight up in series, so they're off half the time.
It's also one of my concerns with OLED displays - they have these really fast refresh times, but if you don't refresh them fast enough, flicker! (I've seen it on cheap MP3 players, annoying. I've also seen it on the Sony OLED TV... Sony sales guy blamed it on the 1080p24 source, but I'm not sure.)
Developing a system to fool the tools would cost money. Traffic shaping seems to be more a problem with Cable ISPs, and for almost free, they can flood TV with the gripping and compelling story of "HOW CABLE IS FASTAR!!® THAN DSL BECAUSE OF THE TRAFFIC SHAPING!!!" (disclaimer: this movie may or may not be a work of fiction)
Way to preach to the choir, google.
There's actually no contradiction.
P2P is a problem for cable ISPs because well, the upstream bandwidth of cable systems (DOCSIS) is extremely limited. It doesn't take many people uploading at full speed to max out the upstream DOCSIS bandwidth for the node, causing everyone to slow down (think how TCP works and what happens if the ACK packets don't make it back for the downstream packet). Or, it only takes a few people uploading to shoot your pings from 30-50ms to easily 100-200+ms.
On the flip side, there's plenty of downstream bandwidth - you can easily get 5Mbps packages as the basic tier, but 10Mbps, 15Mbps, 25+Mbps downstream is readily achievable, and since these numbers are way bigger than what ADSL can get you, well, cable is teh fastar.
And some cable ISPs do throttling the right way - they throttle upstream bandwidth...
The Army doesn't used iPods to store data. Service members, however, have a habit of ignoring policies and using whatever storage mechanism is handy to transfer data between systems. I'm in the Navy, and I've seen similar behavior. Yes, there are policies against it on my side as well. Stuff still happens, and this is exactly why we have rules concerning storage devices.
The problem is, if you ban storage devices, you're gonna have to provide an equally convenient way to move data around. Otherwise everyone's going to find their own method, which may be as simple as emailing it around.
The issue is that rules are made, but the rulemakers don't realize the reason why people were doing what they were doing. Ban storage devices, and if someone still needs to get data from point A to point B, well, you've just got a bunch of people who are going to find a way to either circumvent the rule, or to find an alternative, which may not be as secure.
Banning the devices without an equally convenient alternative will just result in people finding workarounds. Just don't be surprised what those workarounds are. Interfere with people Getting Stuff Done(tm) without educating them on How to Get Stuff Done without X...
So if I have Vista, and I upgrade to Windows 7 Beta...what happens at the end of beta testing? Does my computer still run Windows 7 (presumably I am now forced to either reformat or purchase Windows 7 or does it downgrade to Vista or does it just lock up or do I basically get Windows 7 for free?)?
When installing windows 7, does the software uninstall any defunct Vista components? If it doesn't, can I reformat my computer and use the the Windows 7 install (once I burn it to DVD) as a fresh install? I would like to try Windows 7 on my laptop but just have some questions.
At the end, it dies. Either upgrade to the latest beta at the time, or the released version.
It's called a "beta" with the anticipation that it has a good chance of screwing up and deleting everything if you hit the wrong combination of keys. Thus, the first instruction in the install is "back up your data", made all the more poignant by the MP3 bug (fixed in an update).
A fresh install is definitely a good idea, with perhaps a different hard drive as well. And it's a full install, so you don't need to upgrade, but the caveat is, when it dies, your computer will just boot to a screen that says "This copy has expired". Now, if you dual-booted, just boot back into Vista, and it should automatically see your Windows 7 drive so you can recover any precious data you may have accidentally left on it.
That might actually bite Microsoft in the ass when it comes time and millions of machines are suddenly locked out. Then again, the Vista recovery CD has a file recovery program that'll mount NTFS and let people copy data off it to a USB hard drive.
And if the taxed all non-kid games at 1,000,000%, it would clearly be equivalent to a ban. Where do we draw the line?
That's why it's tax incentives rather than taxes.
A tax incentive is a promise of a lower tax rate to someone who does something. You may be familiar with "film tax incentives" which basically mean people making movies get tax breaks if they fulfill certain criteria. They still pay taxes, but if they qualify, they can discount some of the taxes they would normally pay. SOme of these can be quite large and the qualification provisions interesting - e.g., X% of your crew must be local, and Y% of the film budget be spent at the locality, and you'll get back a Z% rebate on the sales taxes you pay for crew/equipment/lodgings/etc.
These normally involve produces, rather than consumers. In this case, let's say game companies pay 10% of profits as taxes (made up number). If they qualify, then they get a 5% rebate (again, made up number) on their taxes based on profits they earned from a game.
If the game bombs and they make a loss, well, they can't get a rebate on the profit - they made none. If the game does so well that the amount of tax rebate exceeds the tax owing, they pay $0. If they don't want to play by those rules, they pay the standard tax rate they would've normally paid anyhow.
It's a way to encourage business to do what you want, but business is free to not go along as well, in which case, they'll pay what they always paid. As a consumer, you won't notice anything different. If your business makes lots of money selling some M rated game, well, do nothing, and you won't be penalized. If you want, you can try taking a risk and making a game that qualifies and get a discount on the taxes you'd normally pay, but that's a business decision (risk of poor sales vs. reward of a tax discount).
Mine was jailbroken around Christmas-time, for two weeks. I wanted 'net access, and the easiest tethering options were all for jailbroken phones. Now that I'm back around stable connections, I'm pondering reloading the firmware. Apart from winterboard and other theming tools, I can't find any real purpose to have a jailbroken phone if you don't need the unofficial tether.
Here's one reason - MxTube. Lets you download YouTube videos onto the device for watching later. That way you csn watch the wifi version while you only got a cell connection, and they play instantly. Of course, you can also use sftp to then grab the mp4 videos off it if you want to preserve it that way, too.
Another reason is to "fix" your APN so if you don't have a data plan, the phone won't try to do any data over the cell network. It's apparently quite common for people to not have a data plan when they get the iPhone. Or, for me, the carriers disabled changing the APN so I'd be forced to use the "iPhone/Smartphone Data Plan" rather than my unlimited, tethering-allowed data plan (which they don't offer anymore). With a jailbreak and a little creative.plist editing, you can re-enable changing the APN. Without that they would've dinged me at 5cents/kilobyte (kilo, not kibi!) since my plan didn't include that APN.
Third, if you want to do iPhone development, you don't have to ante up $100 to test your app on the device (you will if you want to deploy via the app store, though). If you decide not to ante up, you can still deploy via Cydia or Installer (Cydia is popular... it's just apt-get!). And heck, you can do anything you want with your jailbreak-required app...
Oh yeah, if you're travelling, jailbreaking is mandatory so you can unlock your phone (iPhone 3G's are now unlocked, too) and use a local SIM rather than pay outrageous roaming charges, and even more outrageous data usage charges (if you enabled roaming data usage...)
Well, it works fine (unless you're running a particularly performance-intensive applet) on the 400MHz Nokia n800 (same processor line that the iPhone uses, 2/3 the processor speed, Debian operating system). It certainly decreases battery life while, for example, watching a video online... but it's possible to do so. It's the real thing, too; Desktop-capability Flash 9 (at the time, the most recent version available for any platform - they may have upgraded to 10 with the most recent firmware).
Funny, but other than YouTube, I find flash unusable on my n810 - it slows the system to a stuttering crawl (YouTube does as well). And some videos are even worse - they practically lock up the entire machine while giving you a good.1 fps.
It's practicaly a requirement to have some sort of FlashBlock so you can read the content of a web page first then get back to the video... otherwise I find my n810 won't even scroll the page properly.
Canada does have guns. They don't have school shootings.
Here in Australia we don't have guns (it's neigh impossible to get anything at all these days, believe me I have tried). Per capita, we've had a shitload of people going on killing sprees with guns.
What's this correlation I'm supposed to see? That gaining your independence from England makes you more likely to be a psychopath? Interesting.
And enough reports of kids bringing guns to school to have lock downs here in BC.
So yes, Canada does have school shootings, and while the murder rate is small compared to the US, it has taken large leaps lately. Most of the guns come from the US - though there were some cases where the guns were all legally registered, too.
Maybe what Canada doesn't have is a super gun-crazy culture - it's the right that's missing from the Charter...
the is why googles model (android) is so good. the conservatives can buy only from the store while anybody else can get their apps from anywhere. no whining from either side
Considering they already whine when something is available, period, I think they'd still whine in this case. Unless you expect the masses to not know about installing apps from outside the store, in which case the iPhone will be just the same. They can, after all, be jailbroken fairly easily (on Windows it takes a few clicks of the mouse, and the ability to hit both the power and home buttons, but the program walks you through it, on Mac it's similar, but you have to change your USB driver if it's running leopard). And there are millions of tutorials out there to walk you through the exact procedure too.
I have often wondered... Do these internationally known gamers that add to their games so much (the most amazing line rider maker comes to mind) get anything other than fame for their hard work?
Well, usually no money, just fame and personal self-satisfaction.
However it can add to one's portfolio of game development, if one plans on designing games later on. While people can do games by themselves in a garage and have it be successful, sometimes you need the resources of a company to do it, and this is a much better way to get the position you want, rather than start as a "QA Tester" or "code monkey" at the big guys. And Small indie game developers won't hire you unless you can show them your work. (Thus the rub - you can't do it all yourself (say, you suck at programming, or art, or sound, or whatever), but to show them your work, you have to do all that. Mods and created levels let you do that without all the other heavy lifting you may not be able to do.
The biggest complaint I have with LBP is that stupid "Copy" flag. Naturally no one sets it, understandably. However, it would be really, really, really nice if that was changed to an "Edit" flag, thus allowing people to cache a level locally. There are a number of good levels out there, and it would be a shame if Sony wound up deleting it. Being able to copy it locally would help, and the "Edit" flag would tell you if you could edit it. Also helps get rid of the delay starting it since it won't have to be re-downloaded over and over again.
> For what? Hiring paid actors to say good things about a product?
False and misleading advertising. They deliberately concealed the fact that these "reviews" were paid ads with the intent that the public be misled into believing that the imaginary reviewers were real people who actually used and liked the product.
Considering it's not the first time someone used Amazon's Mechanican Turk to buy a review, and probably only one of a mountain of other "bought reviews", Belkin would be long out of business by the time they got around to it. (It's an incredibly common event, and happens everywhere. Usually the payment's indirect, though, but not always.)
Heck, you want EA to go sue everyone who gave Spore a negative review because of the DRM? (I'm sure a good portion of them didn't buy the game, and thus others were probably "misled into believing that the imaginary reviewers were real people who used and" hated it.)
The problem is, because of the FAA, there is no competition. This means purchase plus install for a really nice 406 unit can cost in excess of $5000 for a $200-$400 ELT. Now that lower priced units, and units which are compatible with existing installs are finally starting to come onto the market you'll start to see increase in the number of installations. Yet the bulk of these installs will likely occur either during an aircraft's annual or when the existing ELT's battery requires replacement. The combination of the two means installs should start to increase sometime over the next 24-months.
In the meantime, many have elected to go with much cheaper solutions. Personal Locater Beacons (PLBs) and SPOT are very popular with pilots because they can be had at a fraction of the cost despite their reduced sized and increased capabilities.
Consider yourselves lucky.
In Canada, Transport Canada has mandated (for General Aviation) the new 406 beacons. There is a short 2 year transition period to which all Canadian GA planes must be 406 equipped (except US visitors). Given the number of planes, and the number of qualified avionics shop required to do the work, it's a practically impossible. Nevermind the cost of the ELT itself and the installation. Oh yeah, there's a list of approved ELTs - the one you purchase must be on that list. And until very recently, that was a very short list of very expensive ELTs ($5k+, more if you wanted GPS interface (using aircraft GPS - additional installation fees to wire the GPS to your ELT too), and still more if you want onboard GPS).
The only concession is a long-standing ban on ELTs using LiSO3 batteries has been liften (thus letting more ELTs in the market), and that an AME rather than an avionics shop can do the swap (swap only - rewiring or adding GPS requires avionics shop). And no, a PLB or SPOT device isn't suitable.
The solution is simple -- the government already has PDAs that tie into their networks and are secure. He will use that for classified information, as required by law anyway. His blackberry will be used for non-classified information. Separation between the two is also required by law. Now, why are we fangirling over Obama like this? This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too. Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.
Or, why not take away his personal blackberry, and give him a government-issued one? They're already so prevalent throughout the government, so why not give him one? Then you can do the BES thing and have remote wipe, and have all emails sent through it archived. And given the encryption already on it, I'm sure it's usable for classified stuff as well.
If he wants, he can tell his friends his new email address, or forward his current emails onwards.
At least, it should be possible, no? Everyone raves about how good BES is at doing stuff and keeping records...
I have seen the Sony OLED TV (FYI, the resolution is quarter-1080p 960x540), but one thing I noticed is... the flicker during bright scenes. Now, I don't know if it was caused by the source (blu-ray player), the cabling (running 1080p24), or the scaler (both the size and framerate adjust). It was the light images, but I'm just somewhat concerned that we'll end up in the days of screens that flicker again. (Nothing's more annoying that someone who has their CRT set to 60Hz refresh).
I'm thinking it's just a scalar issue, but I've seen it on some of the OLED screens used in MP3 players...
I seem to recall a recent change in terms of service. My guess is that if you actually read the whole thing, it would have told you that personal info is attached to files you download.
I'm betting 99.9999% of the folks just clicked accept without reading the new terms.
My only gripe on these sorts of changes in terms of service is that I think they should highlight what has recently changed.
This has always been the case since the iTunes store opened! It's not news, it's several years old. Heck, when Hymn was available (removed FairPlay from purchased music, and this was 5+ years ago), it kept the personal information to prevent people from P2P'ing the newly unlocked music.
So the very first time you used the iTunes store years ago, personal information was attached - it wouldn't have shown up with change bars because that part has not changed. You can probably find the news articles about it from years ago, and again from a couple of years ago when iTunesPlus was started about how the AppleID of the purchaser was embedded in the file.
People are acting like this is completely new, when it's been happening for years now.
http://lemonodor.com/archives/001405.html It does say that the FAA does not approve. The autonomous nature of the aircraft is the big sticking point it seems. As for actual use of UAVs in domestic operations, I don't know of any, but law enforcement seems very interested.
It's a good thing the FAA doesn't approve - certain areas of airspace are controlled (airport tower or otherwise), with good reason - aircraft. UAVs have to be designed to be controlled - so they'll need avionics to pick up the local tower, transponders for secondary radar, cameras pointed around to see traffic around them. And those are UAVs controlled by a ground station (who at least have a chance to talk with controllers). Make them autonomous and the fun really starts (what happens whey they accidentally get into wake turbulence from a nearby jet?).
Tiny UAVs are even more of a hazard - think bird strikes, except instead of a somewhat feathery lump of meat, you have metal, composites, electronics and fuel. I'm sure the folks at LAX would just love to have a jet suck one of those into their engines on takeoff or landing. Something the size of a Predator would at least have a chance of being seen by the pilot and hopefully avoided, but those tiny ones...
We do have problems now. Which is why every residential Internet user is having to use NAT to connect more than one device to their always-on Internet connection, and why things like VoIP boxes (that require transparent two-way connectivity) require special ways of setting them up rather than just plugging into an Ethernet port in the wall.
I don't see what that has to do with IPv6. Sure, in an ideal world, the ISP will give every residential user their fair share of IPv6 addresses they're entitled to. No, most ISPs will probably give you an entire block of IPv6 addresses, but they'll only route packets to one of them, unless you pay $5/month for more (it's too lucrative a stream of cash - like text messaging). Some ISPs give every customer 2 IP(v4) addresses for "free", and I'll bet 99% of users still use NAT on the two computers they have.
No, it's stupid to think that IPv6 everywhere will mean the death of NAT. We'll just have NATv6 to deal with instead, and all the same problems we have with NAT today, will still be present in an IPv6 world. Even if the ISP decided to give everyone their fair share of IPv6 addresses, we'll still see deployment of NATv6 boxes, and since firewalls aren't going away anytime soon (if people don't deploy NATv6), end-to-end protocols will still break.
Firewalling has improved protocol design though - I still remember the days when to play online required opening 10 TCP ports and 10 UDP ports on your PC (per game, pretty much), due to some design decisions in some libraries (DirectPlay, notably). Nowadays, it's down to usually 1 TCP port, and a couple of UDP ports, if that (STUN helps). Or heck, sometimes you just don't need to do anything at all to get online gaming to work. Though you still do see the occasional game that requires DMZ mode...
Dwindle the numbers of exhibitors and visitors all you want, but if you cut back on the booth babes, you've crossed the line...
It's held in Las Vegas. At the same time as the Adult Entertainment Expo. If the booth babes aren't sufficient, just head down the street.
Funny enough, I don't recall a big part of CES being the booth babes - sure they exist, but they never did appear to be a big part of the whole CES experience. Probably this is because you get all sorts of people reporting on CES, and some are from more "family oriented" media. Having a booth babe dancing behind the camera might mean your booth isn't reported at all because they couldn't get "usable" footage.
OTOH, E3 was well known for their booth babes - probably because E3 appeals to a different audience...
As such, the implementation is hardware-dependent, which is why there isn't a standard implementation of this function for Windows CE.
It is nevertheless the case, as others here have pointed out, that the correct way of handling date problems is to use Julian dates and day numbers, for which all these algorithms exist in well-documented forms. Getting the Julian Day number in this case should be trivial, as the function gets the number of days since January 1st 1980 as an argument, so it is just a matter of adding that to the Julian Day of the start date.
If you can't use a third-party calender/time lib (which is obviously the preferred solution given the hellish complexity and enormous subtlety of correct date/time representation) year/month/day divisions should be kept STRICTLY in the UI, and all internal date representations and calculations should be in terms of Julian Day or Date.
And the thing is, the functions exist in Windows CE. In Windows CE, the functions exist as SystemTimeToFileTime, and FileTimeToSystemTime (or similar - it's a standard date function), which convert between nice year/month/day/hour/minute/section to a 64-bit monotonically increasing number, a "file time" (number of 100-nanosecond intervals since Jan 1, 1904, I believe). In the kernel, they exist as their "K" counterparts. Microsoft wasn't this helpful because they feel date functions are useful, they put it in so people won't screw up their date computations.
An RTC driver is trivial. GetSystemTime() gets you a SYSTEMTIME. SystemTimeToFileTime(), gets you a FILETIME. Do another SystemTimeToFileTime on your chosen epoch. Subtract the first from the second, and you have the number of 100-nanosecond periods from your epoch to "now". Multiply by 10,000,000 to get it in seconds. Divide that figure by 86400 (24*60*60) to get days. Take the remainder to get seconds since midnight. And for those arguing about 86400 - the hardware RTC chip is probably automatically rolling over every 86400 seconds.
And now, the driver only relies on simple well-defined multiplication and division of known quantities of time. The OS is doing the heavy lifting of date calculations in those function calls - handling leap years and other stuff. Sure the OS library may have a bug in it, but at least the bug is consistently in all applications using those functions, and I'd like to bet that the API call is probably more well tested than the date code you'd write.
a)How do you get around activation at purchase time? b)Does Apple break this later on, especially when I need it?
a) You jailbreak it. Activation has always been "an issue" since the original iPhone, and the jailbreaks all offer the ability to pre-activate the phone in the firmware. This pre-activation also fixes up lockdownd in whatever means necessary to ensure it doesn't go into "brick" mode.
b) Yes, Apple with break it. So, if you're going to need it, don't update the iPhone software. Just because iTunes pops up that friendly dialog saying there's a new update available, doesn't mean you have to click "Download and Install". YOu can just click "Download", or even "Cancel". You may wish to check the box marked "Don't remind me again" so iTunes won't keep popping up the alert (until the next update).
iPhone firmware updates are optional to install. People with an itch to run the latest and greatest shouldn't jailbreak because it takes time from when Apple releases an update to when there's a jailbreak, and from that update to when the unlock is published. I ran with iPhone software 1.1.2 on my iPhone until very recently - and iPhone 2.x software was available for about half a year.
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At which point, we have to ask - what has the private sector been doing the past 30 years? Did it really take them 30 years to lobby the government to allow private space flight? And if so, why? Surely there are countries willing to let a private enterprise go into space if they wanted (especially smaller ones which no hope of any formal space program).
Why has there only been interest in the past 10 years?
That's because the music industry demanded DRM. And guess what, they did try to open their own music store. But, like all music stores, they failed for one simple reason - there was no way people would buy music if they couldn't load it on their device. And the device that most people had? iPods. Whose DRM was proprietary to Apple. Which meant they could take a piece out of the non-iPods out there (along with the millions other stores), but that's it.
The last gasp at trying to break into the iPod (and to get Apple to bend over to the music labels, rather than the labels bending over to Apple) was Amazon. Alas, while Amazon is popular (and #2), it still didn't hold a candle to iTunes' popularity. And Jobs knows that since the music industry was already wavering on DRM, now would be the time to also make iTunes DRM-free (Amazon is DRM-free, so iTunes should be able to demand same).
This is an industry where a very limited customer base was considered a Good Thing(tm). Yes, Jobs went to the music labels, and promoted the limited marketshare of Mac users as a benefit in the experiment of selling music online.
Maybe it's just what is updated? It seems that everytime there's a system update for the PS3 (monthly, practically), you'll be sitting there waiting for a 10-50MB download, while the Xbox gets a much tinier update. About the biggest "wait" I had on the xbox was the NXE update which probably took 30 minutes to download and install.
Nothing's more irritating than inserting a game disc, and having to sit through another 20MB+ of updates (which seems to happen often on the PS3). On the Xbox, they seem to take maybe 30 seconds. Or maybe Microsoft spent time and effort in a patch mechanism that really avoids the big waits?
I don't know - it just seems that the Xbox downloads "feel faster". Either smarter caching and prefetching, or just perception.
I do know Home was excruciating to use. A 70+MB download that took forever (can't be backgrounded), then a bunch of "hidden" downloads while you set up your avatar (which took forever, as well - it appears to download only what you hovered your cursor on when "trying out" stuff like hairstyles, rather than tried to download more previews and everything), followed by more download screens. You'd think because it's a tutorial, you could get started and have tons more background downloads take place since you know where the user is going next...
The problem is, it's like indie music. First, publishing on the Internet doesn't mean you'll get noticed. You may have written mankind's best SF story, but if it sits in some dark corner of the Internet that no one ends up going to, well, it sits, stagnant. You can get a few hits by using blogs and what not, but driving traffic that way gets difficult, fast. If you're lucky you'll get hit with some article in a newspaper or popular website.
That's why the magazines got people discovered - you had the usual brand-name authors beside the more obscure ones. Flipping through the mag trying to get to a story, you may stop by the obscure author's few closing words, get intrigued, and read from the beginning. Others do the same, and some obscure author gets boosted. Or heck, being stuck with the mag and having nothing else to do, you may read some of the other stories to pass time.
A website trying to emulate this behavior won't have the same effect - if you stick with the standard Table Of Contents model, people reading a certain author will just click straight to that author's story and stop. Then they'd go off for their next distraction (another website), while the more obscure authors go unclicked.
While the mag's story has a few lines to possibly hook a reader, a website only has the title/subtitle to do so (leading to the "Short Catchy Title - Long explanatory subtitle" titling format we see today).
But I suppose the demise of the mags comes from the fact that quality is going down - good authors don't need mags - they'll just post it online and get other blogs to generate traffic for them. The so-so kind either try to submit into a mag and hope, or expect to post it on the Internet and have it magically generate publicity to them. Unfortunately, getting noticed on the Internet is difficult, because with literally everyone publishing, there's way too much content out there.
It depends highly on the BIOS. Some BIOSes like their partition tables to be laid out in a paricular format and sorted in a particular way (there is no standard - some fdisk programs do it first-last, others last-first, others sort them beginning-end, etc). Others check to see if the first partition is a particular type (even though it can be in the middle of the disk).
As for the SSD - it's not one block - it's one cylinder. PC partitions are made on cylinder boundaries. A typical block size for MLC NAND flash is 128kB/block (64 pages of 2K each, emulating 4 sectors per page). There are 128 blocks to one cylinder according to how your SSD is reporting its CHS geometry, which I'd guess is */4/32. (It's completely arbitrary how these figures are reported since almost no one uses CHS anymore (and no modern storage device actually has), but it's something that the PC partition table spec calls for, hard drives and SSDs emulate (through CHS to sector translation), and something we're stuck with until BIOSes and Windows start supporting GUID Partition Tables or other formats.
As long as your dimmers are the electronic PWM based kind, LEDs will work with them. (CFL's have issues when they're only given part of the sinewave). If you use the crappy rheostat dimmers LEDs won't work with them.
The only thing I question about LEDs is... will they give us headaches from the flicker? It's my current annoyance with LED christmas lights - they can flicker quite horribly. CFLs not so much, and neither the standard flourescent lamps (flicker at 120Hz, plus smoothed out by phosphors).
I forsee cheap LED lamps not using a full bridge rectifier (= 120Hz flickering), and just hooking them straight up in series, so they're off half the time.
It's also one of my concerns with OLED displays - they have these really fast refresh times, but if you don't refresh them fast enough, flicker! (I've seen it on cheap MP3 players, annoying. I've also seen it on the Sony OLED TV... Sony sales guy blamed it on the 1080p24 source, but I'm not sure.)
There's actually no contradiction.
P2P is a problem for cable ISPs because well, the upstream bandwidth of cable systems (DOCSIS) is extremely limited. It doesn't take many people uploading at full speed to max out the upstream DOCSIS bandwidth for the node, causing everyone to slow down (think how TCP works and what happens if the ACK packets don't make it back for the downstream packet). Or, it only takes a few people uploading to shoot your pings from 30-50ms to easily 100-200+ms.
On the flip side, there's plenty of downstream bandwidth - you can easily get 5Mbps packages as the basic tier, but 10Mbps, 15Mbps, 25+Mbps downstream is readily achievable, and since these numbers are way bigger than what ADSL can get you, well, cable is teh fastar.
And some cable ISPs do throttling the right way - they throttle upstream bandwidth...
The problem is, if you ban storage devices, you're gonna have to provide an equally convenient way to move data around. Otherwise everyone's going to find their own method, which may be as simple as emailing it around.
The issue is that rules are made, but the rulemakers don't realize the reason why people were doing what they were doing. Ban storage devices, and if someone still needs to get data from point A to point B, well, you've just got a bunch of people who are going to find a way to either circumvent the rule, or to find an alternative, which may not be as secure.
Banning the devices without an equally convenient alternative will just result in people finding workarounds. Just don't be surprised what those workarounds are. Interfere with people Getting Stuff Done(tm) without educating them on How to Get Stuff Done without X...
At the end, it dies. Either upgrade to the latest beta at the time, or the released version.
It's called a "beta" with the anticipation that it has a good chance of screwing up and deleting everything if you hit the wrong combination of keys. Thus, the first instruction in the install is "back up your data", made all the more poignant by the MP3 bug (fixed in an update).
A fresh install is definitely a good idea, with perhaps a different hard drive as well. And it's a full install, so you don't need to upgrade, but the caveat is, when it dies, your computer will just boot to a screen that says "This copy has expired". Now, if you dual-booted, just boot back into Vista, and it should automatically see your Windows 7 drive so you can recover any precious data you may have accidentally left on it.
That might actually bite Microsoft in the ass when it comes time and millions of machines are suddenly locked out. Then again, the Vista recovery CD has a file recovery program that'll mount NTFS and let people copy data off it to a USB hard drive.
That's why it's tax incentives rather than taxes.
A tax incentive is a promise of a lower tax rate to someone who does something. You may be familiar with "film tax incentives" which basically mean people making movies get tax breaks if they fulfill certain criteria. They still pay taxes, but if they qualify, they can discount some of the taxes they would normally pay. SOme of these can be quite large and the qualification provisions interesting - e.g., X% of your crew must be local, and Y% of the film budget be spent at the locality, and you'll get back a Z% rebate on the sales taxes you pay for crew/equipment/lodgings/etc.
These normally involve produces, rather than consumers. In this case, let's say game companies pay 10% of profits as taxes (made up number). If they qualify, then they get a 5% rebate (again, made up number) on their taxes based on profits they earned from a game.
If the game bombs and they make a loss, well, they can't get a rebate on the profit - they made none. If the game does so well that the amount of tax rebate exceeds the tax owing, they pay $0. If they don't want to play by those rules, they pay the standard tax rate they would've normally paid anyhow.
It's a way to encourage business to do what you want, but business is free to not go along as well, in which case, they'll pay what they always paid. As a consumer, you won't notice anything different. If your business makes lots of money selling some M rated game, well, do nothing, and you won't be penalized. If you want, you can try taking a risk and making a game that qualifies and get a discount on the taxes you'd normally pay, but that's a business decision (risk of poor sales vs. reward of a tax discount).
Funny, but other than YouTube, I find flash unusable on my n810 - it slows the system to a stuttering crawl (YouTube does as well). And some videos are even worse - they practically lock up the entire machine while giving you a good .1 fps.
It's practicaly a requirement to have some sort of FlashBlock so you can read the content of a web page first then get back to the video... otherwise I find my n810 won't even scroll the page properly.
There was a rather famous one at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal 20 years ago... (rather sad, too, since the gunman targeted only women - in engineering, nonetheless) http://archives.cbc.ca/society/crime_justice/topics/398/
And enough reports of kids bringing guns to school to have lock downs here in BC.
So yes, Canada does have school shootings, and while the murder rate is small compared to the US, it has taken large leaps lately. Most of the guns come from the US - though there were some cases where the guns were all legally registered, too.
Maybe what Canada doesn't have is a super gun-crazy culture - it's the right that's missing from the Charter...
Considering they already whine when something is available, period, I think they'd still whine in this case. Unless you expect the masses to not know about installing apps from outside the store, in which case the iPhone will be just the same. They can, after all, be jailbroken fairly easily (on Windows it takes a few clicks of the mouse, and the ability to hit both the power and home buttons, but the program walks you through it, on Mac it's similar, but you have to change your USB driver if it's running leopard). And there are millions of tutorials out there to walk you through the exact procedure too.
Well, usually no money, just fame and personal self-satisfaction.
However it can add to one's portfolio of game development, if one plans on designing games later on. While people can do games by themselves in a garage and have it be successful, sometimes you need the resources of a company to do it, and this is a much better way to get the position you want, rather than start as a "QA Tester" or "code monkey" at the big guys. And Small indie game developers won't hire you unless you can show them your work. (Thus the rub - you can't do it all yourself (say, you suck at programming, or art, or sound, or whatever), but to show them your work, you have to do all that. Mods and created levels let you do that without all the other heavy lifting you may not be able to do.
The biggest complaint I have with LBP is that stupid "Copy" flag. Naturally no one sets it, understandably. However, it would be really, really, really nice if that was changed to an "Edit" flag, thus allowing people to cache a level locally. There are a number of good levels out there, and it would be a shame if Sony wound up deleting it. Being able to copy it locally would help, and the "Edit" flag would tell you if you could edit it. Also helps get rid of the delay starting it since it won't have to be re-downloaded over and over again.
Considering it's not the first time someone used Amazon's Mechanican Turk to buy a review, and probably only one of a mountain of other "bought reviews", Belkin would be long out of business by the time they got around to it. (It's an incredibly common event, and happens everywhere. Usually the payment's indirect, though, but not always.)
Heck, you want EA to go sue everyone who gave Spore a negative review because of the DRM? (I'm sure a good portion of them didn't buy the game, and thus others were probably "misled into believing that the imaginary reviewers were real people who used and" hated it.)
Consider yourselves lucky.
In Canada, Transport Canada has mandated (for General Aviation) the new 406 beacons. There is a short 2 year transition period to which all Canadian GA planes must be 406 equipped (except US visitors). Given the number of planes, and the number of qualified avionics shop required to do the work, it's a practically impossible. Nevermind the cost of the ELT itself and the installation. Oh yeah, there's a list of approved ELTs - the one you purchase must be on that list. And until very recently, that was a very short list of very expensive ELTs ($5k+, more if you wanted GPS interface (using aircraft GPS - additional installation fees to wire the GPS to your ELT too), and still more if you want onboard GPS).
The only concession is a long-standing ban on ELTs using LiSO3 batteries has been liften (thus letting more ELTs in the market), and that an AME rather than an avionics shop can do the swap (swap only - rewiring or adding GPS requires avionics shop). And no, a PLB or SPOT device isn't suitable.
At least the FAA isn't mandating the transition.
Links: http://www.copanational.org/non-members/body_files/Update406ELTDec12.htm
Background: http://www.copanational.org/non-members/body_files/406%20ELT%20Background%20Information.htm
Ugh.
Or, why not take away his personal blackberry, and give him a government-issued one? They're already so prevalent throughout the government, so why not give him one? Then you can do the BES thing and have remote wipe, and have all emails sent through it archived. And given the encryption already on it, I'm sure it's usable for classified stuff as well.
If he wants, he can tell his friends his new email address, or forward his current emails onwards.
At least, it should be possible, no? Everyone raves about how good BES is at doing stuff and keeping records...
I have seen the Sony OLED TV (FYI, the resolution is quarter-1080p 960x540), but one thing I noticed is... the flicker during bright scenes. Now, I don't know if it was caused by the source (blu-ray player), the cabling (running 1080p24), or the scaler (both the size and framerate adjust). It was the light images, but I'm just somewhat concerned that we'll end up in the days of screens that flicker again. (Nothing's more annoying that someone who has their CRT set to 60Hz refresh).
I'm thinking it's just a scalar issue, but I've seen it on some of the OLED screens used in MP3 players...
This has always been the case since the iTunes store opened! It's not news, it's several years old. Heck, when Hymn was available (removed FairPlay from purchased music, and this was 5+ years ago), it kept the personal information to prevent people from P2P'ing the newly unlocked music.
So the very first time you used the iTunes store years ago, personal information was attached - it wouldn't have shown up with change bars because that part has not changed. You can probably find the news articles about it from years ago, and again from a couple of years ago when iTunesPlus was started about how the AppleID of the purchaser was embedded in the file.
People are acting like this is completely new, when it's been happening for years now.
It's a good thing the FAA doesn't approve - certain areas of airspace are controlled (airport tower or otherwise), with good reason - aircraft. UAVs have to be designed to be controlled - so they'll need avionics to pick up the local tower, transponders for secondary radar, cameras pointed around to see traffic around them. And those are UAVs controlled by a ground station (who at least have a chance to talk with controllers). Make them autonomous and the fun really starts (what happens whey they accidentally get into wake turbulence from a nearby jet?).
Tiny UAVs are even more of a hazard - think bird strikes, except instead of a somewhat feathery lump of meat, you have metal, composites, electronics and fuel. I'm sure the folks at LAX would just love to have a jet suck one of those into their engines on takeoff or landing. Something the size of a Predator would at least have a chance of being seen by the pilot and hopefully avoided, but those tiny ones...
I don't see what that has to do with IPv6. Sure, in an ideal world, the ISP will give every residential user their fair share of IPv6 addresses they're entitled to. No, most ISPs will probably give you an entire block of IPv6 addresses, but they'll only route packets to one of them, unless you pay $5/month for more (it's too lucrative a stream of cash - like text messaging). Some ISPs give every customer 2 IP(v4) addresses for "free", and I'll bet 99% of users still use NAT on the two computers they have.
No, it's stupid to think that IPv6 everywhere will mean the death of NAT. We'll just have NATv6 to deal with instead, and all the same problems we have with NAT today, will still be present in an IPv6 world. Even if the ISP decided to give everyone their fair share of IPv6 addresses, we'll still see deployment of NATv6 boxes, and since firewalls aren't going away anytime soon (if people don't deploy NATv6), end-to-end protocols will still break.
Firewalling has improved protocol design though - I still remember the days when to play online required opening 10 TCP ports and 10 UDP ports on your PC (per game, pretty much), due to some design decisions in some libraries (DirectPlay, notably). Nowadays, it's down to usually 1 TCP port, and a couple of UDP ports, if that (STUN helps). Or heck, sometimes you just don't need to do anything at all to get online gaming to work. Though you still do see the occasional game that requires DMZ mode...
Funny enough, I don't recall a big part of CES being the booth babes - sure they exist, but they never did appear to be a big part of the whole CES experience. Probably this is because you get all sorts of people reporting on CES, and some are from more "family oriented" media. Having a booth babe dancing behind the camera might mean your booth isn't reported at all because they couldn't get "usable" footage.
OTOH, E3 was well known for their booth babes - probably because E3 appeals to a different audience...
And the thing is, the functions exist in Windows CE. In Windows CE, the functions exist as SystemTimeToFileTime, and FileTimeToSystemTime (or similar - it's a standard date function), which convert between nice year/month/day/hour/minute/section to a 64-bit monotonically increasing number, a "file time" (number of 100-nanosecond intervals since Jan 1, 1904, I believe). In the kernel, they exist as their "K" counterparts. Microsoft wasn't this helpful because they feel date functions are useful, they put it in so people won't screw up their date computations.
An RTC driver is trivial. GetSystemTime() gets you a SYSTEMTIME. SystemTimeToFileTime(), gets you a FILETIME. Do another SystemTimeToFileTime on your chosen epoch. Subtract the first from the second, and you have the number of 100-nanosecond periods from your epoch to "now". Multiply by 10,000,000 to get it in seconds. Divide that figure by 86400 (24*60*60) to get days. Take the remainder to get seconds since midnight. And for those arguing about 86400 - the hardware RTC chip is probably automatically rolling over every 86400 seconds.
And now, the driver only relies on simple well-defined multiplication and division of known quantities of time. The OS is doing the heavy lifting of date calculations in those function calls - handling leap years and other stuff. Sure the OS library may have a bug in it, but at least the bug is consistently in all applications using those functions, and I'd like to bet that the API call is probably more well tested than the date code you'd write.
a) You jailbreak it. Activation has always been "an issue" since the original iPhone, and the jailbreaks all offer the ability to pre-activate the phone in the firmware. This pre-activation also fixes up lockdownd in whatever means necessary to ensure it doesn't go into "brick" mode.
b) Yes, Apple with break it. So, if you're going to need it, don't update the iPhone software. Just because iTunes pops up that friendly dialog saying there's a new update available, doesn't mean you have to click "Download and Install". YOu can just click "Download", or even "Cancel". You may wish to check the box marked "Don't remind me again" so iTunes won't keep popping up the alert (until the next update).
iPhone firmware updates are optional to install. People with an itch to run the latest and greatest shouldn't jailbreak because it takes time from when Apple releases an update to when there's a jailbreak, and from that update to when the unlock is published. I ran with iPhone software 1.1.2 on my iPhone until very recently - and iPhone 2.x software was available for about half a year.