Lots of places still do minimum limits, though. "Your transaction must be at least $3.00 to use a credit card here."
That's against the terms of the merchant agreement to require a lower limit.
What you might be thinking of is the similar "Minimum $3 charge if using credit card". Your quote implies that if you buy a $1 item, you can't pay by credit card. My quote says if you want to buy a $1 item, you will be charged $3 for it instead if you use a credit card.
It's a very subtle thing - it implies a cash discount (buy item for $1 via cash, or $3 via credit card), but it also isn't (if you buy 3 $1 items, it's $3).
What I want to know is if merchant accounts don't allow cash discounts, why don't they go after the tons of people who advertise prices, then say "price is after 3% cash discount"?
I suppose you could argue that the game could actually be installed if the user had the large Xbox360 hard drive (120gb). However I think that would be an excessive requirement for a single game.
A lot of the later PS3 games require installation. I believe Grand Theft Auto needs ~4GB of hard drive space (it's printed on the back of the game). And from my PS3 experience (I own one), installing games can be one way to do it. Download a game from PSN, and it comes in a "capsule" that you click and install (why?!?! It's not like you can copy it off to a memory card...). Then after waiting for it to be installed, you click the new version and the game launches.
Not sure if the PS3 discs do that (probably just start up and ask to install).
About the only real thing one notices about the PS3 is that doing almost anything involves reading an EULA before you can do anything. (Besides the initial set up - installing games often pops up another EULA, as do software updates). So the "installation experience" is already here...
I am a touch concerned, though, as you are, about the upcoming Final Fantasy games. This recent approach by Square-Enix to make the Final Fantasy series into multiple-game affairs spread across everything from portables and cellphones up to the latest cutting-edge home console is causing them to over-think and over-engineer the worlds in which their characters reside. The games, or to be more specific the stories, are losing their focus and suffering for it.
Actually, the only one I can think of that's spawned a ton of spinoffs is Final Fantasy VII. I'm told it's not the best FF out there (FF5/6 apparently are, but I haven't played those), but it was one of the most popular ones - enough so that 10 years later, people still liked that story. After all, for North America, there's a movie (Advent Children), a 3rd person shooter? (Dirge of Cerebrus), and a prequel (Crisis Core, PSP). I know in Japan there are a ton of cellphone games and movies base don it as well. But I don't think 10+ years ago when FF7 was originally released, that people were thinking that far ahead.
Of course, I haven't played FFXII yet (I have it).
My only thing is... I've never finished any FF game - I end up in some spot and decide to not continue. For FF7, it was when I got Cloud's ultimate weapon, and couldn't remember my original materia configuration. For FF8, it was near the beginning - I just got bored. For FF9, it was in an open area where I got tired of random battling. Ditto with FFX. I hear that FF12 and later ones have ways of avoiding random battles, as well as knowing when one will happen so you can do it if you wanted. Crisis Core has it, and it works well enough (plus, it avoids a lot of the needless travelling in order to do subquests).
And if I'm not mistaken, they were considering to enable it again, but the FAA asked them not to, since aircraft use it to better state their position (I'm sorry for any factual inaccuracy, but I'm just a Spaniard with a limited understanding of how the system works and the US agencies involved).
Less positioning, more navigation. GPS is rapidly becoming (if it hasn't already) a level 1 navigational device (trustable on its own). Right now, it's level 2, which means it's good for general use, but must be compared against another source of navigational information (VORs, etc). The reason is, GPS is cheap compared to maintaining the entire network of VORs and NDBs (and sometimes LORAN) equipment.
The other issue is that if they degrade the GPS accuracy, there is a huge loss - a number of airports have instrument approaches that rely on GPS, and good GPS units can often be used at lower minimums than regular ILS approaches (not landings, though, for obvious reasons). Airports are happy with GPS approaches because they're cheap, they avoid having to maintain expensive ILS equipment. Thus there are a number of GPS-approach-only airports (the requirements are quite strict - WAAS must be available, and enough GPS satellites must be available to compensate for satellite irregularity. Aviation GPSes that are certifiable for instrument approaches have calculators that can tell you if an approach is possible at the destination based on current GPS almanac data).
If they started degrading GPS again, the impact on aviation would be quite significant.
The other thing is WAAS. FAA wanted a way to compensate for GPS signal degradation, so they had WAAS put in, which broadcasts correction data... from the GPS satellite! (That's why most modern GPS receivers can pick up WAAS easily - the satellite is already transmitting the information, so picking up the WAAS information is trivial). Of course, if you degrate the main GPS signal and don't degrade WAAS, the whole exercise is pointless.
(DGPS requires an external receiver - higher end units have a bidirectional serial port so they can transmit NMEA data to a host, but also receive a DGPS correction data from a DGPS receiver, which is why almost no GPS come with built in DGPS - it doesn't come "for free" like WAAS does).
3) Copyright holders cannot restrict how any one copy of their work is used by buyers, except to make them respect the artificial scarcity of copyright law. Meaning, if I want to resell iPhones with jail-broken OSs and tons of apps, Apple cannot legally interfere with my customers' enjoyment of their iPhone and its OS anymore than Honda could interfere with my customers if I were selling modified racing civics (except to cut off their warranty).
Apple didn't do it. They released an update, they warned people not to update if they modded their phones. The update isn't mandatory - iTunes just says "There is an update for your iPhone [Install] [DOwnload Only] [Cancel]" and they even have a little checkbox that lets you disable it. It's like a modded Civic coming back to Honda for an ECU update, only to find that hey, the update breaks all the mods (and possibly disables the car).
The updates aren't forced, and Apple has no way to tell what can happen if you mod your iPhone and decide to upgrade - your mod may very well screw up the ability to update (as the "unlock code" did for the baseband processor (this written by the people who created all the iPhone hacks). And yes, Apple does void the warranty if you bring it in for service with mods.
Ironically, one of the things Apple did in a later update was manage to fix this.
Anyhow, is anyone really surprised by Virgin's move? They're a big conglomerate, like Sony, but this time, it looks like all the individual pieces are working together in their collective self-interest. Virgin Internet and Virgin Records (a music store at least), and there's probably a music label with Virgin's name on it, too.
This is a documented feature of the system and has been since day one. I installed Linux shortly after the UK launch, and it really isn't anything to write home about - no support for hardware accelerated 3D, and a processor that really isn't designed for general-purpose computing. Novelty value for a couple of minutes, sure, then back to gaming on the PS3 and Linuxing on a real PC.
No support for accelleration (the "OtherOS Virtual Machine" prevents access to hardware - PS3 Linux runs on a VM on top of the hardware), and no access to the GPU memory (256MB) so you have a Linux system that only has 256MB of RAM. And framebuffer access only, giving you a really, really, really slow X environment if you run it at 1080p. So slow, you cannot play back a DVD without dropping frames (and pegging the other PowerPC processor handling the framebuffer - you update the framebuffer, then trigger an interrupt into the VM so the framebuffer gets copied to the GPU).
Also no access to built-in WiFi or Bluetooth hardware (VM doesn't export it), and limited access to hard drive (VM only exports to Linux the OtherOS partition as a SCSI device), and limited access to program flash (bootloader). And basic access to the Blu-ray drive (no advanced commands, again, all filtered as an emulated SCSI device).
The only real use of Linux is as a novelty, and as a way to play with the Cell SPUs. The 2 main PPEs are unimpressive - they're fast, but have blocks removed that make the PowerPC G5 cores slower than they should be, and calling into the VM for framebuffer updates consumes a lot of CPU cycles.
The main problem is that the Sony VM limits what you can do - in the end, it's a great Cell development kit, but that's about all...
If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click:)... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age
Worked fine for me... I just click the scroll wheel on a link and bam, a new tab opens in the background on my Mac. Hey, it works in Safari too... and Opera.
Don't know what kind of Mac you're using, but they do work great with multibutton mice.
(And GUI designers can take a note about that - forcing a single button means you can't hide features away in right-click menus. There are literally Windows applications where the right click is used more often than left! Or heck, even Windows Explorer has modifier keys for right click - often Shift- or Alt- right-click can bring up a context menu with more actions.)
Don't iPhones send out an insane number of scans per minute? Isn't that why Duke University banned them from their network, and how that couple had a $3,000 data charge bill from taking their iPhone on a cruise, even though they didn't use it?
Not really.
The reason Duke had to ban them was because the way they did their WiFi somehow clashed with the way Duke's WiFi network was set up. The end result was that a small concentration of iPhones managed to actually take down the WiFi network by consuming inordinate amounts of CPU time on the WiFi processors. This was confined to that one network - everywhere else, even those using the same WiFi accesspoints, worked just fine. It was an oddball configuration issue.
As for the $3000 phone bill, it is true. But it's not because of the scans - it's because the person was roaming, and data roaming is pricey. You can configure the iPhone to poll a mail server every so often (regular POP or IMAP). Guess what? Checking POP or IMAP takes bytes, and bytes are pricey (easily 5 cents per 1000 bytes or less - some providers count every byte sent over the air including all headers and trailers, and not just raw IP packets). This was resolved in a 1.1 firmware update which has the option to disable data roaming (the iPhone will not make an EDGE connection if it detects it's roaming - it won't even make a standby connection).
1) Of course they were being shared. Whether anyone took them up on their offer to share, and whether the person understood what they were doing... those are issues that are uncertain. But they were accessable for other people to download.
Reasonable doubt doesn't factor in at all. It is a civil case, the standard of proof is "more likely than not". Which means you will need to explain why those files were publically shared.
But is the offer to share the same thing as sharing?
To overuse a car analogy, if you buy a car that can go >110MPH (basically the highest legal speed limit), are you guilty of speeding? And should the DMV just fine every driver for speeding anyhow, since I'm sure 99% of all drivers during their lives have exceeded the speed limit (even by 1MPH... or inadvertently, going downhill, for instance)?
Just because you could, doesn't mean you did. More likely than not, the car in your driveway can exceed the speed limit. Why don't you explain why you have it, since you can be speeding?
According to wikipedia, the total computer storage in 2006 was estimated to be 160 EB. According to the article, storage doubles every 18 months (at best).
So to get a 1 YB of total storage, one would have to multiply the capacity in 2006 by 6250. The number of times you have to double the capacity is then log2(6250) = 12.6. Given 18-month cycles, this takes 18.9 years. So 1 YB will come in 2025, not in 2011.
Or am I missing something?
Probably the article is wrong. Semiconductor storage will double every 18 months or so (Moore's law - double the transistors --> double the storage, roughly). Spinning disk storage seems to double almost yearly these days - a couple of years ago, a 500GB drive was expensive, then last year, 500GB drives are extremely common while 1TB drives were pricey. In between, we have such monsters as 750GB disks. It's one of the barriers that SSD faces - until spinning disk storage capacity stops growing faster than Moore's Law, there's not much chance SSD can catch up.
Also, you missed out on this being "shipped" storage. We're making more hard drives than ever. Even if technology doesn't progress, if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storage.
The big question is - how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)?
That always puzzles me - a consumer camera like a Nikon Coolpix allows you to see the final image through the LCD (even with zoom), while Digital SLR's, costing several thousands of pounds always switch the LCD off when a picture is about to be taken.
Because it's physically impossible on an SLR. In an SLR, you have the lens, that then is followed by a mirror. The mirror, in the "down" position, reflects the light from the lens through the prism viewfinder and then to your eye.
When you click the shutter, the mirror flips up (viewfinder goes dark), exposing the shutter which then opens and shuts the right amount of time the actual camera sensor.
That's not to say it's not possible to say, add a little cameraphone like sensor and offer a live preview (several dSLRs do this now), but historically, it wasn't possible. The light is either going to the main camera sensor, or the viewfinder. A small amount is actually reflected *down* for autofocus, though.
Though, as anyone knows, holding your camera at arm's length (so you can use the LCD as a viewfinder) sucks for camera shake. And most camera LCDs are of QVGA or lower resolution, so you miss out on all the nice little details youc an see through a real optical viewfinder like that on a dSLR...
I've worked with several large IP transit providers who don't always filter prefixes properly, either due to technical or bureaucratic reasons. Simply look at the problem YouTube ran into when a Pakistan ISP tried to blackhole YouTube only in Pakistan, but due to prefixes not being filtered properly, their announcement propagated out to the net.
While I'm glad you've been able to work with organizations that filter prefixes properly, it doesn't always work out the way you've experienced.
Given how well the Pakistan mistake worked globally, why couldn't someone else "accidentally" broadcast that 134.17.0.0/16 route? That would take it out for a large portion of the network.
Hell, that would stop a large proportion of the spam - if the originating servers can't make as many outgoing connections (because the return packets are mis-routed back), then it'll take a bit of work to find the few botnet machines able to communicate back...
Anyone can boot from a Knoppix live CD and mount NTFS drives in Linux and poke around. NTFS security is not applied under Linux so you can have a look at anything you want. I don't see how this is a big deal.
The only thing that might be a problem is browsing the registry, but I wonder if wine's regedit can load native Windows registry hives. If so, then all Microsoft has done is taken existing Linux functionality and made it user friendly for the police.
Speaking of which, anyone wanna place bets as to how long it takes for this tool to spread across p2p and torrent sites?
Or, given that a number of new computers have FireWire ports, you can easily break in via FireWire!
This can also be used to break into MacOS X and Linux machines as well via the FireWire bus. Of course, it does require physical access to the machine, but you can do this, and get in while the machine is still on without rebooting it.
It's basically a very similar way to how one would debug operating systems via FireWire. Except one's intent is more malicious. (You can use FireWire to do post-mortem debugging since the controller runs independently of the OS).
i just refilled my samsung ml1710 toner cartridge with a toner refill kit and i have to say i'm impressed. nearly 1/8th the cost of a full replacement cartridge, i can't see the difference. and replacing the toner was simple. it amazes me that more people don't go this route.
Considering a toner cartridge for my Brother laser printer costs $75, but lasts 2500-ish pages, refills might be cheaper, but it's just easier to buy a new one every so often (usually 2 years or more - we don't print much). The drum is separate, so the cartridge is basically a molded plastic container. Also, I'd rather not have to deal with toner spills.
Of course, refilled toner cartridges are always an option - save the toner spills to people who know how to deal with it.
But if you print a lot, an inkjet is probably the worst possible way to do it (i.e., office environment). Far cheaper to make an upfront investment in a laser printer - the ink costs alone would probably cover the difference in a month or two!
Back that up. Just because it's a PC, doesn't mean automatically it's noisy. So far, there aren't any reviews or measurements made that I've seen so far.
Sure it's not a scientific measurement of noise, but the fan whirr is definitely noticable. The Dell workstation on my desk at work is quieter, as is my Mac Pro (think - the real noise comes from the hard drives, not fans, and that's the standard seeking noises when they're busy.).
Heck, I think you can get some whitebox PCs that are quieter.
And the other thing that sucks - VPinMAME isn't open source, even though PinMAME is. Not too bad, but when you consider the former and latter are both in the same repository on the SourceForge page... (yes, you can get the vPinmame code there, but the deal is, it's encrypted. There's the source for the decryption program there too, but guess what? There's no key, so you can't build vPinMAME unless you crack it). The reasons are honorable, I suppose, but it's that the whole community starts to grate you the wrong way when people wish to protect their IP while openly disregarding other's IP.
Good Will. Garage Sales. Then download them. It's just a Media Shift, it's gray area.
That is not what the judge said in UMG v. MP3.com . You have to make the copy directly from a Game Pak, not from the Internet.
Technically, no. You can copy CDs to MP3s, but you cannot actually dump ROMs, except for backwards compatibility development as a developer (the courts will decide - you have to be developing something that needs the dump). It's the reason why Connectix won (Sony v. Connectix, appeal) with its Virtual Game Station product. Initially, they lost...
Turns out, ROMs are treated as "mask works" which disallow shifting to an electronic format. The only "fair use" you have is actually burning a copy of the ROM onto another ROM (to replace one that went bad, for example).
Crazy copyright laws. The only real savior is the fact that it's really hard to prosecute anyone over this.
The other exception is if there's actually a legal distribution of the ROM - there was a company (out of business) that sold ROMs legally for MAME (copyright holder permission and all), and some companies did actually make ROM images available (pinball), though some companies, seeing even pinball machines get emulated, promptly withdrew their ROM images, forcing everyone to use their "preferred" distributor for ROM updates. Gottlieb is the first who started it...
Need to send a street address, but the recipient doesn't really need it until tomorrow? Send an email. Need to tell a friend that you're at the upstairs bar? Send an SMS.
Better yet, call them.
SMS latency can be extremely random. Sure, 99% of SMSes are received within say, 5 minutes of them being sent, but a significant number bounce around the system enough that they may be received hours or days later. Worse still, if there's a slight strangeness in the SMS providers, you can keep receiving the *SAME* SMS several times. Worst situation I've seen is an SMS took around 3 days for it to be received, and not only that, ended up being received multiple times over the next few days after that (the SAME SMS). I don't know why thatr is, but it happens. Something to be aware of if you have time-sensitive criticsl things sent exclusively via SMS.
I don't really get any of this. Wasn't Dish offering DVR functionality before Tivo was even a company? And aside from that if it is a software patent, how did Tivo get to see the code to know that it is infringing? Wouldn't they have the same complaint to DTV, Comcast? Didn't replayTV also have DVRs before Tivo? Why does Tivo get to sue over the DVR?
Actually, no - TiVo and ReplayTV were the first to have DVR boxes on sale (I think they came out around the same time) around 1998.
What TiVO did was realize that people wanted it with their satellite boxes, and offered the technology to both Dish and DirecTV. Dish poo-poohed the idea, while DirecTV lauded it (and licensed it). One of the problems was, TiVo left behind one of their boxes for Dish to "play" with. Rumor has it that the box was reverse-engineered and Dish released their own box to compete against DirecTiVos.
Now, DVRs have come and gone, so if TiVo's patent was obvious, there would be an overwhelming supply of them. Instead we have 'em in cable boxes (Motorola, PACE, Scientific Atlanta), and Dish/DirecTV have their own (DirecTV has licensed TiVo), and only TiVo is making them still on the market. UltimateTV isn't supported anymore, and ReplayTV has gone to become a software-only company. Myth isn't even in the same league, unless it runs on boxes with low CPU (sub-200MHz), with hardware encoders and decoders (practically all PC capture cards and video cards do these days, but they won't run on slow CPUs). And more rumors have it that the current executive and board of DirecTV love their TiVos, and may actually decide to bring them back.
Of course, the big deal is the TiVo box that TiVo left behind at EchoStar (Dish). It effectively was the trojan horse. With that one move (probably done out of generousity, rather than malice), EchoStar cannot claim to have not peeked at patented technologies, nor be unaware that such patents may exist.
Actually I'm pretty sure there's no way for this to convince someone it's real. You know that the ground is moving under you when you take a step so you'll always know you're not really going anywhere. Plus, people can sense acceleration.
Which is mostly done in the inner ear: Three "rate gyros" per ear (the semicircular canals) plus three linear accelleration sensors ditto (nerve cells with calcified masses on the ends).
But it turns out these can be fooled by elecrtostimulus from varying magnetic fields generated by coils mounted on a headpiece near them.
Actually, you can fool them quite easily, as any pilot knows. "Spatial disorientation" has downed many aircraft, usually because the pilot thinks the aircraft is doing one thing (flying straight and level), when it's really doing something else (descending/turning, or ascending/turning leading to stall).
One trick done during training is having the instructor do a maneuver like a turn continually for a minute or two, then ask the pilot to level the aircraft (by feel). The end result is quite... interesting. Let it continue for a minute, and the aircraft will be in a very strange attitude. Another thing is to simply let the pilot fly blind, by feel, and see what trouble it leads into.
It's why IFR pilots must trust their instruments and not their gut feel.
I don't see why you can't apply similar tricks into this to make it realistic. After all, those simulator rides feel pretty damn real even though the cabin only moves a few feet each way.
The human eye is naturally lazy, and likes to look at things that do not cause it to send strong signals. To that end, a black background is essential for "easy on the eyes" formatting.
Actually, the problem is, people don't use light-on-dark properly, which makes it even harder on the eyes. If you use a thin font like Heveltica or Arial, white-on-black causes the letters to turn into a light grey. The thing is, the black "creeps" onto the lighter color. The general hints have been to either use bold, which fattens the letters enough to offset some of the creep, make the font size larger, or choose a fatter font. All of this helps offset the creep - it's only at the larger sizes does the effect of the creep become less noticeable. It's why I hate when Courier is used as a default font - it's damn hard to read on a black background. On Windows boxes, I much prefer the fat and easily read FixedSys.
But there are tons of contrasty color combinations. White-black is generic and isn't eyecatching, but great for long sessions. Colors like Yellow-on-Blue are easily read, and the blue doesn't actually "creep" into the yellow too badly. Yellow-Red and Yellow-Green work well too. But yellow can be quite tiring to read.
Not quite. It protects the bios from hard disk writes using int 13h. It won't protect from programs accessing the hard drive directly using I/O ports, which any modern MBR virus is likely to do.
True, most protection does this, especially from 12 years ago when DOS was still a viable platform.
However, I don't see why more modern systems can't store a copy of the MBR in the CMOS - it is, after all, only 512 bytes in size. On boot, it simply does a compare between the MBR on the hard disk and the one it stored in CMOS. On miscompare, it simply asks what you want to do - restore from CMOS, or use the modified MBR (and update CMOS).
Other than GRUB and Lilo and other multi-OS boot systems, the MBR code is quite simple, simple enough that practically anything can restore it...
Re:For a determined person not too hard
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NXP RFID Cracked
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Put your antenna in a van, with your power hungry amplifier, then put a hole in the van before the antenna, and put some material which is transparent to that frequency, but opaque to normal sight. Park your van in LOS of what you want to check out. Naturally works only in the street, but that should open you some nice application.
Has anyone considered that instaed of a high-gain antenna, you use a moderate gain one, something htat would work in the order of feet (or half a metre or so)?
Think about it, to get many cards, you have to be close. In situations where people are already close, this isn't too much of a problem - think subways, crowded hallways, and other places people gather. Take it one step farther, and use a regular reader, and bump into people where they're most likely to store their cards (wallets, purses, etc). In crowded situations, it's entirely possible to bump into people (and probably expected).
Sure you won't get *everyone*, but if you're really just wanting to collect *some*, this could work quite well. The crowd gives the perpetrator anonymity, and the low number of victims makes it hard to pin the reading to any particular place or time. Do it right and most people will assume its a fault with the technology.
Think of it in situations like a supermarket lineup - you're close enough to others that if youc an read a few feet, you can get the info off the person in front. Or any other lineup, for that matter. Or if packed subways is your think, just the few people around you. Be near the door and read people as they pass by.
Nothing that requires huge ungainly antennas or equipment - just ones that can be easily hidden in a bag or so.
Since the GPS only receives signals and transmits none, no one can accuse you of generating signals that interfere with the aircraft function.
Incorrect.
Anything that has anything with electrons flowing and not flowing generates EM waves - interference. This is especially true of radio receivers who need an oscillator close to the target frequency (for common superheterodyne receivers), but also applies to things like the CPUs and LCD displays - usually a problem because they can have a nasty harmonic in the aviation band. SDRAM clocks are particularly nasty, having the fundamental in the middle of the band.
The only good part is, unless you're really lucky, each different nav system can be interfered in a different way, so cross-checking can reveal if something is awry. GPS systems tend to lose lock (annoying to lose GPS if doing GPS approaches), INS systems build in errors (hope you have a cross-check available), and generic nav systems can often display errornous results. At least in a modern airliner, they use all these systems simultaneously nowadays...
I can only speak for my ISP in Canada (Shaw). They throttle Bit Torrent on the default ports it would appear, but not on any other ports. (This is based on my own informal speed tests.)
Actually, no. Shaw uses Ellacoya units(warning, PDF) which perform deep packet inspection. These units, which have been recently tested (and Ellacoya is one of the two that had faith in their units), do not care about what port traffic is on. They inspect packets and throttle those like BitTorrent, regardless of what port it's on. The Ellacoya units faired quite well during the tests - identifying most P2P traffic, with no false positives.
So far, encryption is the only way to foil these shapers, and there's lots of talk about the traffic shaping that Shaw does in the Shaw forums at DSL Reports. There's a link to Shaw's CEO saying they use traffic shapers as well.
Of course, I think more and more BitTorrent clients are coming with encryption enabled. Eventually, I see everyone encrypting all traffic soon...
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That's against the terms of the merchant agreement to require a lower limit.
What you might be thinking of is the similar "Minimum $3 charge if using credit card". Your quote implies that if you buy a $1 item, you can't pay by credit card. My quote says if you want to buy a $1 item, you will be charged $3 for it instead if you use a credit card.
It's a very subtle thing - it implies a cash discount (buy item for $1 via cash, or $3 via credit card), but it also isn't (if you buy 3 $1 items, it's $3).
What I want to know is if merchant accounts don't allow cash discounts, why don't they go after the tons of people who advertise prices, then say "price is after 3% cash discount"?
A lot of the later PS3 games require installation. I believe Grand Theft Auto needs ~4GB of hard drive space (it's printed on the back of the game). And from my PS3 experience (I own one), installing games can be one way to do it. Download a game from PSN, and it comes in a "capsule" that you click and install (why?!?! It's not like you can copy it off to a memory card...). Then after waiting for it to be installed, you click the new version and the game launches.
Not sure if the PS3 discs do that (probably just start up and ask to install).
About the only real thing one notices about the PS3 is that doing almost anything involves reading an EULA before you can do anything. (Besides the initial set up - installing games often pops up another EULA, as do software updates). So the "installation experience" is already here...
Actually, the only one I can think of that's spawned a ton of spinoffs is Final Fantasy VII. I'm told it's not the best FF out there (FF5/6 apparently are, but I haven't played those), but it was one of the most popular ones - enough so that 10 years later, people still liked that story. After all, for North America, there's a movie (Advent Children), a 3rd person shooter? (Dirge of Cerebrus), and a prequel (Crisis Core, PSP). I know in Japan there are a ton of cellphone games and movies base don it as well. But I don't think 10+ years ago when FF7 was originally released, that people were thinking that far ahead.
Of course, I haven't played FFXII yet (I have it).
My only thing is... I've never finished any FF game - I end up in some spot and decide to not continue. For FF7, it was when I got Cloud's ultimate weapon, and couldn't remember my original materia configuration. For FF8, it was near the beginning - I just got bored. For FF9, it was in an open area where I got tired of random battling. Ditto with FFX. I hear that FF12 and later ones have ways of avoiding random battles, as well as knowing when one will happen so you can do it if you wanted. Crisis Core has it, and it works well enough (plus, it avoids a lot of the needless travelling in order to do subquests).
Less positioning, more navigation. GPS is rapidly becoming (if it hasn't already) a level 1 navigational device (trustable on its own). Right now, it's level 2, which means it's good for general use, but must be compared against another source of navigational information (VORs, etc). The reason is, GPS is cheap compared to maintaining the entire network of VORs and NDBs (and sometimes LORAN) equipment.
The other issue is that if they degrade the GPS accuracy, there is a huge loss - a number of airports have instrument approaches that rely on GPS, and good GPS units can often be used at lower minimums than regular ILS approaches (not landings, though, for obvious reasons). Airports are happy with GPS approaches because they're cheap, they avoid having to maintain expensive ILS equipment. Thus there are a number of GPS-approach-only airports (the requirements are quite strict - WAAS must be available, and enough GPS satellites must be available to compensate for satellite irregularity. Aviation GPSes that are certifiable for instrument approaches have calculators that can tell you if an approach is possible at the destination based on current GPS almanac data).
If they started degrading GPS again, the impact on aviation would be quite significant.
The other thing is WAAS. FAA wanted a way to compensate for GPS signal degradation, so they had WAAS put in, which broadcasts correction data... from the GPS satellite! (That's why most modern GPS receivers can pick up WAAS easily - the satellite is already transmitting the information, so picking up the WAAS information is trivial). Of course, if you degrate the main GPS signal and don't degrade WAAS, the whole exercise is pointless.
(DGPS requires an external receiver - higher end units have a bidirectional serial port so they can transmit NMEA data to a host, but also receive a DGPS correction data from a DGPS receiver, which is why almost no GPS come with built in DGPS - it doesn't come "for free" like WAAS does).
Apple didn't do it. They released an update, they warned people not to update if they modded their phones. The update isn't mandatory - iTunes just says "There is an update for your iPhone [Install] [DOwnload Only] [Cancel]" and they even have a little checkbox that lets you disable it. It's like a modded Civic coming back to Honda for an ECU update, only to find that hey, the update breaks all the mods (and possibly disables the car).
The updates aren't forced, and Apple has no way to tell what can happen if you mod your iPhone and decide to upgrade - your mod may very well screw up the ability to update (as the "unlock code" did for the baseband processor (this written by the people who created all the iPhone hacks). And yes, Apple does void the warranty if you bring it in for service with mods.
Ironically, one of the things Apple did in a later update was manage to fix this.
Anyhow, is anyone really surprised by Virgin's move? They're a big conglomerate, like Sony, but this time, it looks like all the individual pieces are working together in their collective self-interest. Virgin Internet and Virgin Records (a music store at least), and there's probably a music label with Virgin's name on it, too.
No support for accelleration (the "OtherOS Virtual Machine" prevents access to hardware - PS3 Linux runs on a VM on top of the hardware), and no access to the GPU memory (256MB) so you have a Linux system that only has 256MB of RAM. And framebuffer access only, giving you a really, really, really slow X environment if you run it at 1080p. So slow, you cannot play back a DVD without dropping frames (and pegging the other PowerPC processor handling the framebuffer - you update the framebuffer, then trigger an interrupt into the VM so the framebuffer gets copied to the GPU).
Also no access to built-in WiFi or Bluetooth hardware (VM doesn't export it), and limited access to hard drive (VM only exports to Linux the OtherOS partition as a SCSI device), and limited access to program flash (bootloader). And basic access to the Blu-ray drive (no advanced commands, again, all filtered as an emulated SCSI device).
The only real use of Linux is as a novelty, and as a way to play with the Cell SPUs. The 2 main PPEs are unimpressive - they're fast, but have blocks removed that make the PowerPC G5 cores slower than they should be, and calling into the VM for framebuffer updates consumes a lot of CPU cycles.
The main problem is that the Sony VM limits what you can do - in the end, it's a great Cell development kit, but that's about all...
Worked fine for me... I just click the scroll wheel on a link and bam, a new tab opens in the background on my Mac. Hey, it works in Safari too... and Opera.
Don't know what kind of Mac you're using, but they do work great with multibutton mice.
(And GUI designers can take a note about that - forcing a single button means you can't hide features away in right-click menus. There are literally Windows applications where the right click is used more often than left! Or heck, even Windows Explorer has modifier keys for right click - often Shift- or Alt- right-click can bring up a context menu with more actions.)
Not really.
The reason Duke had to ban them was because the way they did their WiFi somehow clashed with the way Duke's WiFi network was set up. The end result was that a small concentration of iPhones managed to actually take down the WiFi network by consuming inordinate amounts of CPU time on the WiFi processors. This was confined to that one network - everywhere else, even those using the same WiFi accesspoints, worked just fine. It was an oddball configuration issue.
As for the $3000 phone bill, it is true. But it's not because of the scans - it's because the person was roaming, and data roaming is pricey. You can configure the iPhone to poll a mail server every so often (regular POP or IMAP). Guess what? Checking POP or IMAP takes bytes, and bytes are pricey (easily 5 cents per 1000 bytes or less - some providers count every byte sent over the air including all headers and trailers, and not just raw IP packets). This was resolved in a 1.1 firmware update which has the option to disable data roaming (the iPhone will not make an EDGE connection if it detects it's roaming - it won't even make a standby connection).
But is the offer to share the same thing as sharing?
To overuse a car analogy, if you buy a car that can go >110MPH (basically the highest legal speed limit), are you guilty of speeding? And should the DMV just fine every driver for speeding anyhow, since I'm sure 99% of all drivers during their lives have exceeded the speed limit (even by 1MPH... or inadvertently, going downhill, for instance)?
Just because you could, doesn't mean you did. More likely than not, the car in your driveway can exceed the speed limit. Why don't you explain why you have it, since you can be speeding?
Probably the article is wrong. Semiconductor storage will double every 18 months or so (Moore's law - double the transistors --> double the storage, roughly). Spinning disk storage seems to double almost yearly these days - a couple of years ago, a 500GB drive was expensive, then last year, 500GB drives are extremely common while 1TB drives were pricey. In between, we have such monsters as 750GB disks. It's one of the barriers that SSD faces - until spinning disk storage capacity stops growing faster than Moore's Law, there's not much chance SSD can catch up.
Also, you missed out on this being "shipped" storage. We're making more hard drives than ever. Even if technology doesn't progress, if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storage.
The big question is - how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)?
Because it's physically impossible on an SLR. In an SLR, you have the lens, that then is followed by a mirror. The mirror, in the "down" position, reflects the light from the lens through the prism viewfinder and then to your eye.
When you click the shutter, the mirror flips up (viewfinder goes dark), exposing the shutter which then opens and shuts the right amount of time the actual camera sensor.
That's not to say it's not possible to say, add a little cameraphone like sensor and offer a live preview (several dSLRs do this now), but historically, it wasn't possible. The light is either going to the main camera sensor, or the viewfinder. A small amount is actually reflected *down* for autofocus, though.
Though, as anyone knows, holding your camera at arm's length (so you can use the LCD as a viewfinder) sucks for camera shake. And most camera LCDs are of QVGA or lower resolution, so you miss out on all the nice little details youc an see through a real optical viewfinder like that on a dSLR...
Given how well the Pakistan mistake worked globally, why couldn't someone else "accidentally" broadcast that 134.17.0.0/16 route? That would take it out for a large portion of the network.
Hell, that would stop a large proportion of the spam - if the originating servers can't make as many outgoing connections (because the return packets are mis-routed back), then it'll take a bit of work to find the few botnet machines able to communicate back...
Or, given that a number of new computers have FireWire ports, you can easily break in via FireWire!
http://storm.net.nz/projects/16
This can also be used to break into MacOS X and Linux machines as well via the FireWire bus. Of course, it does require physical access to the machine, but you can do this, and get in while the machine is still on without rebooting it.
It's basically a very similar way to how one would debug operating systems via FireWire. Except one's intent is more malicious. (You can use FireWire to do post-mortem debugging since the controller runs independently of the OS).
Considering a toner cartridge for my Brother laser printer costs $75, but lasts 2500-ish pages, refills might be cheaper, but it's just easier to buy a new one every so often (usually 2 years or more - we don't print much). The drum is separate, so the cartridge is basically a molded plastic container. Also, I'd rather not have to deal with toner spills.
Of course, refilled toner cartridges are always an option - save the toner spills to people who know how to deal with it.
But if you print a lot, an inkjet is probably the worst possible way to do it (i.e., office environment). Far cheaper to make an upfront investment in a laser printer - the ink costs alone would probably cover the difference in a month or two!
How about the video on Gizmodo showing one in operation?
Sure it's not a scientific measurement of noise, but the fan whirr is definitely noticable. The Dell workstation on my desk at work is quieter, as is my Mac Pro (think - the real noise comes from the hard drives, not fans, and that's the standard seeking noises when they're busy.).
Heck, I think you can get some whitebox PCs that are quieter.
Too true.
And the other thing that sucks - VPinMAME isn't open source, even though PinMAME is. Not too bad, but when you consider the former and latter are both in the same repository on the SourceForge page... (yes, you can get the vPinmame code there, but the deal is, it's encrypted. There's the source for the decryption program there too, but guess what? There's no key, so you can't build vPinMAME unless you crack it). The reasons are honorable, I suppose, but it's that the whole community starts to grate you the wrong way when people wish to protect their IP while openly disregarding other's IP.
Technically, no. You can copy CDs to MP3s, but you cannot actually dump ROMs, except for backwards compatibility development as a developer (the courts will decide - you have to be developing something that needs the dump). It's the reason why Connectix won (Sony v. Connectix, appeal) with its Virtual Game Station product. Initially, they lost...
Turns out, ROMs are treated as "mask works" which disallow shifting to an electronic format. The only "fair use" you have is actually burning a copy of the ROM onto another ROM (to replace one that went bad, for example).
Crazy copyright laws. The only real savior is the fact that it's really hard to prosecute anyone over this.
The other exception is if there's actually a legal distribution of the ROM - there was a company (out of business) that sold ROMs legally for MAME (copyright holder permission and all), and some companies did actually make ROM images available (pinball), though some companies, seeing even pinball machines get emulated, promptly withdrew their ROM images, forcing everyone to use their "preferred" distributor for ROM updates. Gottlieb is the first who started it...
Better yet, call them.
SMS latency can be extremely random. Sure, 99% of SMSes are received within say, 5 minutes of them being sent, but a significant number bounce around the system enough that they may be received hours or days later. Worse still, if there's a slight strangeness in the SMS providers, you can keep receiving the *SAME* SMS several times. Worst situation I've seen is an SMS took around 3 days for it to be received, and not only that, ended up being received multiple times over the next few days after that (the SAME SMS). I don't know why thatr is, but it happens. Something to be aware of if you have time-sensitive criticsl things sent exclusively via SMS.
Actually, no - TiVo and ReplayTV were the first to have DVR boxes on sale (I think they came out around the same time) around 1998.
What TiVO did was realize that people wanted it with their satellite boxes, and offered the technology to both Dish and DirecTV. Dish poo-poohed the idea, while DirecTV lauded it (and licensed it). One of the problems was, TiVo left behind one of their boxes for Dish to "play" with. Rumor has it that the box was reverse-engineered and Dish released their own box to compete against DirecTiVos.
Now, DVRs have come and gone, so if TiVo's patent was obvious, there would be an overwhelming supply of them. Instead we have 'em in cable boxes (Motorola, PACE, Scientific Atlanta), and Dish/DirecTV have their own (DirecTV has licensed TiVo), and only TiVo is making them still on the market. UltimateTV isn't supported anymore, and ReplayTV has gone to become a software-only company. Myth isn't even in the same league, unless it runs on boxes with low CPU (sub-200MHz), with hardware encoders and decoders (practically all PC capture cards and video cards do these days, but they won't run on slow CPUs). And more rumors have it that the current executive and board of DirecTV love their TiVos, and may actually decide to bring them back.
Of course, the big deal is the TiVo box that TiVo left behind at EchoStar (Dish). It effectively was the trojan horse. With that one move (probably done out of generousity, rather than malice), EchoStar cannot claim to have not peeked at patented technologies, nor be unaware that such patents may exist.
Actually, you can fool them quite easily, as any pilot knows. "Spatial disorientation" has downed many aircraft, usually because the pilot thinks the aircraft is doing one thing (flying straight and level), when it's really doing something else (descending/turning, or ascending/turning leading to stall).
One trick done during training is having the instructor do a maneuver like a turn continually for a minute or two, then ask the pilot to level the aircraft (by feel). The end result is quite... interesting. Let it continue for a minute, and the aircraft will be in a very strange attitude. Another thing is to simply let the pilot fly blind, by feel, and see what trouble it leads into.
It's why IFR pilots must trust their instruments and not their gut feel.
I don't see why you can't apply similar tricks into this to make it realistic. After all, those simulator rides feel pretty damn real even though the cabin only moves a few feet each way.
Actually, the problem is, people don't use light-on-dark properly, which makes it even harder on the eyes. If you use a thin font like Heveltica or Arial, white-on-black causes the letters to turn into a light grey. The thing is, the black "creeps" onto the lighter color. The general hints have been to either use bold, which fattens the letters enough to offset some of the creep, make the font size larger, or choose a fatter font. All of this helps offset the creep - it's only at the larger sizes does the effect of the creep become less noticeable. It's why I hate when Courier is used as a default font - it's damn hard to read on a black background. On Windows boxes, I much prefer the fat and easily read FixedSys.
But there are tons of contrasty color combinations. White-black is generic and isn't eyecatching, but great for long sessions. Colors like Yellow-on-Blue are easily read, and the blue doesn't actually "creep" into the yellow too badly. Yellow-Red and Yellow-Green work well too. But yellow can be quite tiring to read.
True, most protection does this, especially from 12 years ago when DOS was still a viable platform.
However, I don't see why more modern systems can't store a copy of the MBR in the CMOS - it is, after all, only 512 bytes in size. On boot, it simply does a compare between the MBR on the hard disk and the one it stored in CMOS. On miscompare, it simply asks what you want to do - restore from CMOS, or use the modified MBR (and update CMOS).
Other than GRUB and Lilo and other multi-OS boot systems, the MBR code is quite simple, simple enough that practically anything can restore it...
Has anyone considered that instaed of a high-gain antenna, you use a moderate gain one, something htat would work in the order of feet (or half a metre or so)?
Think about it, to get many cards, you have to be close. In situations where people are already close, this isn't too much of a problem - think subways, crowded hallways, and other places people gather. Take it one step farther, and use a regular reader, and bump into people where they're most likely to store their cards (wallets, purses, etc). In crowded situations, it's entirely possible to bump into people (and probably expected).
Sure you won't get *everyone*, but if you're really just wanting to collect *some*, this could work quite well. The crowd gives the perpetrator anonymity, and the low number of victims makes it hard to pin the reading to any particular place or time. Do it right and most people will assume its a fault with the technology.
Think of it in situations like a supermarket lineup - you're close enough to others that if youc an read a few feet, you can get the info off the person in front. Or any other lineup, for that matter. Or if packed subways is your think, just the few people around you. Be near the door and read people as they pass by.
Nothing that requires huge ungainly antennas or equipment - just ones that can be easily hidden in a bag or so.
Actually, no. Shaw uses Ellacoya units(warning, PDF) which perform deep packet inspection. These units, which have been recently tested (and Ellacoya is one of the two that had faith in their units), do not care about what port traffic is on. They inspect packets and throttle those like BitTorrent, regardless of what port it's on. The Ellacoya units faired quite well during the tests - identifying most P2P traffic, with no false positives.
So far, encryption is the only way to foil these shapers, and there's lots of talk about the traffic shaping that Shaw does in the Shaw forums at DSL Reports. There's a link to Shaw's CEO saying they use traffic shapers as well.
Of course, I think more and more BitTorrent clients are coming with encryption enabled. Eventually, I see everyone encrypting all traffic soon...