And what if that fails to work? Will we have to reboot the world?
Well, technically, init could do the job just as well, too. After all, it spawned off (eventually) the process that spawned the zombie (and forgot to reap them). Now, we just need to telinit to reap some zombie processes.
Things are easier if one of those processes was a shell spawned by init... kill the shell, and init will respawn it, reaping any zombies that the shell was an eventual parent of.
Surprised there's no silver-bullet gun utility to go alongside with kill. Or that kill doesn't have a --wooden-stake option.
It's much easier to pull the stickers off. Though less fun I suppose.
Fun trick: Take a solved cube, and on one of the inner edge pieces (the ones with two stickers), and swap the colors. Mix it up, and give it to someone to solve. Or take a corner piece and rotate it.
Hint: It's unsolvable. The Rubik's Cube, if taken apart and put back together randomly, will more often than not end up being unsolvable.
A great way to frustrate that showoff cuber at the office. Especially if they appreciate it when someone scrambles the cube and they'll have it solved in front of everyone. Just go and put it back together randomly, or do one of those devious swaps, and you'll have fun watching him try to solve it.
You hardly need to spend $1200 to save your rig from the years-old consoles. Quad SLI is nvidia's top offering, not entry level PC gaming. A $200 card (and a $300 core 2 duo) can easily trounce anything the xbox 360 or ps3 can do.
And PC game developers are silly to make anything like that a requirement to even play their game at a decent level.
After all, if they concentrate on only the high-end market, their customer base will be quite small. And unfortunately, the higher end the market, the greater likelihood of piracy. As explained in an article about videogame piracy, if you develop for the largest market, then you can ignore the pirates.
After all, once you've shelled out $1200 for a kickass card, you want something to run on it. Yet, you don't want to pay the $60 for a game you'll use as a tech demo, so you'll probably pirate it, go "wow, nice graphics", and that's it.
Go after the people with requirements that an Intel GMA950 can fulfill (basically every machine dating back a few years), and you'll sell a lot of copies, and if it gets pirated up the wazoo, well, don't worry about it. (Also, don't try to sell to markets filled with pirates - e.g., China - why spend all the money translating when you won't make it back. Let the pirates do it for you!).
Sort of how the Nintendo Wii is doing so well - they don't cater for the traditional gaming crowd too much (they do, but Nintendo doesn't focus there), but instead on the non-gamers. The Wii can't compete against the PS3 or Xbox360, so it doesn't. It goes after a bigger market segment of non-gamers. Which is probably why "casual gaming" type games are skyrocketing - non-gamers can play, even their 5-year-old work PC can run it decently, etc.
And AM/FM radio is exactly the same as satellite, right? For example, you can get the same signal driving across the country? The service from satellite is different.
Not necessarily same signal, but same content since ClearChannel and the like have all the "standard stations" in every market now, no? Sure you'll have to retune often, but it's pretty certain if you like say, KISS FM, you'll find the same station the next town over as well, also called (conveniently enough) "KISS FM".
Of course, this brings up the question of if you like non-bland radio you can get anywhere...
Add to that - the unique channels you couldn't get "on the other guy". I have XM precisely because Sirius doesn't offer an equivalent channel for the stuff I like to listen to (Movie scores - XM27 Cinemagic). I'm told it'll survive... but who knows.
And yes, XM WX is quite important as well - not just in the air, but also around as well (XM offers WX service in general now - not terribly useful to those who can catch the local broadcast, but may be important in the boonies).
XM doesn't actually provide the data - they just provide the transport mechanism - they carry the WX data for a third party (I think there used to be a generic "XM Data" service for one-way data transfers?). Funny how Sirius doesn't have a data service...
I thought the Tesla Motors cars were all electric? How do you intend to go cross country with an all electric car? I don't think the rules will allow for you to chase it with a big generator truck to recharge the car every 200 miles. The way the rules are written, it sounds to me like your car is pretty much going to have to be gasoline or diesel powered because that's the only way you're going to be able to refuel it when you're 1000 miles from home. Sneaking in behind shopping malls or something every 200 miles and plugging it into an outside wall outlet is probably not going to work.
You could make the engine part a trailer. When you're doing your inter-city commutes, you'd just plug it in at work, plut it in at home, and go about your merry little business as a fully electric car.
When you want to go cross-country, you'd hook up the trailer to the car, and as necessary, it starts up, generates power for the battery, and shuts down, like hybrid cars. Except unlike hybrids, you're not carrying the whole engine and supporting systems (gas, cooling, exhaust, etc) with you everywhere you go. And like hybrids, it can work the engine where its most efficient. (The ICE is so inefficient, that it's way more efficient to use its mechanical power to generate electricity, and then use the electricity to move a vehicle - see the popular diesel-electic train).
Heck, if there's a standard for wiring up these trailers and cars together, a whole new industry is born - car companies can produce an all electric car and their standard trailer, and third parties can make their own trailers. Or rent a trailer if they don't go on long trips frequently enough to justify owning one (aren't most cars just used for the daily commute? In which case the plug in at office/home would work just fine).
Well, once the DRM is stripped, this'll make for much faster TV ups on piratebay...
Already been done (link in another post, and that link has a nice link to another open-source project that automates the entire procedure).
Only thing is, you need to edit the file still - remove the commercial breaks and all that jazz, so TiVo-to-TPB isn't quite there yet unless one wants to upload stuff that still has all the commercials intact, plus all the stuff before the teasers and the potential to cut stuff off at the end.
I will admit, though, it's cool - I use it, and it's nice to actually have the closed-captioning embedded in the video. Now to find a closed-captioning aware editor...
"Unsupported" != "Deliberate device disablement via updates for hacked devices"
Here we go again.
Has it been proven it was deliberate? Because there was an update later on (1.1.2, I believe) that fixed all the "bricked" phones. Which would mean that whoever unlocked their phone, the software was done poorly enough that the updates were screwed up. Even the iPhone Elite Team says it's due to a messed up unlock patch. A hack
And Apple said it will brick phones if they unlocked the phone and update. The solution was to avoid updating until later...
Heck, Nintendo has to start warning too that their updates may brick the Wii, as well, if there were any third-party modifications done to it.
... to figure out how to do what we do with dogs and cats on a daily basis.../blockquote>
Hrm... wouldn't this just be a consumer version of laser targeting systems that's been used by the military for aiming missiles at buildings and stuff?
Funny, but that wasn't a vaporware product... the actual device shown may have been, but before dSLRs, people could acquire "digital backs" for their SLR cameras to turn them into digital cameras. So the technology isn't new, innovative, or even vaporware. While everyone was raving over "point and shoot" digital cameras, the serious guys wanted something for their SLRs.
It was just that it easily cost around $10,000, so not many could afford them.
Then dSLRs came onto the market and that ended that reign. And these days, they're well within the reach of amateur photographers, costing not much more than a high-end point and shoot...
Sorry man, but TTG is half baked at best. The software is poorly designed, and there are Macrovision restrictions (whoops, you can't transfer that!)
I'd put up with two weeks to watch certain programs (and current Tivo service), but I've had more than one movie (on the premium movie channels) that wouldn't transfer all together. 2 weeks, maybe 1.
They have to fix TTG before it would be compelling: -Less restrictive. No limits (other than a current Tivo subscription) for unflagged content, and a couple of weeks (at least) to watch Macrovision protected content with limited transfer. -Non broken software. The TivoToGo software added two services (Beacon and another one) that produced endless errors. Reformatting didn't help, and it is kind of invasive. -An easier way to transfer. Maybe Series 4 Tivos can have onboard front USB?
TivoToGo really, really, sucks. I have an 100MBit network and it takes 12 hours to transfer a one hour show. It needs to be faster. When Tivo can fix TTG to be more compelling and less DRM encumbered, it will appeal to me.
Can't help you with the premium programming - if your cable provider marks channels as "copy protected", TiVo has to obey them, unfortunately.
But TiVoToGo is great. You're obviously using the TiVo Desktop software, when there's a brilliant alternative available. After all TiVo Desktop only works on Windows. And if you use Mac, you must buy Roxio. And nothing for Linux....
Yeah, I'll keep you waiting....
You might want to check out this page on some interesting information on what you can do with TiVoToGo. Supposedly, you can use this program to automatically grab videos off your TiVo and encode them for whatever in the background too. In particular, this application is very intriguing.
I only use the first, but a few use the second and like it. Nice having raw MPG files... (with closed-captions embedded, too).
I didn't see one - everyone's claiming that there were 10% less items for sale, but for what I was looking at, the numbers seemed normal. I expected things to run a little short near the end, but it didn't happen, other than the nominal "cheap listing day" crap they pull every so often that spams all my searches with a billion identical items.
Which is a problem for eBay. When they make their insertion fees cheap, everyone spams a billion auctions, drowning out the stuff I want with cruft I don't. The problem is, those items can't really be searched away - they are the item being looked for, technically, just not the one you want.
I believe probalby 95% of people on eBay really don't give a damn, it's just a vocal minority spouting. I certainly didn't see any changes. Then again, I use eBay for finding hard to find stuff. Stuff you can buy in a store, is usually less of a hassle buying it from the store (B&M or online) - rather than eBay. eBay's for all those items one either can't find in stores (sold out/not made anymore/rare items), and the ones complaining are those who sell what everyone else can find at an online store. It's not like eBay even has many deals, so bargain hunting isn't an option.
As for the reasoning behind the changes, well, consider "feedback hostage" is rampant on eBay. The seller won't post feedback until you (the buyer) do. If you post negative feedback (say, item was fraudulent), the seller will do the same to you, even though you fulfilled your obligations (i.e., paid seller in a timely fashion, tried to resolve issues with seller, etc). Most good sellers will leave feedback immediately since the buyer's fulfilled their contractual duty to pay. (Part of the changes also involve the buyer not being able to give feedback for 3 days or so, to prevent the buyer from the lesser idiocy of "I paid seller within hour, item didn't arrive 5 minutes later" crap, or the more common "item did not arrive" when buyer hasn't even paid for it!).
There's no real good solution to this - you could do feedback escrow (buyer and seller can't see feedback until both have submitted it), but that won't protect against buyers doing what I mention.
I don't know if the changes are good or bad, but I'm guessing they came out of all the complaints from buyers who left negative feedback because sellers deserved it, while getting retaliatory feedback in return when they did their end of the deal.
Honestly, if I want to see video, I'll fire up some porn. Would it have been too much to ask to get some transcripts and/or replies in the standard, text only format that I expect from every single other post on Slashdot, or would all that typing be too much of a hassle?
Not to mention that reading is way faster than speaking, and doubly so when there's enough background noise to make inaudible the speech (futzing with rewind buttons and progress thumbs is quite slow, especially in crappy players that insist on only letting you go back/forth to markers every N seconds rather than anywhere). That, and if you only care about one small part of a video, having to sit there through the entire thing is a pain rather than simple scanning.
Video is great for some things, but other times, it should be used to augment, rather than replace. (E.g., video is great for demos and such, but poor if you're looking at a talking head unless it's used to clarify or illustrate a particularly difficult concept in the text).
"Why the hell do you need to watch a movie in HD on a 15 inch screen?"
Because you bought the BluRay edition of the movie to be able to watch it at home on your 42" plasma TV?
Well, the better solution would be to do it the HD-DVD way. Put both the Blu-Ray and the DVD versions on one disc! The technology has been demonstrated, so it's doable.
Of course, there is managed copy, but I don't see how that's supposed to work until Blu-Ray 2.0 players come out later this year able to do key negotiations and license management.
OT Question - why was it that Blu-Ray was in development for such a long time that HD-DVD could be researched, commercialized, and end up being released with far more features that caught the Blu-Ray folks by surprise? Blu-Ray 2.0 will have everything HD-DVD has, two years after HD-DVD was introduced. And Sony was working on Blu-Ray far longer before anyone at Toshiba got the idea.
Yeah, you could do that, but then why do you even need BluRay? We could just put Divx movies on plain old DVDs and have HighDef movies without even having a new disc. If you're going to rip the disk, you might as well rip it to a DVD resolution file, and make it only take up about 1 GB. You probably wouldn't even see the difference given the size of the screen and the quality of the sound card.
Because so-called "high-def" is really "high-res" video?
Everyone is claiming that downloading will kill Blu-Ray. It won't for at least the near future. IF we take even the most common Blu-Ray format around (single layer 25GB), you cannot compress it into DivX without losing a lot. Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) these days use more advanced codecs than DivX (h.264 or VC-1). H.264 is known formally as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), while DivX is known as MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile). DivX is much better than MPEG2, but isn't a contender at all when compared to AVC.
Until one can download 25GB easily, most "high def" is around 720p. Sure that's "good enough" for most people, except it's also horribly overcompressed. Even comparisons of various downloaded "HD" videos show slight improvements against the standard-def version, but were clearly inferior to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD and even Cable. One review even said "save your money and just download the standard def version".
Have you tested it with 720P and/or 1080I MPEG2 files like those one would get from an ATSC tuner? That's what I need in a Myth frontend. I use a AMD X2 box to do it now, but if I can make a PS3 do it well, I would buy one. With blu-ray and games available in the same box, that's worth $400 if they can get Myth playing ATSC files deinterlaced with a 720P output.
You can, but don't expect Linux to do it. If your Myth box can do DLNA and export compatible h.264 videos, it'll stream over the network just fine.
The problem is, everyone thinks PS3-Linux runs "on bare metal" when it's really running on a virtual machine. The VM allows access to 6 of the 7 available SPEs (PS3's OS reserves one for its purpose, and one of the SPEs is disabled in the silicon). The VM disallows access to the RSX chip - it's a rather expensive framebuffer operation to update the screen (update memory, trigger interrupt to get VM to update RSX's framebuffer). Hard drive, card slots are virtualized, as well. Access to Bluetooth and WiFi are disabled. Access to the Blu-Ray drive is limited to insecure ATA commands only. Hard drive (SATA), Blu-Ray drive (IDE) and card slots are exported as standard SCSI devices without using any IDE-SCSI type emulation. A bad sector on the disk leads to strange errors (I know - my first drive upgrade had a bad sector, and the disk kept giving me strange ext3 errors).
Stupid framebuffer kernel thread also runs all the time...
I can't get the PS3 to play back a DVD upscaling to 1080p without Xine complaining that it has to drop frames. The X server is the Xfb framebuffer server. Xrandr, yes, Xv, no.
The iPod touch update was curious - the apps were already in the new firmware, and the update just "unlocked" them. (The update weighs in at 9 KB.) Since people won't get to download new firmware every time they get an app, this doesn't confirm much, although I agree that it was probably a dry run of some component in the whole scheme, most likely signing.
Could be another SOX thing.
After all, if they added applications ("features") to the iPod Touch in the new update, then they couldn't have accounted for all the iPod Touch revenues in the last quarter(s). They'd have to restate their earnings since this update effectively makes the iPod Touch "more complete". Sort of like the $2 802.11n enabler.
It's stupid, but I guess everyone's so afraid (or Apple Legal is) of violating securities law. Especially how Apple was one of the high profile cases. The only thing that saved them was the fact that it's hard to claim negative losses from the backdating options screwing over investors.
The standard response to "increase bandwidth" is "P2P apps consume all available bandwidth, increasing bandwidth won't solve anything", but that response overlooks the fact that you aren't automatically obligated to increase the bandwidth provided to end users. Improve your core network while keeping your customers in the same bandwidth tier they currently have and you'll solve the problem of p2p bogging things down.
That's half the problem
The other half is stuck in the last mile. Cable is a bad way to upload a lot of data. Sure there's a lot of bandwidth, but cable has very poor uploading characteristics. Just a few people in the highest paid tier of service using all the upstream can easily deny the rest of the people of the node access to the Internet.
It's not just the ISP, but the last mile technology used. Cable and DSL came about with the assumption that most people download way more than they upload. Unfortunately, Bittorrent doesn't do this (if you want a good ratio, you have to upload as much as, or more than you download). A few people paying for 10M/1M service in a cable node can easily take down the entire node.
You may notice that the companies having issues with this tend to be cable companies. Shaw (BitTorrent throttling) and Rogers (encrypted traffic throttling) in Canada (two largest cable companies), Time-Warner Cable (iTunes throttling, byte metering), Comcast (RST packet spoofing for P2P), amongst others. Cable just can't handle the upstream component of P2P.
From "Hi-Fi" (High Fidelity) to "Wi-Fi" (Wireless, but the Fi sounds cool and people vaguely know what you mean) to "GiFi" as gigabit wireless, you've basically lost the actual underlying words.
True, but the WiFi Alliance (the ones behind the "WiFi" name, logo, and certification (as well as the "Wireless x" branding), and completely UNrelated to the IEEE) does it because they want to ensure compatitibility between various products. You do, after all, want to be able to connect your Intel chipset to your Netgear router while your friend's PC uses a D-Link card, for example. So it can be considered "wireless fidelity" in how 802.11-compatible all these devices are to the IEEE spec. (They're also the folks behind WPA while the IEEE and WPA worked to make 802.11i (known as WPA2)).
Alas, even certificated devices often have issues connecting in these modes, but that's another problem.
1 million machines in a network talking to each other would probably consume more bandwidth in network overhead than useful work. Even instructing 1 million independent machines to do the same thing would take a considerable amount of time/bandwidth (eg. send a spam email to each one plus a list of targets so they can begin spamming... that's a million emails you've got to send - might as well send the spam yourself).
Except that a good botnet doesn't have to have machines talking to each other. Each compromised machine just needs to find a few others to get its orders from, who gets its orders from someone higher in the chain, etc.
There doesn't have to be communications back to the server.
For spamming, each machine gets a list of a bunch of usernames from a peer who shares its list, and gets other addresses from other peers. That's why you can end up with multiple copies of the same spam in your inbox - the spammers don't care if you get 1000 copies of the same email. And the spambots don't bother marking off an email as sent to a specific address and tell everyone, they just run through their own lists.
This way, the only real communication happens top down, fire-and-forget method. If someone buys 1,000,000 emails, spammer can send out more just to ensure that 1,000,000 people got it. But since they're scammers, it doesn't matter if it went to 10,000 people 100 times.
TFA doesn't mention if these will play on a standalone Blu-Ray player or what. It seems pointless unless you really want to throw away your old (new) HD-DVD drive...
Well, just make sure you use the BDAV profile (the "dumb" collection-of-videos mode).
Only BDMV (mastered movies) discs are an issue in playing back in standalone machines. Since you're not supposed to be mastering these except to test before pressing, you shouldn't have an issue.
Unless your standalone player supports BDMV on writable BDs.
I just noticed this - it's in the summary, and in TFA (twice!).
March 15th through April 15th 2007: Qualification period for the Windows Vista Sensei and Office Master superheros
(emphasis mine).
And in the rules...
Offer good only to the first 5,000 residents of the U.S. or Canada that attend at least two live MSDN Webcasts or complete two MSDN Virtual Labs, or one of each, between March 15, 2007, and April 15, 2007
(again, emphasis mine).
Either this is really really really old news (not unusual - it IS/. after all), or someone's got their time machine all messed up?
i would tend to agree with you on the browser part BUT only if you limit it to the browser that is included on the phone. I have a Cingular 8525 (remarked HTC) and yes the built in IE blows ass.. BUT Opera for WM5/6 is extreamly nice and much prefer it to Safari on the iPhone.. the thing is you have to buy Opera it isn't given free and i undertand that 99% of people arn't goingto buy a phone and then go buy a browser for it.
Also understand that in Asia, phones aren't subsidized so heavily, and people are willing to pay for phones. North Americans may balk at paying $400 for an iPhone, but to Asians, that's chump change compared to the other WinMo phones out there. They're used to paying full price, and anything that looks "hip" and "trendy". It's partly why there are a ton more WinMo devices out there in Asia - the market wants functional phones with capability. So if you're an Asian, and you've got a choice between the iPhone at $600, or some bunch of WinMo phones also costing around $600, well, the iPhone starts to look pretty damn good.
Or heck, if a regular cellphone costs $200, even the iPhone doesn't seem too big an investment anymore. Only in North America does it seem that $400 is a lot for a cellphone.
It depends on how you rate the subjective "worthwhile differences". 6 times the pixels, considering 1080p vs 480p (assuming you have a progressive DVD player) is worth it to me.
I have both systems. HD-DVD was "better" than Blu-Ray IMHO (mostly because most HD-DVDs had 30GB to play with, and most BD's have only 25 (there were very, very few dual layer BDs), and with BD's insistence on "Uncompressed PCM Audio" (versus Dolby TrueHD lossless compression), well, that hurts.
But the other reason is, you may have 6 times the pixels, but you don't necessarily get 6 times the resolution. If a director soft-focuses a scene, no amount of pixels makes the image any sharper. "High def blurry" is still blurry. For visual fests like say, Transformers (HD-DVD - 27GB, and NO lossless audio, grr... just Dolby Digital Plus), 6 times the resolution is great. But for dramas and such, all you're doing is upping the pixels without upping the clarity.
In fact, I've bought more DVDs because they were not only cheaper than either BD or HD-DVD, but often contained more extras and stuff (than the BD - the HD-DVDs typically have equal or superior content to the DVD, go figure). That, and my HD-DVD player is a really, really good upscaling DVD player. There are very few movies out there that really justify the enhanced resolution. (Heck, even Transformers gets interesting due to Bay's ADHD-inducing technique). I have many HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays where I'm simply less than impressed with the clarity and resolution, not because of the medium, but of the way the director did his filming.
Or, let's take Cloverfield. Do people really want to watch shaky-cam in high-def? Is it even worthwhile? High-def shaky you can't tell from regular upscaled shaky? Or the "high-def" ST:TOS TV series? Do people really care about seeing the cracks in the plaster?
High def is great, no doubt. But its a lot like the "Megapixel myth" in digital cameras. You can buy 12MP digital camera point and shoots, but they're not much better than a 6MP one that can produce just as good an image (or better), but a smaller filesize. There's still a bunch of things like directing techniques that make the enhanced resolution of high-def pointless.
Sure, there are a few good things that deserve to be in high-def - Pixar's shorts, for example. Animation looks great in high-def. But for many people, the enhanced resolution isn't worth what you get. A good upscaling DVD player can produce images close to the high-def version for a lot of director techniques (especially ones that rely on soft-focus, depth-of-view control, etc). The only thing an upscaled DVD can't do is produce more detail, for those visual fest movies.
Seriously, sounds like a version issue. An SCM (Software Configuration Management). Seriously, I worked for smaller companies that were serious about versioning and regression testing. Is it my imagination or does MS seem more and more like a software organization that is out of control?
It appears that each little division of Microsoft is their own little fiefdom. Take a common DLL - comctl32.dll (common controls). Windows ships with one version. Office ships with another version. Applications (using Visual Studio Redistributables) ship with a third version! Each has features that aren't in the others, so Windows apps get one look, Office another look, and 3rd party apps yet another look.
In addition, the OS team forked the compiler they use from the development team. It makes sense in one aspect - all developers have a stable toolchain. However, if the dev team breaks something, instead of the Windows team making a big stink, people who use Visual Studio do.
As far as anyone's concerned, Microsoft might as well be split up into separate companies - they more or less act that way anyhow. Code's taken from one team and forked, improvements aren't folded back in, etc.
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Well, technically, init could do the job just as well, too. After all, it spawned off (eventually) the process that spawned the zombie (and forgot to reap them). Now, we just need to telinit to reap some zombie processes.
Things are easier if one of those processes was a shell spawned by init... kill the shell, and init will respawn it, reaping any zombies that the shell was an eventual parent of.
Surprised there's no silver-bullet gun utility to go alongside with kill. Or that kill doesn't have a --wooden-stake option.
Fun trick: Take a solved cube, and on one of the inner edge pieces (the ones with two stickers), and swap the colors. Mix it up, and give it to someone to solve. Or take a corner piece and rotate it.
Hint: It's unsolvable. The Rubik's Cube, if taken apart and put back together randomly, will more often than not end up being unsolvable.
A great way to frustrate that showoff cuber at the office. Especially if they appreciate it when someone scrambles the cube and they'll have it solved in front of everyone. Just go and put it back together randomly, or do one of those devious swaps, and you'll have fun watching him try to solve it.
And PC game developers are silly to make anything like that a requirement to even play their game at a decent level.
After all, if they concentrate on only the high-end market, their customer base will be quite small. And unfortunately, the higher end the market, the greater likelihood of piracy. As explained in an article about videogame piracy, if you develop for the largest market, then you can ignore the pirates.
After all, once you've shelled out $1200 for a kickass card, you want something to run on it. Yet, you don't want to pay the $60 for a game you'll use as a tech demo, so you'll probably pirate it, go "wow, nice graphics", and that's it.
Go after the people with requirements that an Intel GMA950 can fulfill (basically every machine dating back a few years), and you'll sell a lot of copies, and if it gets pirated up the wazoo, well, don't worry about it. (Also, don't try to sell to markets filled with pirates - e.g., China - why spend all the money translating when you won't make it back. Let the pirates do it for you!).
Sort of how the Nintendo Wii is doing so well - they don't cater for the traditional gaming crowd too much (they do, but Nintendo doesn't focus there), but instead on the non-gamers. The Wii can't compete against the PS3 or Xbox360, so it doesn't. It goes after a bigger market segment of non-gamers. Which is probably why "casual gaming" type games are skyrocketing - non-gamers can play, even their 5-year-old work PC can run it decently, etc.
Not necessarily same signal, but same content since ClearChannel and the like have all the "standard stations" in every market now, no? Sure you'll have to retune often, but it's pretty certain if you like say, KISS FM, you'll find the same station the next town over as well, also called (conveniently enough) "KISS FM".
Of course, this brings up the question of if you like non-bland radio you can get anywhere...
Add to that - the unique channels you couldn't get "on the other guy". I have XM precisely because Sirius doesn't offer an equivalent channel for the stuff I like to listen to (Movie scores - XM27 Cinemagic). I'm told it'll survive... but who knows.
And yes, XM WX is quite important as well - not just in the air, but also around as well (XM offers WX service in general now - not terribly useful to those who can catch the local broadcast, but may be important in the boonies).
XM doesn't actually provide the data - they just provide the transport mechanism - they carry the WX data for a third party (I think there used to be a generic "XM Data" service for one-way data transfers?). Funny how Sirius doesn't have a data service...
You could make the engine part a trailer. When you're doing your inter-city commutes, you'd just plug it in at work, plut it in at home, and go about your merry little business as a fully electric car.
When you want to go cross-country, you'd hook up the trailer to the car, and as necessary, it starts up, generates power for the battery, and shuts down, like hybrid cars. Except unlike hybrids, you're not carrying the whole engine and supporting systems (gas, cooling, exhaust, etc) with you everywhere you go. And like hybrids, it can work the engine where its most efficient. (The ICE is so inefficient, that it's way more efficient to use its mechanical power to generate electricity, and then use the electricity to move a vehicle - see the popular diesel-electic train).
Heck, if there's a standard for wiring up these trailers and cars together, a whole new industry is born - car companies can produce an all electric car and their standard trailer, and third parties can make their own trailers. Or rent a trailer if they don't go on long trips frequently enough to justify owning one (aren't most cars just used for the daily commute? In which case the plug in at office/home would work just fine).
Already been done (link in another post, and that link has a nice link to another open-source project that automates the entire procedure).
Only thing is, you need to edit the file still - remove the commercial breaks and all that jazz, so TiVo-to-TPB isn't quite there yet unless one wants to upload stuff that still has all the commercials intact, plus all the stuff before the teasers and the potential to cut stuff off at the end.
I will admit, though, it's cool - I use it, and it's nice to actually have the closed-captioning embedded in the video. Now to find a closed-captioning aware editor...
Here we go again.
Has it been proven it was deliberate? Because there was an update later on (1.1.2, I believe) that fixed all the "bricked" phones. Which would mean that whoever unlocked their phone, the software was done poorly enough that the updates were screwed up. Even the iPhone Elite Team says it's due to a messed up unlock patch. A hack
And Apple said it will brick phones if they unlocked the phone and update. The solution was to avoid updating until later...
Heck, Nintendo has to start warning too that their updates may brick the Wii, as well, if there were any third-party modifications done to it.
Funny, but that wasn't a vaporware product... the actual device shown may have been, but before dSLRs, people could acquire "digital backs" for their SLR cameras to turn them into digital cameras. So the technology isn't new, innovative, or even vaporware. While everyone was raving over "point and shoot" digital cameras, the serious guys wanted something for their SLRs.
It was just that it easily cost around $10,000, so not many could afford them.
Then dSLRs came onto the market and that ended that reign. And these days, they're well within the reach of amateur photographers, costing not much more than a high-end point and shoot...
Can't help you with the premium programming - if your cable provider marks channels as "copy protected", TiVo has to obey them, unfortunately.
But TiVoToGo is great. You're obviously using the TiVo Desktop software, when there's a brilliant alternative available. After all TiVo Desktop only works on Windows. And if you use Mac, you must buy Roxio. And nothing for Linux.
Yeah, I'll keep you waiting.
You might want to check out this page on some interesting information on what you can do with TiVoToGo. Supposedly, you can use this program to automatically grab videos off your TiVo and encode them for whatever in the background too. In particular, this application is very intriguing.
I only use the first, but a few use the second and like it. Nice having raw MPG files... (with closed-captions embedded, too).
I didn't see one - everyone's claiming that there were 10% less items for sale, but for what I was looking at, the numbers seemed normal. I expected things to run a little short near the end, but it didn't happen, other than the nominal "cheap listing day" crap they pull every so often that spams all my searches with a billion identical items.
Which is a problem for eBay. When they make their insertion fees cheap, everyone spams a billion auctions, drowning out the stuff I want with cruft I don't. The problem is, those items can't really be searched away - they are the item being looked for, technically, just not the one you want.
I believe probalby 95% of people on eBay really don't give a damn, it's just a vocal minority spouting. I certainly didn't see any changes. Then again, I use eBay for finding hard to find stuff. Stuff you can buy in a store, is usually less of a hassle buying it from the store (B&M or online) - rather than eBay. eBay's for all those items one either can't find in stores (sold out/not made anymore/rare items), and the ones complaining are those who sell what everyone else can find at an online store. It's not like eBay even has many deals, so bargain hunting isn't an option.
As for the reasoning behind the changes, well, consider "feedback hostage" is rampant on eBay. The seller won't post feedback until you (the buyer) do. If you post negative feedback (say, item was fraudulent), the seller will do the same to you, even though you fulfilled your obligations (i.e., paid seller in a timely fashion, tried to resolve issues with seller, etc). Most good sellers will leave feedback immediately since the buyer's fulfilled their contractual duty to pay. (Part of the changes also involve the buyer not being able to give feedback for 3 days or so, to prevent the buyer from the lesser idiocy of "I paid seller within hour, item didn't arrive 5 minutes later" crap, or the more common "item did not arrive" when buyer hasn't even paid for it!).
There's no real good solution to this - you could do feedback escrow (buyer and seller can't see feedback until both have submitted it), but that won't protect against buyers doing what I mention.
I don't know if the changes are good or bad, but I'm guessing they came out of all the complaints from buyers who left negative feedback because sellers deserved it, while getting retaliatory feedback in return when they did their end of the deal.
Not to mention that reading is way faster than speaking, and doubly so when there's enough background noise to make inaudible the speech (futzing with rewind buttons and progress thumbs is quite slow, especially in crappy players that insist on only letting you go back/forth to markers every N seconds rather than anywhere). That, and if you only care about one small part of a video, having to sit there through the entire thing is a pain rather than simple scanning.
Video is great for some things, but other times, it should be used to augment, rather than replace. (E.g., video is great for demos and such, but poor if you're looking at a talking head unless it's used to clarify or illustrate a particularly difficult concept in the text).
Well, the better solution would be to do it the HD-DVD way. Put both the Blu-Ray and the DVD versions on one disc! The technology has been demonstrated, so it's doable.
Of course, there is managed copy, but I don't see how that's supposed to work until Blu-Ray 2.0 players come out later this year able to do key negotiations and license management.
OT Question - why was it that Blu-Ray was in development for such a long time that HD-DVD could be researched, commercialized, and end up being released with far more features that caught the Blu-Ray folks by surprise? Blu-Ray 2.0 will have everything HD-DVD has, two years after HD-DVD was introduced. And Sony was working on Blu-Ray far longer before anyone at Toshiba got the idea.
Because so-called "high-def" is really "high-res" video?
Everyone is claiming that downloading will kill Blu-Ray. It won't for at least the near future. IF we take even the most common Blu-Ray format around (single layer 25GB), you cannot compress it into DivX without losing a lot. Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) these days use more advanced codecs than DivX (h.264 or VC-1). H.264 is known formally as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), while DivX is known as MPEG-4 ASP (Advanced Simple Profile). DivX is much better than MPEG2, but isn't a contender at all when compared to AVC.
Until one can download 25GB easily, most "high def" is around 720p. Sure that's "good enough" for most people, except it's also horribly overcompressed. Even comparisons of various downloaded "HD" videos show slight improvements against the standard-def version, but were clearly inferior to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD and even Cable. One review even said "save your money and just download the standard def version".
You can, but don't expect Linux to do it. If your Myth box can do DLNA and export compatible h.264 videos, it'll stream over the network just fine.
The problem is, everyone thinks PS3-Linux runs "on bare metal" when it's really running on a virtual machine. The VM allows access to 6 of the 7 available SPEs (PS3's OS reserves one for its purpose, and one of the SPEs is disabled in the silicon). The VM disallows access to the RSX chip - it's a rather expensive framebuffer operation to update the screen (update memory, trigger interrupt to get VM to update RSX's framebuffer). Hard drive, card slots are virtualized, as well. Access to Bluetooth and WiFi are disabled. Access to the Blu-Ray drive is limited to insecure ATA commands only. Hard drive (SATA), Blu-Ray drive (IDE) and card slots are exported as standard SCSI devices without using any IDE-SCSI type emulation. A bad sector on the disk leads to strange errors (I know - my first drive upgrade had a bad sector, and the disk kept giving me strange ext3 errors).
Stupid framebuffer kernel thread also runs all the time...
I can't get the PS3 to play back a DVD upscaling to 1080p without Xine complaining that it has to drop frames. The X server is the Xfb framebuffer server. Xrandr, yes, Xv, no.
Could be another SOX thing.
After all, if they added applications ("features") to the iPod Touch in the new update, then they couldn't have accounted for all the iPod Touch revenues in the last quarter(s). They'd have to restate their earnings since this update effectively makes the iPod Touch "more complete". Sort of like the $2 802.11n enabler.
It's stupid, but I guess everyone's so afraid (or Apple Legal is) of violating securities law. Especially how Apple was one of the high profile cases. The only thing that saved them was the fact that it's hard to claim negative losses from the backdating options screwing over investors.
That's half the problem
The other half is stuck in the last mile. Cable is a bad way to upload a lot of data. Sure there's a lot of bandwidth, but cable has very poor uploading characteristics. Just a few people in the highest paid tier of service using all the upstream can easily deny the rest of the people of the node access to the Internet.
It's not just the ISP, but the last mile technology used. Cable and DSL came about with the assumption that most people download way more than they upload. Unfortunately, Bittorrent doesn't do this (if you want a good ratio, you have to upload as much as, or more than you download). A few people paying for 10M/1M service in a cable node can easily take down the entire node.
You may notice that the companies having issues with this tend to be cable companies. Shaw (BitTorrent throttling) and Rogers (encrypted traffic throttling) in Canada (two largest cable companies), Time-Warner Cable (iTunes throttling, byte metering), Comcast (RST packet spoofing for P2P), amongst others. Cable just can't handle the upstream component of P2P.
True, but the WiFi Alliance (the ones behind the "WiFi" name, logo, and certification (as well as the "Wireless x" branding), and completely UNrelated to the IEEE) does it because they want to ensure compatitibility between various products. You do, after all, want to be able to connect your Intel chipset to your Netgear router while your friend's PC uses a D-Link card, for example. So it can be considered "wireless fidelity" in how 802.11-compatible all these devices are to the IEEE spec. (They're also the folks behind WPA while the IEEE and WPA worked to make 802.11i (known as WPA2)).
Alas, even certificated devices often have issues connecting in these modes, but that's another problem.
Except that a good botnet doesn't have to have machines talking to each other. Each compromised machine just needs to find a few others to get its orders from, who gets its orders from someone higher in the chain, etc.
There doesn't have to be communications back to the server.
For spamming, each machine gets a list of a bunch of usernames from a peer who shares its list, and gets other addresses from other peers. That's why you can end up with multiple copies of the same spam in your inbox - the spammers don't care if you get 1000 copies of the same email. And the spambots don't bother marking off an email as sent to a specific address and tell everyone, they just run through their own lists.
This way, the only real communication happens top down, fire-and-forget method. If someone buys 1,000,000 emails, spammer can send out more just to ensure that 1,000,000 people got it. But since they're scammers, it doesn't matter if it went to 10,000 people 100 times.
Well, just make sure you use the BDAV profile (the "dumb" collection-of-videos mode).
Only BDMV (mastered movies) discs are an issue in playing back in standalone machines. Since you're not supposed to be mastering these except to test before pressing, you shouldn't have an issue.
Unless your standalone player supports BDMV on writable BDs.
And in the rules... (again, emphasis mine).
Either this is really really really old news (not unusual - it IS
Also understand that in Asia, phones aren't subsidized so heavily, and people are willing to pay for phones. North Americans may balk at paying $400 for an iPhone, but to Asians, that's chump change compared to the other WinMo phones out there. They're used to paying full price, and anything that looks "hip" and "trendy". It's partly why there are a ton more WinMo devices out there in Asia - the market wants functional phones with capability. So if you're an Asian, and you've got a choice between the iPhone at $600, or some bunch of WinMo phones also costing around $600, well, the iPhone starts to look pretty damn good.
Or heck, if a regular cellphone costs $200, even the iPhone doesn't seem too big an investment anymore. Only in North America does it seem that $400 is a lot for a cellphone.
I have both systems. HD-DVD was "better" than Blu-Ray IMHO (mostly because most HD-DVDs had 30GB to play with, and most BD's have only 25 (there were very, very few dual layer BDs), and with BD's insistence on "Uncompressed PCM Audio" (versus Dolby TrueHD lossless compression), well, that hurts.
But the other reason is, you may have 6 times the pixels, but you don't necessarily get 6 times the resolution. If a director soft-focuses a scene, no amount of pixels makes the image any sharper. "High def blurry" is still blurry. For visual fests like say, Transformers (HD-DVD - 27GB, and NO lossless audio, grr... just Dolby Digital Plus), 6 times the resolution is great. But for dramas and such, all you're doing is upping the pixels without upping the clarity.
In fact, I've bought more DVDs because they were not only cheaper than either BD or HD-DVD, but often contained more extras and stuff (than the BD - the HD-DVDs typically have equal or superior content to the DVD, go figure). That, and my HD-DVD player is a really, really good upscaling DVD player. There are very few movies out there that really justify the enhanced resolution. (Heck, even Transformers gets interesting due to Bay's ADHD-inducing technique). I have many HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays where I'm simply less than impressed with the clarity and resolution, not because of the medium, but of the way the director did his filming.
Or, let's take Cloverfield. Do people really want to watch shaky-cam in high-def? Is it even worthwhile? High-def shaky you can't tell from regular upscaled shaky? Or the "high-def" ST:TOS TV series? Do people really care about seeing the cracks in the plaster?
High def is great, no doubt. But its a lot like the "Megapixel myth" in digital cameras. You can buy 12MP digital camera point and shoots, but they're not much better than a 6MP one that can produce just as good an image (or better), but a smaller filesize. There's still a bunch of things like directing techniques that make the enhanced resolution of high-def pointless.
Sure, there are a few good things that deserve to be in high-def - Pixar's shorts, for example. Animation looks great in high-def. But for many people, the enhanced resolution isn't worth what you get. A good upscaling DVD player can produce images close to the high-def version for a lot of director techniques (especially ones that rely on soft-focus, depth-of-view control, etc). The only thing an upscaled DVD can't do is produce more detail, for those visual fest movies.
It appears that each little division of Microsoft is their own little fiefdom. Take a common DLL - comctl32.dll (common controls). Windows ships with one version. Office ships with another version. Applications (using Visual Studio Redistributables) ship with a third version! Each has features that aren't in the others, so Windows apps get one look, Office another look, and 3rd party apps yet another look.
In addition, the OS team forked the compiler they use from the development team. It makes sense in one aspect - all developers have a stable toolchain. However, if the dev team breaks something, instead of the Windows team making a big stink, people who use Visual Studio do.
As far as anyone's concerned, Microsoft might as well be split up into separate companies - they more or less act that way anyhow. Code's taken from one team and forked, improvements aren't folded back in, etc.