Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.
To put this in numbers, since I've had to wrestle with power management on a cellphone... usually you want say, 300 hours of standby time, and your battery may have 1.2Ah capacity. Do a little math, and the average current your cellphone can draw is 4mA. (GSM tends to be a little more power efficient due to TDMA - with CDMA, each station transmitting increases background noise so a station has to "break" through the noise - CDMA radios have to be very power agile since the amount of noise caused by other stations changes constantly).
So in 4mA, you have to basically power up your receiver to wait for the base station ping, analyze to see if the station needs you to do anything (which can include finding another base station if several can service you - the base station may be getting full and thus wants to kick people to other cells if possible (if you're in the overlap region between cells, which is common in a crowded area where you may have base stations on every block)), then transmit a reply to tell the base station you're still with them (so calls can be routed there). A transmitter is wildly inefficient on power - if you need to transmit at 100mW, you may be drawing twice that in real power.
The main processor itself (the one doing the UI work, aka the applications processor) is often completely stopped and put into a very low power standby state (but can be woken up fast - not instantaneously since its oscillators have stopped as well, but usually within 10+ms), again keeping in mind the 4mA budget. A lot of work goes into making sure this processor isn't woken up unless absolutely necessary (e.g., a phone call, or the user needs to use the cell phone) since keeping it on for 10+ms will easily blow your 4mA budget. This can include operating system fine-tuning to be "tickless" so the processor spends as much time as possible in the low power state. And it also includes shutting down SDRAM (put them into low power refresh mode). To help with this, as much "self-functionality" is pushed out to the other processors - the cellular radio (baseband processor + DSP) maintains the link with the base station, and since its load is relatively static, can be a low power (and thus slow) processor, the wifi module would again handle all the communications, perhaps even buffering packets so the main CPU isn't woken up on every packet of interest but can sleep a little more, etc.
An application that requests CPU time for some reason can easily cut down the battery life significantly, from 300+ hours to just over 24 or 48. As people rarely if ever go for that long on standby, but instead use their phones (play music, games, etc), there's often a "days of use" style of testing, where the user plays music for X hours, checks e-mail or surfs the web on their phone, makes phone calls, interacts with the UI (playing games, checking notes, etc), and the goal is typically 1 to 2 days of battery life.
When's the next one come out?
on
Futurama Returns!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I believe there were 16 episodes that were made (and Bender's Big Score covers 1-4 - the production numbers mark it as season 5).
However, I can't seem to find any details on the next one in the series... I'd love to mark it in my calendar so I don't forget.
It's still relatively easy to get a Wii here. They sell out, but not at the furious pace they used to.
Last year, they sold out before the store opens (because of more people lining up overnight than the store had). Then it changed early in the new year where it sold out in about 20 minutes. During the summer, it easily took a day to sell out, and now, about a week. (Still brisker than a PS3.)
At least here (Vancouver, BC), if you really wanted one, you can get one if you try. No fancy lining up, just check a bunch of stores during the week. I spot them quite easily - just check all the usual stores over the course of a week. You don't have to check every store daily - just once a week, and you're bound to run into one with one in stock within a week or two. From observations, companies like Best Buy and other big electronic chains typically get big shipments (~30/week or so per store), than game stores like EBGames (maybe 3 a week). Wal-Mart tends to get a few as well. Generalize to other big stores.
Of course, with Christmas approaching, I expect the sellout time to be around a day again, so if you have an electronics store (Best Buy, whatever) along your commute, it may help to stop by. If you ask nicely, they may even tell you when the shipments normally come in, so you can plan to visit that day, the day before (stuff occasionally arrives early), and the next business day (in case it's late). Heck, most stores post signs nowadays, so you don't have to ask, or offer clues (e.g., bundles) that they're in stock.
I'm not really sure why you're getting moderated insightful... what was your signal before? There's a huge range of levels that would still show up as full strength. You could easily get a 10db drop in the signal and still show full strength without knowing it.
Actually, my iPhone gets much better reception than my old phone (SE P900). I can often still get a tiny bit of signal in tunnels and the link, where none existed before (and it manages to still do EDGE/GPRS, slowly, while before, I'd lose all connectivity).
But yeah, you cannot go by the "bars" of signal. Carriers often make demands that "five bars means a signal of at least -100dbm" or something to that extent (I've seen such requirements... the number of bars drops quickly beyond that). Just FYI, most WiFi cards cannot pick up a signal that low (and definitely not a top speed).
Of course, though, the iPhone is Apple's design, so Apple's "bars" may be different than AT&T's "bars". I laughed when I saw the Cingular (now AT&T) ads that said "more bars in more places". The easy way to do that is to just say "5 bars is no longer -70dbm, it's -90dbm" in the carrier certification requirements.
Of course, the flip side is, my old phone could just be generally crappy in reception. I don't know, since I rarely compare it with other phones from the same carrier...
Can't we just go straight to the solid-state memory and stop worrying about "spinning disks"? I mean, think about it: very soon, we're going to laugh about the fact that we used to use these boxes with spinning platters inside to save all of our data.
Problem is, storage capacity has risen faster tha Moore's Law, thus, spinny disks get more storage faster than solid state memory gets more memory. Also, people want large disks. A 64GB SSD costs the better part of a grand, and people want it in their laptops to hold Vista, Office, other applications, games, *AND* their music and movies. It gets filled rather fast. For the same price, you can get a ton of storage cheap (500GB drives are what? Under $200 now?), which holds tons of music and video (and applications/games are hardly a consideration).
At the price flash drives are getting to it's tempting to get a SATA to CompactFlash adaptor and put the base system (where performance matters most) on that and keep the 500gb drive for logs and movies..
IIRC, performance would suck. CompactFlash, except the massively expensive ones that support UDMA, only support PIO mode. Fine for small servers, but might be a touch annoying. But great for low power applications and extreme environments, or where the CPU power it needs is minor (disk rarely accessed).
I wonder why WD don't seem to publish a read bit error rate for these drives. Seagate's 7200.11's rate 1 sector per 1^14, or 1^15 for the ES.2; neither of which are particularly wonderful (what's that, 1 error per 10-100TB read?), but you'd hope WD are closer to the latter than the former if they're touting these for enterprisey usage.
I've always had a question about that... is that reading the data off the media (and thus corrected before it hits the external bus), or is that an undetected error that makes it all the way to the external bus, thus your read(2) call gets back crappy data, or you crash when the CPU gets to that bit of code? It can be hard to tell...
Though, wasn't there a utility (I believe it was called fsprobe?) that basically wrote test patterns to disk and read them back continuously and discovered that there were events (misreads) to the tune of maybe once a month (or once a week)?
As for iPhone being locked to T-mobile. It sucks because I want one (not that I can get one here) but I don't want to be forced to use a particular carrier (of Apple's choice) just to use what is essentially a standard mobile phone with a few nice extra features.
Well, you can either not buy an iPhone, or unlock it yourself. Now, granted iPhone software 1.1.2 hasn't been unlocked yet, but it eventually will. Remember Apple quoting that around a quarter-million iPhones are unlocked?
In fact, even though the iPhone is technically tied to a contract, you buy it without signing any contract. In effect, it's a contract-bound phone where you don't sign any contract to purchase it.
Example - my iPhone works in Canada. I was in the US. I walked into an AT&T store. I said "I want an iPhone". I hand over my (Canadian) credit card, and they bill $399 to it (no sales tax in OR). No muss, no fuss, they wanted my cellphone number, and asked if I was with AT&T, to which I said no. Not even an address.
So I handed over $399, and a phone number. And I have my iPhone. No promise to sign up on an AT&T contract. No SSN. Nothing.
Come home, follow the instructions to activate and unlock the phone, and boom, it works with my Canadian SIM card. No contract, either. No visual voicemail, but no biggie. I don't even have voicemail on my account.
It's interesting, buying a locked, contract bound phone, without actually agreeing to do that. I saw nothing on any screen that said I had to keep my phone activated with AT&T for 2 years, nor clicked any such agreements.
Where's it's suckered more people in... though, the CBC did a show about it. They covered the US FTC complaint, and how the Q-Ray Canada guys are trying to avoid the same here. (Marketplace is an interesting show... caught onto it from that "Geek expose" thing they did a few weeks ago posted on/.).
Has AMD always been OC friendly? I remember when Intel was actively discouraging the practice so as not to have sales of more expensive CPUs undercut.
Well, traditionally, AMD always had supply issues, so their chips tended to not be very overclockable (they had problems with yields of higher-end chips, so there were no high-end parts to remark as lower end chips). However, they were easy to overclock, usually with aid of conductive ink to restore bridges that set the clock frequencies and multipliers of the clock generator. You could get some nice overclocks, but they tended to be quite rare.
Intel, which usually doesn't have production or supply issues, often had problems suppling low-end chips because their chips could always perform much faster, which is why they always discouraged it. Often times, a part was marked slower just to meet market demand, but was very well capable of going faster (or... much faster). Of course, from time to time, they also had a part that was only going to perform as binned, so it didn't always work, but with Intel, the chances of that were very, very small. (The single exception I can think of was the ill-fated 1.13GHz Pentium III Tualatin CPU - basically it was a 1GHz or so overclocked, but it turns out it was overclocked as a marketing effort for it ran hot, needed lots of power, and was still unstable. I believe Intel was just stretching a design that never could go much beyond 1GHz...)
Annoyingly for Intel, everytime they introduced a new process, the low-end chips would often be wildly overclockable as their yields were such that low-end parts were of low yield as all the parts could perform much faster. Easily 10%, but 20+% overclocks were possible as well.
came up with an idea where if a telemarketer called, we would connect them to an automated system that tried to make them think they were talking to a person. The idea being that whenever the guy stopped talking, the computer would play prerecorded messages like 'Tell me more' to see how long it could keep him on the line. Never actually tried it though.
The TeleCrapper 2000. Windows only, though it looks like they have one with Asterisk. Answers the phone, if it's a telemarketer, boom, they get a nice little script you can program in (check out some of the sample calls...). Allows for more interesting messages...
I use a CF for the disk on a router that I built. The cost of the adapter and card were about what you mentioned. The I/O performance, however, is really abysmal. Much slower than a magnetic hard drive. Doesn't really matter for my application, though, since just about everything is done in RAM.
Just FYI, the SSDs you can get in PATA/SATA connections normally support advanced transfer modes like UDMA. Most CF cards, except the ultra-high-speed ones ($$$) don't support UDMA, and in fact, the CF spec only calls for them to support PIO (you tie one pin of a CF card to ground and it'll start up in IDE mode. Most CF cards though only support PIO mode since that's the traditional way PCMCIA/CF storage cards are handled.).
So performance will be abysmal simply from the fact that the CPU spins doing I/O using a CF card. Not a big deal for a server where card's only used during bootup, but a consideration if you do a bit of disk I/O. In which case, investing in a small SSD or a better CF card with UDMA support will help a lot.
But the re-write times are twice as slow! (ok I can live with that). But the read times are faster...as a home user, WHERE is this going to benefit me? Will I notice a diffence in 'vim file' or playing/streaming music?
Actually, if you do any sort of multitasking, you'll probably notice it's a lot "snappier" (apps load faster, switching apps doesn't seem to take so long, etc). Or if you're a typical home user with decent RAM but still have all the usual crapware loaded, WIndows won't feel so slow. Or you don't defragment your disks and let your disk get horribly fragmented...
The deal with SSDs is that they can manage their peak datarates all the time. With disks, the smaller the I/O transfer, the slower the disk becomes. If you have a disk with a 5ms seek time, you're limited to 20 I/Os per second. If you read maybe 16 sectors each (8kiB), it means your disk throughput is on the order of... 160kiB/sec. Seeks are taking a lot of time compared to the actual time it takes to read the disk.
An SSD has negligible seek time, so reading those 160kiB off an SSD won't take noticably longer than reading 160kiB in one read (the overhead of doing the transaction over the ATA bus is the biggest overhead).
You won't use an SSD if you need high throughput, where you're basically doing huge writes or huge reads (i.e., media center media disks, video capture/production, etc). But a home user that's doing a lot of little random I/O will notice that the entire system feels "snappier" as the I/O is mostly seek-bound, not throughput-bound (small I/O). This applies as time goes on as most people don't defragment their disks (you don't have to, or should, with an SSD, since wear-levelling may still not put it contiguously on the flash media), so even a heavily fragmented disk will still feel fast with an SSD.
What we really need is VLC to be on the PS3, and cut out all the crap. xbox360 owners seem to have their own limited support issues, but they're having great success with HD WMV, which sony won't touch.
Too late. A variation of WMV-HD (WMV9) is already in every Blu-Ray player out there as part of the spec. You may know it by its alternative name, VC1. (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD all support the same codecs - MPEG2, H.264 (aka AVC), and VC-1.).
Of course, most recent Blu-Ray releases use AVC while a number of HD-DVDs use VC-1. But it's in the Blu-Ray spec, and it has to be supported. (Early Blu-Ray releases used MPEG2...)
Anyhow, VLC on PS3 will suck if you're talking about porting the Linux version. Think - framebuffer access only. You'd think upscaling a DVD to 1080p, a reasonable job for most players, and something the PS3's built-in DVD player can do natively (too bad the upscaler isn't that great, IMHO - good for static benchmarks, lousy for video), but just drops frames when forced to do it via the framebufffer.
DivX/XviD support is good, anyhow - even though everyone's (including portable players) moving to MPEG4-AVC (h.264), there's still a ton of MPEG4-SP/ASP (DivX/XviD) files out there.
More ads in more annoying places, that are harder to avoid. Mass astroturfing, product placement, adware etc.
Actually, product placement isn't that new. It's quite old, dating back to plain old radio itself. Except then, they tended to be a bit more blatant... "This radio show is brought to you buy XXXX soap - cleans better and faster!". They would actually do it during the show itself. When TV came about, the same things occurred - you'd have the actors/actresses/newsanchors/etc suddenly place the product in their hand and do an in-show ad. I don't know exactly when the explicit commercial breaks started happening, though, but it's probably a fairly recent (past 50-60 years) thing. About the closest you get to the old ads would be to watch The Price is Right these days.
As for noticing it, well, take some TV shows and watch the extremes they go to covering up product logos and what not. Most of the time, you can easily identify the product in question, but the logo is covered up with black tape or something. Sometimes, they did a nice job and cut the tape to the logo's border, so you can make out the logo still. Is this any better than just showing it's a Dell laptop, or a Sony laptop, or an Apple laptop? Could it also be seen as insulting the audience when you see a metallic grey laptop with the Apple logo on the back covered by some black circle? Many products aren't very generic looking these days, and often have unique styling that makes it easily recognizable what it really is.
I suppose everyone could just go and use those cardboard mockups like they have in furniture stores...
I think most of the value is in a game that you're currently playing. Say you have played 23 hours into a 28 hour game, and you go back to play it again the next day and your hard drive crashes. You can reload the game from original media, but the save files are gone. Personally, there aren't many games that I would pick up and start over with after that kind of loss. The majority of games are the "beat it once and never play it again" variety.
Take a more likely scenario - the game crashes on you that corrupts the savegame file. (Some games keep the savegame file open and save everything continuously.) I had that happen when I was playing with a friend in Diablo 2 (made it to the second to last level), when it crashed (hardware fault, it turns out - motherboard underpowered the CPU - you say to give it 1.4V, it really only delivers 1.35 or less - Funny how 50mV separates rock-solid stability from "crashes every now and again").
The crash corrupted my savegame as I was messing around in my inventory juggling stuff. Diablo2 reopened the file, and determined it corrupt, and only offered me to start over again. Luckily I found a simple character editor, opened it, and found what caused the problem. The corruption resulted in the inventory having multiple items occupy the same spot. Remove the offending item, and it worked great again.
Another reason to keep the save game is often, well, you might want to see the endgame again. Sometimes they're quite amazing and you want to show your friend, etc. (I really hate games that don't let you save just after you defeat the final boss).
We can fit a whole 1080p XViD movie into a single layer DVD, just need to come up with a format standard for menus, have a few hardware players support it and give a free license to the porn industry.
It's possible, at really crappy quality. Think Blu-Ray and MPEG2 quality. (Xvid is really an implementation of MPEG4 SP/ASP. Funny enough, the same MPEG4 spec also includes more advanced video codecs like... h.264 (MPEG4 AVC) which get you better quality for smaller datarates. Most 720p films take the better part of a single layer DVD. Going to 1080p just results in a tight squeeze.
And surprise! HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support AVC as a codec! Either they're both idiots for giving AVC so much bitrate (after all, an AVC encoded film, as you say, should fit on a DVD), or maybe there are advantages to a higher datarate.
Anyhow, here's the reason Blu-Ray will win - DRM. Taken from the SlySoft AnyDVD (beta) release notes (the one where they break BD+):
# New (Blu-ray): AnyDVD ripper copies BD+ titles # New (Blu-ray): Removed "BD+ not supported" warning, as all available BD+ titles can be copied with AnyDVD ripper, or can be watched on HTPC without HDCP using PowerDVD 3104 and AnyDVD. Reports indicate, that burned BD+ titles work on PS3 and standalone players as well. # Note to Twentieth Century Fox: As you can see, BD+ didn't offer you any advanced security, it just annoyed some of your customers with older players. So could you please cut this crap and start publishing your titles on HD DVD? There are thousands of people willing to give you money. # Note to people considering to invest in HD media: Please buy HD DVD instead of Blu-ray. HD DVD is much more consumer friendly (e.g., no region coding, AACS not mandatory). Don't give your money to people, who throw your fair-use rights out of the window.
Those two words "consumer friendly". Pure evil with the studios and content creators/distributors.
just hope they don't bleed enough money to make the DRM monstrosity that is Blu-Ray a success. As long as it goes the way of UMD, I'll be happy.
Unfortunately, the target users for Blu-Ray (i.e., not us the viewer) wants DRM. That's unfortunately why a standard like HD-DVD is bound to fail - the DVD Forum guys may have learned from the mistakes of DVD (i.e., region coding), but at the same time, they're making it unpalatable to the studios, who want their content locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
Blu-Ray offers them that, beyond the already cracked AACS, they have BD+ (potentially cracked), ROM-Mark (not really a protection other than "third shift" and home bit-for-bit copies), and probably tons more in the works for BD Live (Blu-Ray 2.0). Heck, they even have region coding (see those $3 DVDs for China? Extrapolate for Blu-Ray. If HD-DVD won, people would flock for these cheap discs). No doubt, the regionalization was done with regards to current laws allowing DVD players to be region-unlocked.
It's an unfortunate reality, actually. The only real thing that can derail Blu-Ray is if they serious screw up the Blu-Ray 1.0 to Blu-Ray 1.1 (from draft profile to full profile) transition enough to get a bunch of people fed up, or if BD-Life (Blu-Ray 2.0) does the same. Or HD-DVD players suddenly decline to sub-$100 levels permanently like they have during the closeout sales, causing people to buy them since they are nice upscaling DVD players as well.
I think it's important for users (and developers) of such sites to keep in mind that most people want only a limited degree of visibility. Like you said, people do want to share those drunken escapades with their friends, but not necessarily with strangers, or worse, employers, or worse, mom and dad.
If we can't keep PRIVATE data private (think of all the data leaks - credit card, SSNs, etc), what makes you think we can keep PUBLIC data "somewhat private"?
Perhaps the operating motto should be "data leaks happen". If you want limited visibility to some event, spread the news in a limited fashion. Otherwise checking the box that reads "friends only" puts the trust into whatever's ensuring that. But some gizmo, gadget, geegaw, what-have-you that someone wrote might (accidentally, ignorantly, purposely) ignore that flag, and boom, it becomes public.
It isn't new. It isn't confined to these "social networking" sites. After all, if you do something stupid in public, you're counting on everyone around you keeping it quiet so it doesn't show up on YouTube in 5 minutes. Now you're counting on one of your friends also not passing on this to someone else? Sure that "someone else" may not be able to view the source material, at which point it becomes another telephone game. Or someone just saves the picture and emails it to everyone, and soon your boss has it in his inbox.
To control information dissemination, it requires control on all levels. Don't want the general public to see it? Don't post it. "Friends only" is still public, just you've applied a little bit of DRM on it.
Ah, maybe that's the solution. You'll have to DRM-protect all this "Friends only" stuff to keep it only between your friends and not your friend's friends (and so on). After all, DRM works great on music and movies...
That's not "fast-boot technology". It's "just another software program". One with a great purpose, but not worth distinguishing as "technology".
Not to mention it's not even new technology.
PCs (especially laptops) have long had special "media boot options" for years now. All it does is tell the BIOS to boot into a different partition to run the media player. My palmtop (Toshiba Libretto) has a button on its DVD dock. If it's off, it'll turn on and boot into a special locked partition on the disk that runs the DVD player. It's basically just Linux with LinDVD on it. Goal is to make it come up quick (it does, a minute or two normally) and come up into the app.
The goal being that why go through all the trouble of starting up/shutting down Windows when you really just want to watch a DVD or play a CD or something.
Removing? Some markets (Europe, Australia etc.) didn't get the hardware-based PS2 compatibility in the first place.
Technically, there is some PS2 hardware in the PS3s except the 40GB. The first PS3s came with the combined EE/GS chip, thus putting a full PS2 inside every PS3. The ones that Europe got still have a GS chip in them, while the EE was emulated by the Cell CPU. The GS was never fully emulated by the Cell or RSX (unlike the Xbox360).
The 40GB PS3, however, lacks a GS chip. Thus it has no backwards compatibility at all. Sony will have to write a GS emulator for their existing emulator in order to get backwards compatibility in that unit.
I've never seen the point of my (personal) details being on a WhoIs record. If it was a corporate held domain and there was some validation that the details were correct then it might be useful, but for any Tom, Dick or Harry buying their own domain then it seems like a major security risk (ignoring the more low-level privacy invasion of posting it on the Net).
Yeah, it's really annoying. Heck, I filter my email (thanks procmail) to only allow email from my registrar (who actually check that the info is valid - they use your billing contact as the billing info from the credit card, and the email registered as the contact email). So much for all those promises about "misuse of WHOIS data". (The email I use is specifically for the registrar, so if I get spam, I know some spammer mined WHOIS data. They all do).
WHOIS is nice from time to time, but honestly, everytime I've used it, it was to get some info about the domain, I didn't care for phone numbers or street addresses (city/state/country is useful, though, as are the dates). Hell, if I needed to contact someone from their domain, I'd probably use their website.
You know that most people just turn off UAC, right? Everyone that I've talked to about it said they turned it off after the first message. It's annoying, and if you're computer literate there's really no reason for you to have it on; you wont benefit from it at all.
Yeah, you turn off UAC, then you get a nasty red shield with "Windows is not protected" and balloons saying "User account control is off". A power user can ignore these security warnings since they probably already do the right steps, but a normal user will turn it off, see the red shield, then "fix it" and boom, UAC is on again.
Worse yet, there are apparently a set of distinct tasks that can only be done with either UAC off, or UAC on. Some tasks require UAC to be on, while others require it to be off (I can't remember the list, but there are a few picky settings).
Some things with UAC on just really make life miserable - before I reinstalled Vista, I copied off my downloads and a few other directories to a USB disk (why redownload files that are downloaded in the past week?). Afterwards, with UAC on, mysteriously all the executable files cannot be run at all, even answering "Allow" to the UAC prompts. Useless. Permission repairing, setting security, etc., I could not figure out how to get those executable installers running again. Turn off UAC, boom they work just fine. All it takes is a folder on a network drive, or copied from a thumbdrive, and you can be seeing this happening relatively often if one of your applications gets tagged like that. Worse yet, Windows may decide your app is insecure and start prompting you with UAC prompts. It's random enough to be frustrating...
I found the old IE model a bit annoying (where every file downloaded off the internet gets marked with a "downloaded" attribute (NTFS)), but at least it prompts you if you want to run them, then lets you run them. Better than making it look like it works, but fails silently.
The strange thing is, Unix, OS X, and Linux get it right. If you're changing a user setting, no annoying prompt. A system setting - a password prompt (and it's usually good for a few minutes, so you can avoid seeing it repeatedly). The differentiation between user and system is such that rarely does one need system privileges, so seeing the dialog is a rare enough event.
Vista's "user virtualization" (where the system registry keys and system folders are silently mirrored to user accessible versions) could accomplish the same thing for the millions of broken Windows apps out there, and the amount of prompting kept a minimum... but it's like Microsoft intentionally decided to inundate us with this "security".
Believe it or not, many people use the server version as a desktop OS. Usually this is people with too much money who want as many toys as possible in setting up their home network... seriously...
Actually, I've heard of *gamers* running Server 2003 because it's even faster than XP at a lot of things. Of course, installing DirectX is a tiny bit of a challenge, but once that's done, they manage to get performance boosts (small ones, I believe) over regular XP.
Maybe what will happen is when Server 2008 comes out, people migrate to that instead of the horrific mess that is Vista (I used it) just because it's more familiar than the new locations where Vista puts crap. Might be interesting to see how many people do the XP->2008 transistion over XP->Vista.
Now maybe the "net neutrality isn't important because we can trust giant corporations not to screw their customers crowd" will shut up. Of course, the people getting paid to lobby or keep those bills out of Congress won't change their mind, but maybe regular people will. And that's a step in the right direction.
This story does make me wish I was not boycotting Comcast already though, so I could boycott it for this.
Actually, this will hurt net neutrality because everyone is getting QoS confused with Net Neutrality!
QoS is legal, and it should exist. Prioritizing classes of traffic is OK, provided the classes are generic classes of traffic (e.g., email, web, ftp, p2p, voip, etc).
Net Neutrality is compatible with QoS. What Net Neutrality proponents want isn't avoidance of QoS, but to prevent deals where if you use Windows Live Search, it comes up instantly, while if you use Google, you'll find yourself waiting a good minute for the frontpage to load up. I.e., both use the same class of traffic (web), but service is differentiated based on who can pay.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Basically, like traffic should be treated alike. But unlike traffic may be treated differently. So if Comcast charged an extra $10 for enhanced VoIP QoS, that's OK, as long as it's for all VoIP, not just say, Vonage only, or Skype.
Net Neutrality opponents like to bleat the Anti-QoS line because it's the easiest way to spread FUD, when they really mean "Google, pay us, or we'll make your page take ages to load, while making Windows Live Search load instantly".
Slashdot Mirror
To put this in numbers, since I've had to wrestle with power management on a cellphone... usually you want say, 300 hours of standby time, and your battery may have 1.2Ah capacity. Do a little math, and the average current your cellphone can draw is 4mA. (GSM tends to be a little more power efficient due to TDMA - with CDMA, each station transmitting increases background noise so a station has to "break" through the noise - CDMA radios have to be very power agile since the amount of noise caused by other stations changes constantly).
So in 4mA, you have to basically power up your receiver to wait for the base station ping, analyze to see if the station needs you to do anything (which can include finding another base station if several can service you - the base station may be getting full and thus wants to kick people to other cells if possible (if you're in the overlap region between cells, which is common in a crowded area where you may have base stations on every block)), then transmit a reply to tell the base station you're still with them (so calls can be routed there). A transmitter is wildly inefficient on power - if you need to transmit at 100mW, you may be drawing twice that in real power.
The main processor itself (the one doing the UI work, aka the applications processor) is often completely stopped and put into a very low power standby state (but can be woken up fast - not instantaneously since its oscillators have stopped as well, but usually within 10+ms), again keeping in mind the 4mA budget. A lot of work goes into making sure this processor isn't woken up unless absolutely necessary (e.g., a phone call, or the user needs to use the cell phone) since keeping it on for 10+ms will easily blow your 4mA budget. This can include operating system fine-tuning to be "tickless" so the processor spends as much time as possible in the low power state. And it also includes shutting down SDRAM (put them into low power refresh mode). To help with this, as much "self-functionality" is pushed out to the other processors - the cellular radio (baseband processor + DSP) maintains the link with the base station, and since its load is relatively static, can be a low power (and thus slow) processor, the wifi module would again handle all the communications, perhaps even buffering packets so the main CPU isn't woken up on every packet of interest but can sleep a little more, etc.
An application that requests CPU time for some reason can easily cut down the battery life significantly, from 300+ hours to just over 24 or 48. As people rarely if ever go for that long on standby, but instead use their phones (play music, games, etc), there's often a "days of use" style of testing, where the user plays music for X hours, checks e-mail or surfs the web on their phone, makes phone calls, interacts with the UI (playing games, checking notes, etc), and the goal is typically 1 to 2 days of battery life.
I believe there were 16 episodes that were made (and Bender's Big Score covers 1-4 - the production numbers mark it as season 5).
However, I can't seem to find any details on the next one in the series... I'd love to mark it in my calendar so I don't forget.
It's still relatively easy to get a Wii here. They sell out, but not at the furious pace they used to.
Last year, they sold out before the store opens (because of more people lining up overnight than the store had). Then it changed early in the new year where it sold out in about 20 minutes. During the summer, it easily took a day to sell out, and now, about a week. (Still brisker than a PS3.)
At least here (Vancouver, BC), if you really wanted one, you can get one if you try. No fancy lining up, just check a bunch of stores during the week. I spot them quite easily - just check all the usual stores over the course of a week. You don't have to check every store daily - just once a week, and you're bound to run into one with one in stock within a week or two. From observations, companies like Best Buy and other big electronic chains typically get big shipments (~30/week or so per store), than game stores like EBGames (maybe 3 a week). Wal-Mart tends to get a few as well. Generalize to other big stores.
Of course, with Christmas approaching, I expect the sellout time to be around a day again, so if you have an electronics store (Best Buy, whatever) along your commute, it may help to stop by. If you ask nicely, they may even tell you when the shipments normally come in, so you can plan to visit that day, the day before (stuff occasionally arrives early), and the next business day (in case it's late). Heck, most stores post signs nowadays, so you don't have to ask, or offer clues (e.g., bundles) that they're in stock.
Actually, my iPhone gets much better reception than my old phone (SE P900). I can often still get a tiny bit of signal in tunnels and the link, where none existed before (and it manages to still do EDGE/GPRS, slowly, while before, I'd lose all connectivity).
But yeah, you cannot go by the "bars" of signal. Carriers often make demands that "five bars means a signal of at least -100dbm" or something to that extent (I've seen such requirements... the number of bars drops quickly beyond that). Just FYI, most WiFi cards cannot pick up a signal that low (and definitely not a top speed).
Of course, though, the iPhone is Apple's design, so Apple's "bars" may be different than AT&T's "bars". I laughed when I saw the Cingular (now AT&T) ads that said "more bars in more places". The easy way to do that is to just say "5 bars is no longer -70dbm, it's -90dbm" in the carrier certification requirements.
Of course, the flip side is, my old phone could just be generally crappy in reception. I don't know, since I rarely compare it with other phones from the same carrier...
Problem is, storage capacity has risen faster tha Moore's Law, thus, spinny disks get more storage faster than solid state memory gets more memory. Also, people want large disks. A 64GB SSD costs the better part of a grand, and people want it in their laptops to hold Vista, Office, other applications, games, *AND* their music and movies. It gets filled rather fast. For the same price, you can get a ton of storage cheap (500GB drives are what? Under $200 now?), which holds tons of music and video (and applications/games are hardly a consideration).
IIRC, performance would suck. CompactFlash, except the massively expensive ones that support UDMA, only support PIO mode. Fine for small servers, but might be a touch annoying. But great for low power applications and extreme environments, or where the CPU power it needs is minor (disk rarely accessed).
I've always had a question about that... is that reading the data off the media (and thus corrected before it hits the external bus), or is that an undetected error that makes it all the way to the external bus, thus your read(2) call gets back crappy data, or you crash when the CPU gets to that bit of code? It can be hard to tell...
Though, wasn't there a utility (I believe it was called fsprobe?) that basically wrote test patterns to disk and read them back continuously and discovered that there were events (misreads) to the tune of maybe once a month (or once a week)?
Well, you can either not buy an iPhone, or unlock it yourself. Now, granted iPhone software 1.1.2 hasn't been unlocked yet, but it eventually will. Remember Apple quoting that around a quarter-million iPhones are unlocked?
In fact, even though the iPhone is technically tied to a contract, you buy it without signing any contract. In effect, it's a contract-bound phone where you don't sign any contract to purchase it.
Example - my iPhone works in Canada. I was in the US. I walked into an AT&T store. I said "I want an iPhone". I hand over my (Canadian) credit card, and they bill $399 to it (no sales tax in OR). No muss, no fuss, they wanted my cellphone number, and asked if I was with AT&T, to which I said no. Not even an address.
So I handed over $399, and a phone number. And I have my iPhone. No promise to sign up on an AT&T contract. No SSN. Nothing.
Come home, follow the instructions to activate and unlock the phone, and boom, it works with my Canadian SIM card. No contract, either. No visual voicemail, but no biggie. I don't even have voicemail on my account.
It's interesting, buying a locked, contract bound phone, without actually agreeing to do that. I saw nothing on any screen that said I had to keep my phone activated with AT&T for 2 years, nor clicked any such agreements.
Where's it's suckered more people in... though, the CBC did a show about it. They covered the US FTC complaint, and how the Q-Ray Canada guys are trying to avoid the same here. (Marketplace is an interesting show... caught onto it from that "Geek expose" thing they did a few weeks ago posted on /.).
Better yet, I want to see people shaking their bluetooth keyboards and mice with their computers (desktops and laptops)...
Hmm... easy Bluetooth connection, or my hard disk?
Well, traditionally, AMD always had supply issues, so their chips tended to not be very overclockable (they had problems with yields of higher-end chips, so there were no high-end parts to remark as lower end chips). However, they were easy to overclock, usually with aid of conductive ink to restore bridges that set the clock frequencies and multipliers of the clock generator. You could get some nice overclocks, but they tended to be quite rare.
Intel, which usually doesn't have production or supply issues, often had problems suppling low-end chips because their chips could always perform much faster, which is why they always discouraged it. Often times, a part was marked slower just to meet market demand, but was very well capable of going faster (or... much faster). Of course, from time to time, they also had a part that was only going to perform as binned, so it didn't always work, but with Intel, the chances of that were very, very small. (The single exception I can think of was the ill-fated 1.13GHz Pentium III Tualatin CPU - basically it was a 1GHz or so overclocked, but it turns out it was overclocked as a marketing effort for it ran hot, needed lots of power, and was still unstable. I believe Intel was just stretching a design that never could go much beyond 1GHz...)
Annoyingly for Intel, everytime they introduced a new process, the low-end chips would often be wildly overclockable as their yields were such that low-end parts were of low yield as all the parts could perform much faster. Easily 10%, but 20+% overclocks were possible as well.
Just FYI, the SSDs you can get in PATA/SATA connections normally support advanced transfer modes like UDMA. Most CF cards, except the ultra-high-speed ones ($$$) don't support UDMA, and in fact, the CF spec only calls for them to support PIO (you tie one pin of a CF card to ground and it'll start up in IDE mode. Most CF cards though only support PIO mode since that's the traditional way PCMCIA/CF storage cards are handled.).
So performance will be abysmal simply from the fact that the CPU spins doing I/O using a CF card. Not a big deal for a server where card's only used during bootup, but a consideration if you do a bit of disk I/O. In which case, investing in a small SSD or a better CF card with UDMA support will help a lot.
Actually, if you do any sort of multitasking, you'll probably notice it's a lot "snappier" (apps load faster, switching apps doesn't seem to take so long, etc). Or if you're a typical home user with decent RAM but still have all the usual crapware loaded, WIndows won't feel so slow. Or you don't defragment your disks and let your disk get horribly fragmented...
The deal with SSDs is that they can manage their peak datarates all the time. With disks, the smaller the I/O transfer, the slower the disk becomes. If you have a disk with a 5ms seek time, you're limited to 20 I/Os per second. If you read maybe 16 sectors each (8kiB), it means your disk throughput is on the order of... 160kiB/sec. Seeks are taking a lot of time compared to the actual time it takes to read the disk.
An SSD has negligible seek time, so reading those 160kiB off an SSD won't take noticably longer than reading 160kiB in one read (the overhead of doing the transaction over the ATA bus is the biggest overhead).
You won't use an SSD if you need high throughput, where you're basically doing huge writes or huge reads (i.e., media center media disks, video capture/production, etc). But a home user that's doing a lot of little random I/O will notice that the entire system feels "snappier" as the I/O is mostly seek-bound, not throughput-bound (small I/O). This applies as time goes on as most people don't defragment their disks (you don't have to, or should, with an SSD, since wear-levelling may still not put it contiguously on the flash media), so even a heavily fragmented disk will still feel fast with an SSD.
Too late. A variation of WMV-HD (WMV9) is already in every Blu-Ray player out there as part of the spec. You may know it by its alternative name, VC1. (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD all support the same codecs - MPEG2, H.264 (aka AVC), and VC-1.).
Of course, most recent Blu-Ray releases use AVC while a number of HD-DVDs use VC-1. But it's in the Blu-Ray spec, and it has to be supported. (Early Blu-Ray releases used MPEG2...)
Anyhow, VLC on PS3 will suck if you're talking about porting the Linux version. Think - framebuffer access only. You'd think upscaling a DVD to 1080p, a reasonable job for most players, and something the PS3's built-in DVD player can do natively (too bad the upscaler isn't that great, IMHO - good for static benchmarks, lousy for video), but just drops frames when forced to do it via the framebufffer.
DivX/XviD support is good, anyhow - even though everyone's (including portable players) moving to MPEG4-AVC (h.264), there's still a ton of MPEG4-SP/ASP (DivX/XviD) files out there.
Actually, product placement isn't that new. It's quite old, dating back to plain old radio itself. Except then, they tended to be a bit more blatant... "This radio show is brought to you buy XXXX soap - cleans better and faster!". They would actually do it during the show itself. When TV came about, the same things occurred - you'd have the actors/actresses/newsanchors/etc suddenly place the product in their hand and do an in-show ad. I don't know exactly when the explicit commercial breaks started happening, though, but it's probably a fairly recent (past 50-60 years) thing. About the closest you get to the old ads would be to watch The Price is Right these days.
As for noticing it, well, take some TV shows and watch the extremes they go to covering up product logos and what not. Most of the time, you can easily identify the product in question, but the logo is covered up with black tape or something. Sometimes, they did a nice job and cut the tape to the logo's border, so you can make out the logo still. Is this any better than just showing it's a Dell laptop, or a Sony laptop, or an Apple laptop? Could it also be seen as insulting the audience when you see a metallic grey laptop with the Apple logo on the back covered by some black circle? Many products aren't very generic looking these days, and often have unique styling that makes it easily recognizable what it really is.
I suppose everyone could just go and use those cardboard mockups like they have in furniture stores...
Take a more likely scenario - the game crashes on you that corrupts the savegame file. (Some games keep the savegame file open and save everything continuously.) I had that happen when I was playing with a friend in Diablo 2 (made it to the second to last level), when it crashed (hardware fault, it turns out - motherboard underpowered the CPU - you say to give it 1.4V, it really only delivers 1.35 or less - Funny how 50mV separates rock-solid stability from "crashes every now and again").
The crash corrupted my savegame as I was messing around in my inventory juggling stuff. Diablo2 reopened the file, and determined it corrupt, and only offered me to start over again. Luckily I found a simple character editor, opened it, and found what caused the problem. The corruption resulted in the inventory having multiple items occupy the same spot. Remove the offending item, and it worked great again.
Another reason to keep the save game is often, well, you might want to see the endgame again. Sometimes they're quite amazing and you want to show your friend, etc. (I really hate games that don't let you save just after you defeat the final boss).
It's possible, at really crappy quality. Think Blu-Ray and MPEG2 quality. (Xvid is really an implementation of MPEG4 SP/ASP. Funny enough, the same MPEG4 spec also includes more advanced video codecs like... h.264 (MPEG4 AVC) which get you better quality for smaller datarates. Most 720p films take the better part of a single layer DVD. Going to 1080p just results in a tight squeeze.
And surprise! HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support AVC as a codec! Either they're both idiots for giving AVC so much bitrate (after all, an AVC encoded film, as you say, should fit on a DVD), or maybe there are advantages to a higher datarate.
Anyhow, here's the reason Blu-Ray will win - DRM. Taken from the SlySoft AnyDVD (beta) release notes (the one where they break BD+):
Those two words "consumer friendly". Pure evil with the studios and content creators/distributors.
Unfortunately, the target users for Blu-Ray (i.e., not us the viewer) wants DRM. That's unfortunately why a standard like HD-DVD is bound to fail - the DVD Forum guys may have learned from the mistakes of DVD (i.e., region coding), but at the same time, they're making it unpalatable to the studios, who want their content locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
Blu-Ray offers them that, beyond the already cracked AACS, they have BD+ (potentially cracked), ROM-Mark (not really a protection other than "third shift" and home bit-for-bit copies), and probably tons more in the works for BD Live (Blu-Ray 2.0). Heck, they even have region coding (see those $3 DVDs for China? Extrapolate for Blu-Ray. If HD-DVD won, people would flock for these cheap discs). No doubt, the regionalization was done with regards to current laws allowing DVD players to be region-unlocked.
It's an unfortunate reality, actually. The only real thing that can derail Blu-Ray is if they serious screw up the Blu-Ray 1.0 to Blu-Ray 1.1 (from draft profile to full profile) transition enough to get a bunch of people fed up, or if BD-Life (Blu-Ray 2.0) does the same. Or HD-DVD players suddenly decline to sub-$100 levels permanently like they have during the closeout sales, causing people to buy them since they are nice upscaling DVD players as well.
If we can't keep PRIVATE data private (think of all the data leaks - credit card, SSNs, etc), what makes you think we can keep PUBLIC data "somewhat private"?
Perhaps the operating motto should be "data leaks happen". If you want limited visibility to some event, spread the news in a limited fashion. Otherwise checking the box that reads "friends only" puts the trust into whatever's ensuring that. But some gizmo, gadget, geegaw, what-have-you that someone wrote might (accidentally, ignorantly, purposely) ignore that flag, and boom, it becomes public.
It isn't new. It isn't confined to these "social networking" sites. After all, if you do something stupid in public, you're counting on everyone around you keeping it quiet so it doesn't show up on YouTube in 5 minutes. Now you're counting on one of your friends also not passing on this to someone else? Sure that "someone else" may not be able to view the source material, at which point it becomes another telephone game. Or someone just saves the picture and emails it to everyone, and soon your boss has it in his inbox.
To control information dissemination, it requires control on all levels. Don't want the general public to see it? Don't post it. "Friends only" is still public, just you've applied a little bit of DRM on it.
Ah, maybe that's the solution. You'll have to DRM-protect all this "Friends only" stuff to keep it only between your friends and not your friend's friends (and so on). After all, DRM works great on music and movies...
Not to mention it's not even new technology.
PCs (especially laptops) have long had special "media boot options" for years now. All it does is tell the BIOS to boot into a different partition to run the media player. My palmtop (Toshiba Libretto) has a button on its DVD dock. If it's off, it'll turn on and boot into a special locked partition on the disk that runs the DVD player. It's basically just Linux with LinDVD on it. Goal is to make it come up quick (it does, a minute or two normally) and come up into the app.
The goal being that why go through all the trouble of starting up/shutting down Windows when you really just want to watch a DVD or play a CD or something.
Technically, there is some PS2 hardware in the PS3s except the 40GB. The first PS3s came with the combined EE/GS chip, thus putting a full PS2 inside every PS3. The ones that Europe got still have a GS chip in them, while the EE was emulated by the Cell CPU. The GS was never fully emulated by the Cell or RSX (unlike the Xbox360).
The 40GB PS3, however, lacks a GS chip. Thus it has no backwards compatibility at all. Sony will have to write a GS emulator for their existing emulator in order to get backwards compatibility in that unit.
Yeah, it's really annoying. Heck, I filter my email (thanks procmail) to only allow email from my registrar (who actually check that the info is valid - they use your billing contact as the billing info from the credit card, and the email registered as the contact email). So much for all those promises about "misuse of WHOIS data". (The email I use is specifically for the registrar, so if I get spam, I know some spammer mined WHOIS data. They all do).
WHOIS is nice from time to time, but honestly, everytime I've used it, it was to get some info about the domain, I didn't care for phone numbers or street addresses (city/state/country is useful, though, as are the dates). Hell, if I needed to contact someone from their domain, I'd probably use their website.
Yeah, you turn off UAC, then you get a nasty red shield with "Windows is not protected" and balloons saying "User account control is off". A power user can ignore these security warnings since they probably already do the right steps, but a normal user will turn it off, see the red shield, then "fix it" and boom, UAC is on again.
Worse yet, there are apparently a set of distinct tasks that can only be done with either UAC off, or UAC on. Some tasks require UAC to be on, while others require it to be off (I can't remember the list, but there are a few picky settings).
Some things with UAC on just really make life miserable - before I reinstalled Vista, I copied off my downloads and a few other directories to a USB disk (why redownload files that are downloaded in the past week?). Afterwards, with UAC on, mysteriously all the executable files cannot be run at all, even answering "Allow" to the UAC prompts. Useless. Permission repairing, setting security, etc., I could not figure out how to get those executable installers running again. Turn off UAC, boom they work just fine. All it takes is a folder on a network drive, or copied from a thumbdrive, and you can be seeing this happening relatively often if one of your applications gets tagged like that. Worse yet, Windows may decide your app is insecure and start prompting you with UAC prompts. It's random enough to be frustrating...
I found the old IE model a bit annoying (where every file downloaded off the internet gets marked with a "downloaded" attribute (NTFS)), but at least it prompts you if you want to run them, then lets you run them. Better than making it look like it works, but fails silently.
The strange thing is, Unix, OS X, and Linux get it right. If you're changing a user setting, no annoying prompt. A system setting - a password prompt (and it's usually good for a few minutes, so you can avoid seeing it repeatedly). The differentiation between user and system is such that rarely does one need system privileges, so seeing the dialog is a rare enough event.
Vista's "user virtualization" (where the system registry keys and system folders are silently mirrored to user accessible versions) could accomplish the same thing for the millions of broken Windows apps out there, and the amount of prompting kept a minimum... but it's like Microsoft intentionally decided to inundate us with this "security".
Actually, I've heard of *gamers* running Server 2003 because it's even faster than XP at a lot of things. Of course, installing DirectX is a tiny bit of a challenge, but once that's done, they manage to get performance boosts (small ones, I believe) over regular XP.
Maybe what will happen is when Server 2008 comes out, people migrate to that instead of the horrific mess that is Vista (I used it) just because it's more familiar than the new locations where Vista puts crap. Might be interesting to see how many people do the XP->2008 transistion over XP->Vista.
Actually, this will hurt net neutrality because everyone is getting QoS confused with Net Neutrality!
QoS is legal, and it should exist. Prioritizing classes of traffic is OK, provided the classes are generic classes of traffic (e.g., email, web, ftp, p2p, voip, etc).
Net Neutrality is compatible with QoS. What Net Neutrality proponents want isn't avoidance of QoS, but to prevent deals where if you use Windows Live Search, it comes up instantly, while if you use Google, you'll find yourself waiting a good minute for the frontpage to load up. I.e., both use the same class of traffic (web), but service is differentiated based on who can pay.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Basically, like traffic should be treated alike. But unlike traffic may be treated differently. So if Comcast charged an extra $10 for enhanced VoIP QoS, that's OK, as long as it's for all VoIP, not just say, Vonage only, or Skype.
Net Neutrality opponents like to bleat the Anti-QoS line because it's the easiest way to spread FUD, when they really mean "Google, pay us, or we'll make your page take ages to load, while making Windows Live Search load instantly".