I think Valve still has great developer support. They regularly update their games with patches, updates, new features, etc. You only pay for new games, or a new episode in the case of HL2. So, there are still companies out there doing it, you just have to look for them and buy their games. And I do agree that this guy sounds like he has no idea how he's going to make the "extras" good enough to be worth paying for.
Don't forget some interesting patches they did to get their older games to play on modern machines. You can get the original Half-Life and play it on your modern gaming rig without any issues at all, despite it being originally a Win9x game. At least the version you get from Steam is like that - all patched and ready to run on a modern machine.
(And if you do have a gaming rig or even just a modestly powerful computer, you'll also see how in half-life, the CPU utilization barely budges from the single digits).
For many things, the dead tree format is obsolete.
Oh man, I can't tell you how off-base I think this is. Only thing that salvages it is the "for most things" qualifier. I've been reading stuff on-screen since the 1970s so don't have a knee-jerk Luddite aversion to it. But as others have said, there is just too much GOOD reading that won't be available -- electronically, conveniently, portably -- for a while.
Too true. The one major disadvantage of electronic to deadtree is well, cost and disposability. Curling up with a good book on the sofa and munching on some snack is a pastime for many people. Well, if the deadtree gets all the crumbs and crap on it, you don't care (if it got too grungy, you buy a new copy and chuck the old one (assuming you don't read rare books like this - but most people make a copy first and read that)). Get your e-reader grungy, and (forgetting DRM) means you're shelling out a chunk of change for a new one.
Ditto with reading in the bathtub - I have tons of books that have undergone major soakings, and other than crinkled pages, are otherwise still readable.
Or, as someone once complained... they read the newspaper, and eat their breakfast. They don't care if they spill some coffee on it, or if their breakfast drops crumbs / oil on it. They put it in the recycling, and get a fresh copy the next day. Reading off a screen... well, you don't want to do stuff like that.
For stuff that changes often, e-readers are great. But deadtree will be around a long time, simply because they're far more durable and disposable than an e-reader. Until we get rid of reading in the bathtub or curling up with a good book and a snack, or just reading stuff at breakfast and not minding the fact that it's getting dirty and grungy. The convenience of deadtree in this case has yet to be surpassed by e-readers. Maybe in the future when e-readers are $5 each...
I've heard good things about them, specifically the battery life. Does anyone own an E-Reader? I was thinking of getting Sony's. Any thoughts?
They're actually quite nice.
The e-paper screen is *beautiful*. The only thing you'll miss is a book light. It's very nice and contrasty (but more like black on a dull grey background), and the text isn't buried under glass, but appears on the surface, like real paper. It's a nice matte surface, so glare is a non-issue, and is extremely readable in all lighting conditions except pitch black (like a regular book).
The bad thing - if you want to use its internal memory, you need to use Sony's software (a poor imitation of iTunes). But luckily, it accepts Memory Stick and SD cards. Just plop in it text files, RTF, or PDF files onto your SD card and away you go (making this the OS agnostic way of using it - just need a card reader and external card). The other issue is ghosting - when the screen updates, the parts that were black don't return all the way to background color, but leaves an imprint. Not to worry - another refresh will fix it. Might be slightly irritating if the book lines alternate.
The other bad thing is when it needs to refresh the area - what happens is it inverts the entire screen, then writes the new image to it (in an effort to alleviate the ghosting).
But the screen is really nice, you can easily forget about such issues. Just remember the flashlight if reading beneath the covers.
Portal is probably one of the most unique cross-genre games out there (FPS + puzzle).
The major thing is that the puzzles aren't the generic jumping puzzles, nor can they be solved by blindly rushing in and shooting everything in sight. Portal can require a bunch of strategy (planning out where to shoot portals to accomplish the goal without getting hurt), a bit of trickery and timing (involves shooting a portal in mid-air so you can rocket to the next place and shoot the next portal where you couldn't before you started), etc. Heck, some of the puzzles you can't solve the traditional way.
And yes, the puzzles aren't overly complicated, but they do require some planning, some figuring out, and the best thing - I don't think it's possible to get yourself stuck! (Major no-no in puzzle games is to work yourself into a spot where you can't get out of because you forgot to pick up the whatzit 3 levels back). Valve really did spend a lot of time making sure a mistake won't make the puzzles suddenly unsolvable.
So while I guess it may be a general trend, I hope developers realize that it shouldn't be possible to get stuck if you happen to not notice the whatzit (if item X is needed near the end, you give the player less and less subtle clues they need X to continue later...).
Otherwise, this will be the end of the puzzle genre again.
That's odd, all the Macs I've owned in the last 7+ years have done that though FireWire Disk Mode. Boot, hold a key down, in 5 seconds or so you have a oversized, way overpowered, external FireWire disk. It's about time the rest of the computer world started getting this ability.
Actually, the feature is much older - dates back to the early 90's on the 68k Macs as well. Though, they didn't have Firewire ports, they did have SCSI ports. You could set them into "SCSI Disk Mode", and they'd appear on the SCSI bus as a disk (with the SCSI ID you set).
Heck, the SCSI logo that bounced around the screen while this went on even displayed the SCSI ID in case you forgot to set it properly (and thus can do some black magic to get your SCSI bus working again).
Was a great way of transferring files from my old Macs (one of which didn't have Ethernet!) to my new Powerbook about 4 years ago. (Admittedly, another neat thing was the fact that the old Mac with Ethernet didn't do AppleTalk over IP (which unfortunately, is all OS X supported natively). But OS X Classic could be booted and Chooser (remember that?) could find it, and it still magically appears as a mounted disk in OS X. I don't think I want to know how many layers of software was used for that to happen.
USB is much harder though - you can't just plug a USB Host port into another USB Host port - that's an illegal USB topology. (There can only be one host on a USB bus since it's a master-slave bus, unlike Firewire/SCSI which are peer-to-peer).
(offtopic, but makes me wonder why on earth Orange signed/wanted to sign an exclusivity deal with Apple, knowing what the laws were in France)
Don't see why Apple can't sell it as an unlocked phone.
It's got double activation, so the first one would be to sign up for an Orange contract. Oh, the phone's unlocked alright, but you'll have to sign this contract to use it, so you'll pay your provider plus Orange. Sure you can probably get out of it, who knows what the contract termination fees are (probably along the lines of, "You think $200 is expensive?").
Or heck, maybe Apple will just sell it through Orange dealers, who'll probably give you plenty of warning that yes, it's unlocked, but you're still bound by the contract. (The sim lock and an external contract with a service provider are two separate things...). To cancel the contract early (i.e., standard return policy), return the phone as per EU directives and French laws - none of this AT&T style cancel the plan but keep the phone. Heck, I'm sure there are ton of other ways to ensure that even though you can use the phone with any network in the world, well, you're gonna pay Orange still.
The MP3 player industry, maybe. In the PC market, Apple doesn't have the buying power to squeeze its suppliers. When Apple demanded faster-cheaper PowerPCs from IBM threatening to take its then-2% market share elsewhere, Big Blue could barely stop laughing long enough to tell Steve Jobs to take a hike.
Actually, while that is true, the reality is, Apple buys parts in huge quantities. Sure IBM could laugh them off, but think of their other customers as well - they have Microsoft, Sony/Toshiba and Nintendo as major customers also buying parts in equally big quantities from IBM, but on friendlier terms. (Add to this the inability for IBM to scale up G5 production to the quantities Apple desired - remember when Steve said there would be 3GHz G5s that never materialized? Or how the top end part *always* has shortages?) Given the choice, Apple only wants high end parts, while the yields are low (and leaving IBM with the parts that don't make it), and ending up with a pile of G5s no one wants, well, IBM simply said "no". Apple bullied, IBM bullied back, let the bigger bully win.
End result, Apple goes x86, seeing that PowerPC wasn't keeping up with the brute force and raw GHz of the x86, and supplies of the x86 CPUs are relatively plentiful. Apple could choose between AMD and Intel. They went with Intel as AMD unfortunately is at full production, and at the quantities Apple buys stuff at, it would basically strain supply (like IBM and Motorola / Freescale had). Intel instead has plenty of fab capacity, good yields, and would gladly supply chips without missing a beat.
Heck, Apple managed to take Toshiba's full production of 1.8" hard drives during the first few years of iPod production. This difficulty in supplying tiny formfactor drives led to other manufacturers to start making 1.8" drives as well (Hitachi). Now Toshiba has upgraded their facilities to make the same hard drive with ever greater capacity. (The iPod is 6 years old. In that time, the hard drive used in the iPod has grown 32 times (5GB -> 160GB) and shrunk in height to maybe 1/3rd the thickness.
For the Nanos and Shuffles, well, Apple is causing a lot of the shortages as well - prices have risen the past couple of months in anticipation of the holiday season - blame put squarely on Apple for buying up all the parts.
This argument doesn't make sense to me, as flash chips are selling at much higher quantities than hard disks already. Flash MP3 players and embedded devices are everywhere, and the margins on flash manufacturing aren't that high. I suspect prices are being driven down as fast as technology is allowing them to, and that building more products based on them will only drive prices higher as supply outstrips demand.
Yes, right now there's a problem on the supply side. It turns out that Apple is one of the largest customers of flash memory (with all the iPods...), enough so that if anyone supplying Apple sneezes, prices go up. Flash memory prices are already on their way up in anticipation of Apple's increased demand for the holiday season, in fact (which is around now for production). (This is for the large single chip NAND flash - 1GB+)
If you think about it, Apple is really hard on suppliers - think of them as the Wal-Mart of the computer industry. If they can get a part cheaper, they'll bully their suppliers to get it. Thus, it's really in the supplier's interest to find better ways of making the chips cheaper. 8GB chips are already here, and 16GB ones are going to be commercially available shortly, but still, it's a tight market.
Memory technology has moved to the latest and greatest processes already (no, not 65nm... that's old tech. 35nm for memory is the standard nowadays). Problem is, spinning platters improvements have come about far faster than Moore's law. Heck, there was a time when tape was considerably cheaper (cost per megabyte/GB) than a hard disk, but those days have more or less gone (reserved for those who can afford the ultra expensive systems with TB's of space, where it may be cheaper still, but the initial startup costs are prohibitive for normal people).
HD DVD isn't region coded, so you can buy a disk from anywhere in the world and watch it.
With the right firmware you can make your PC DVD player region-free. And there are several DVD rip programs out there that can remove the region flag as well as jump to the main menu upon playback (i.e. skip all the crap and get to the movie). I play all my movies from my HTPC.
Ah, but Blu-Ray IS region coded. There are 3 regions in Blu-Ray. And the DRM in HD-DVD has long been hacked (remember that stupid Digg day where they banned that number? Guess what?). So in this day and age, why not support the format that's progressive? The DVD Forum decided that region coding caused more issues, and decided to eliminate it in the next standard.
Maybe that's why Blu-Ray has more big studio support - they want region coding that Blu-Ray has (despite the availability and legality of regionfree hacks for DVD players).
It's just another hassle in the unlocking of Blu-Ray...
Maybe I missed something, but it seems to me that this is simply an issue about whether the machines should have a printer attached.
Obviously many people think that would be a good idea.
Do others suggest it would be a bad one? Why? What is the reasoning behind that? Or was it just that nobody thought of that when designing the machines?
Why hasn't this been fixed already?
Obviously someone who has never watched or read about the Diebold systems. They already have printers attached! Which proves it's not a technical issue at all, since part of the process is to print out a "zero tape" to prove that the totals inside the machine are zero. (Whether or not such thing is useful is debatable, since a zero tape proves nothing. It's trivial to change the software from printing the actual total to actually print a literal zero... more complex if you want to pass by an audit, but not terribly difficult to make a simple slip-up and actually print zeros when the internal totals aren't zero).
I think the printers even have a little window to which you can peek at them, and they don't necessarily output a slip, but remain in a locked box, too... (well, as secure as the memory card lock, anyhow...)
The thief (singular) walked away with multiple computers? That requires multiple trips into the office. The security is bad no matter how you look at it. Either A) One guy makes multiple trips back and forth to carry all this stuff... unless he's superman and can carry multiple computers. B) A group of guys gets past security. One guy getting past I can see, but an entire group getting past should make it easier to catch them.
I don't see anything that implies they have to be desktop PCs - they could very well be laptops. I mean, a lot of people use them as desktops now, and many people do leave them on their desks when they leave for the night. Last I checked, a normal person can carry away a nice collection of laptops in a single trip.
This is especially so for the "creative" types who desire to have the ability to quickly jot down stuff while they're away from the office. They carry their laptops into meetings for notes and presenting their ideas, but other than that, it stays at the office since if they don't want to bring work home.
They not only cut our copper, but they dug up and removed most of the copper cabling from the neighborhood. They said that with the price of copper, it would be recycled and it would keep it from being stolen since it wasn't being used anymore.
I hope you got a rebate for the exchange of the copper on your next bill.:)
For anyone else, when this happens, tell them to leave the copper with you, so YOU can recycle it for a buck or two.:)
Except if it's on their side of the demarc box, it's their copper. If it's on your side, then yes, you have a say in it, since you own that copper. That's the sole reason why the demarc box exists - or even why it's called a demarc box. It tells you which wire belongs to whom.
You shouldn't be jumping around under fire with a gun, anyway. You're just too used to low-grav physics in games, where you get 2 full seconds of air time a la Master Chief; I'm happy with no jumping in a game that's supposed to be more realistic (at least in some ways).
And getting rid of jumping as a means to locomotion gets rid of one of the most annoying things about a FPS - jumping puzzles! Seriously... who likes jumping puzzles? Or who designs buildings and worlds where the primary way to get around is jumping from floors spaced just-a-bit-under-the-maximum-the-guy-can-jump?
We can blame poor controls and such, but jumping puzzles aren't fun. Adding poor controls that make it impossible to control the landing (such that you always fall off), doesn't help when you have to backtrack all the way to the beginning.
A 550 watt PSU won't even adequately power a SLI/Crossfire setup. They're selling kilowatt PSU's these days. Hell, I see one outfit selling a 1.6KW PSU. Now that might be overkill.
How is that possible? It would mean either the power supply can only supply around 1.3kW, or you're gonna have to hire an electrician to wire in a new 20 amp circuit just for that PC.
A regular 15 amp service at 110V only gives you 1650 watts of power. A PSU rated at 1600W, at "80+" certification (which so far appears to mean they're 80-82% efficient) is going to need 2kW of input power.
Also assuming it draws it at PF 1.0, which isn't unusual since newer power supplies come with power factor correction devices, but if it doesn't, you're going to be close to even a 20 amp circuit from the virtual power (virtual power still means you're handling real currents).
Of course, those who aren't in Japan or North America/South America, do have the benefit of nearly 3kW of power per circuit (using 220V at 13 amps). Might be the power supply that can't be used with 110V...
I don't want eBay business to dwindle, but they should be treated the same as Apple Canada or TigerDirect.ca
Yeah, and that is: without being forced to pay any taxes.
Question is, what's different when you sell via eBay?
If you create a home-based business and sell products and services out of your home, you are expected to pay all the necessary business and income taxes that accrue based on your business. If you create an e-commerce website (or use Yahoo or Amazon), you're expected to do the same. All you've done is increased your potential customer base from the local area to worldwide.
It may be an unfamiliar concept, but eBay isn't just about people hocking their old crap. eBay is a marketplace, and like Amazon, there are businesses that operate by selling goods via eBay. Unlike Amazon (who automatically handles your income taxes for you), eBay expects you do self-report it properly. Using eBay doesn't mean that Apple or Microsoft can suddenly sell their products that way without reporting it as business income. And some sellers make plenty of money through buying and selling via eBay that it's a home-based business. They may not be registered business, but it's still a business.
The CRA is basically going after people who basically make a living or potentially earning significant income via eBay, and making sure that they're reporting it as business or personal income as the case may be. All the CRA has done is basically tell businesses and people using it as a business that it's not a way to hide income...
Legos in sets have always gone for between 8 to 12 cents a piece. 5,000 pieces at 10c a piece is $500, which is about right.
Remember, a 200 piece set goes for between 18-22. The generic boxes of blocks are usually cheaper, running as low as 5c an element.
If you wanted to build a Falcon, this is probably the cheapest way to go. And you get 5000 elements that would work great on other spaceship projects, like the infamous Serenity.
Don't forget you also get a nice massive 4 lbs (just under 2kg) manual telling you how to put together those 5000 pieces into the huge Millenium Falcon.
My only concern is - what do you do if you're missing a piece? Cataloging 5000 pieces is a huge task in and of itself...
The question is, what does "TKO" stand for? I notice a *LOT* of phishes all have that somewhere (usually in the subject as "TKO Notice:" in them. You'd think most eBay phishes would use plain English, and not techie words like "TKO" (to which I don't know what it means).
BTW, according to eBay, all email from them includes your eBay username in them. (Likewise, from Paypal, which will have your real name in them and in the To header). For eBay, that's public information (except the username to e-mail address isn't, until you make it so by replying rather than using the message center - even the recipient is blocked by the "eBay_username members@ebay.com" reply address).
So what do you do when you are on the tail end of a torrent's popularity, you leave your client running for a week, and you still can't get up to 100% because there aren't enough other people who want to download the work? There might be a dozen seeders and 0 downloaders.
You rely on the fact that it's a private tracker, and most (>99%) don't expect you to seed 1:1 for every torrent.
Get in on one earlier and seed it 2:1 or more. You don't have to stop at 1:1, you know. I've done torrents where I only seeded 0.5 because, like you said, it was all seeders and no leechers. (Rare for Demonoid due to the sheer number of users. I had year-old+ torrents where I still ended up seeding 2:1). Just remember to make it up. Even as a new user the first GB is often "free". Just if you want to download more than that...
Or, another trick - go the front page and pick a popular torrent you don't care about. Use it to get your ratio above 1:1. Then stop it and delete the file. (Just be mindful about your limit, though - don't go all crazy and download 4GB torrents planning to seed to 2:1!).
Heck, that's why I liked Demonoid - even the lowest popularity torrent still gets a good bunch of leechers for unknown reasons. But if it wasn't overly large (maybe under 100MB), even at 10kB/s, I'd still have 2.5+:1 over the course of a day. All the little ones add up. Last I checked, I had maybe a 100GB differential over the course of 3 years or so (100GB more upload than downloaded).
It's the total of upload:download that matters to most private sites, not whether you downloaded 4GB and only uploaded 10MB on one torrent after a week (as long as your ratio can absorb that 4GB without dipping below 1:1).
Action like this is highly unlikely, because within our legal system they cannot (rather, should not) take action with the assumption that you are guilty without first having a full judgement.
If there were in fact a judgement, given the speed of our legal system, it would be shut down three years from now.
Actually, if the infringed party feels that the infringing party is unduly harming them, they can ask the judge to issue a temporary injunction from operations. However, in that case, the site can remain operational to explain the situation. Of course, the legality of providing links to files, and not files themselves has yet to be tested in Canadian courts.
It more likely is a hardware failure than anything. When I first tried Demonoid on Monday, the site was returning no data (it was responding to HTTP, however). Tuesday, it was returning connection resets. Blocked for firewalled sites time out, not return no data or connection resets. Heck, if you had torrents running, the torrent tracker server is contactable at the announce URL. If they shut it ALL down, the tracker servers will also be dead, but they're still being scraped normally. (Heck, it appears a few clients with cached torrent files are still connecting...).
It's not like it hasn't happened before - Demonoid has suffered a hardware failure earlier this year (in June, I believe) - took them 3 or 4 days to get the server to the point of "We had a hardware failure". being posted on the main page. Speculation ran that it was a shutdown, as well.
(I didn't know Demonoid was Canadian, honestly... either. That's news to me). As for torrents sapping bandwidth - most good clients have bandwidth throttles you can use to prevent you going over your gig limit. Shaw's "draconian" gig limits (30 for "lite", 60 for "regular", 100 for "regular plus", and 160 for "extreme" or so) aren't that bad, really. And Shaw's are known to be draconian. You can calculate the maximum upload rates if you want to not exceed these, but they're still quite reasonable (I believe 10kB/sec (bytes) will get you at most half way through the 60GB limit a month, roughly, if you uploaded 24/7 continually). If it's a private tracker, well, just keep it running and eventually you'll hit 1:1 ratio. May take a few days compared to the 3 hours to download, but oh well.
It runs Linux like crap because it doesn't provide access to hardware accelerated graphics. And by "hardware accelerated graphics", I don't just mean 3D games and Compiz. It doesn't even have 2D acceleration, so you'll see redraw lag just scrolling in Firefox.
Basically Linux compatibility was just a scheme to get into a different import tax bracket in the European Union (where computers have a lower tax than video game consoles or media players). Actual usability wasn't a design goal.
Heck, Linux isn't even running on the bare metal of the PS3. The tax bracket difference must be pretty huge for Sony to actually design and implement a hypervisor and virtualization system for the PS3 so it can run "Other OS" but not cripple the gaming and security aspects of the PS3.
The hard disk, card slots, etc. are all virtualized. That's why WiFi, RSX and Bluetooth don't work - the hypervisor doesn't allow access to that hardware, or offer virtualized interfaces.
Also adds to the latency in updating the display - you modify the framebuffer, then call into the hypervisor to update the display. Heck, everytime I use it, "ps3fb" is one of the tasks that's always consuming CPU time...
One of the main GOOD parts of the GPLv3 is that it's compatible with the Apache License now and I think some others, too.
The only new incompatibility I'm aware of is the GPLv2, and only if you hate the "or later" clause.
Actually, I wonder now... "GPLv2 or later" code is now effectively multiply licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and later revisions of the GPL) - are we going to run into problems where someone adds a block of GPLv3 code to GPLv2 or Later code, thus locking out that block of code from GPLv2-only projects (who until then could happy incorporate GPLv2 or Later code)?
I think what he's trying to imply is that iTunes (not iTMS) allows people to rip their own CD's unencumbered by DRM. In fact, it doesn't even have an option to force DRM on songs. I was curious about this too, until I realized that MS Windows Media Player has an option to "Copy Protect Music" and presumably has the ability to force people to "copy protect music" if Micrsoft deems it important. Imagine if iTunes never became the dominant music software; I'm guessing this option would already be turned on.
Actually, it already happened. I believe it was in the Windows 2000 era (befors iPods and iTunes), but Windows Media Player defaulted to WMA *with* DRM ("Copy protect music"). You could go and switch it to MP3 or turn off DRM, but by default, it was on. A lot of people were screwed when they reinstalled Windows and ended up with gigs of music they had to re-rip.
A quick Google reveals it was Windows Media Player 9 that had it "on" by default. Windows Media Player 10 turned it off by default...
Something we could all use for the classic "Who farted in the elevator" investigation!
Sheesh, if you're gonna fart in an elevator, do it just when the door opens and you get off on your floor (helps if others get off with you). Only when the doors close do people start to react. Also helps in case your attempt turns into a shart instead, since you have a quick getaway to the nearest bathroom.
If the elevator is empty, then do the same, leaving a nicely "air freshened" elevator for the next guy. Helps if the elevator has poor ventilation and is otherwise busy enough that the next guy gets on within a minute of you leaving.
If it really were just about data integrity, they wouldn't need to include the iPod's serial number hash; furthermore, a perfectly good database would work on every iPod, not just the one it came from. Since that is clearly not the case, the logical conclusion is that the hash was added for the sole purpose of locking out 3rd party software.
Ever consider that it's an integrity check? Remember how Vista broke iPods? (Turns out "Safely Remove Hardware" doesn't - it on occasion fails to flush all the buffers. There's a patch out, but even then, I'm not entirely confident it works. I found filesystem errors on my iPod after hooking it to a patched Vista machine). It's a somewhat well known issue with Vista. Perhaps this is Apple's way of ensuring that even if you don't have a patched Vista install (hint: the patch is NOT INSTALLED via Windows Update - you have to download the patch yourself).
For the serial number hashing, maybe the user has multiple iPods. Could be possible they plug in one after another. Can't have the wrong DB on the wrong iPod, or write the wrong hash to the wrong iPod. There is a remote chance, after all, that hashes can collide.
Heck, maybe they want to have some fun with the Linux guys? Make them release a new version of their software for the new iPods. Or maybe the database changed subtly again, and they're afraid third party tools may not catch the changes, so they make a huge OMGWTF change?
If they really wanted to lock up the iPod, they could just do it like the iPhone and iPod Touch - deny USB Mass Storage access. Heck, the Zune even modified MTP so that you have to authenticate against the Zune before any access can take place.
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Don't forget some interesting patches they did to get their older games to play on modern machines. You can get the original Half-Life and play it on your modern gaming rig without any issues at all, despite it being originally a Win9x game. At least the version you get from Steam is like that - all patched and ready to run on a modern machine.
(And if you do have a gaming rig or even just a modestly powerful computer, you'll also see how in half-life, the CPU utilization barely budges from the single digits).
Too true. The one major disadvantage of electronic to deadtree is well, cost and disposability. Curling up with a good book on the sofa and munching on some snack is a pastime for many people. Well, if the deadtree gets all the crumbs and crap on it, you don't care (if it got too grungy, you buy a new copy and chuck the old one (assuming you don't read rare books like this - but most people make a copy first and read that)). Get your e-reader grungy, and (forgetting DRM) means you're shelling out a chunk of change for a new one.
Ditto with reading in the bathtub - I have tons of books that have undergone major soakings, and other than crinkled pages, are otherwise still readable.
Or, as someone once complained... they read the newspaper, and eat their breakfast. They don't care if they spill some coffee on it, or if their breakfast drops crumbs / oil on it. They put it in the recycling, and get a fresh copy the next day. Reading off a screen... well, you don't want to do stuff like that.
For stuff that changes often, e-readers are great. But deadtree will be around a long time, simply because they're far more durable and disposable than an e-reader. Until we get rid of reading in the bathtub or curling up with a good book and a snack, or just reading stuff at breakfast and not minding the fact that it's getting dirty and grungy. The convenience of deadtree in this case has yet to be surpassed by e-readers. Maybe in the future when e-readers are $5 each...
They're actually quite nice.
The e-paper screen is *beautiful*. The only thing you'll miss is a book light. It's very nice and contrasty (but more like black on a dull grey background), and the text isn't buried under glass, but appears on the surface, like real paper. It's a nice matte surface, so glare is a non-issue, and is extremely readable in all lighting conditions except pitch black (like a regular book).
The bad thing - if you want to use its internal memory, you need to use Sony's software (a poor imitation of iTunes). But luckily, it accepts Memory Stick and SD cards. Just plop in it text files, RTF, or PDF files onto your SD card and away you go (making this the OS agnostic way of using it - just need a card reader and external card). The other issue is ghosting - when the screen updates, the parts that were black don't return all the way to background color, but leaves an imprint. Not to worry - another refresh will fix it. Might be slightly irritating if the book lines alternate.
The other bad thing is when it needs to refresh the area - what happens is it inverts the entire screen, then writes the new image to it (in an effort to alleviate the ghosting).
But the screen is really nice, you can easily forget about such issues. Just remember the flashlight if reading beneath the covers.
Portal is probably one of the most unique cross-genre games out there (FPS + puzzle).
The major thing is that the puzzles aren't the generic jumping puzzles, nor can they be solved by blindly rushing in and shooting everything in sight. Portal can require a bunch of strategy (planning out where to shoot portals to accomplish the goal without getting hurt), a bit of trickery and timing (involves shooting a portal in mid-air so you can rocket to the next place and shoot the next portal where you couldn't before you started), etc. Heck, some of the puzzles you can't solve the traditional way.
And yes, the puzzles aren't overly complicated, but they do require some planning, some figuring out, and the best thing - I don't think it's possible to get yourself stuck! (Major no-no in puzzle games is to work yourself into a spot where you can't get out of because you forgot to pick up the whatzit 3 levels back). Valve really did spend a lot of time making sure a mistake won't make the puzzles suddenly unsolvable.
So while I guess it may be a general trend, I hope developers realize that it shouldn't be possible to get stuck if you happen to not notice the whatzit (if item X is needed near the end, you give the player less and less subtle clues they need X to continue later...).
Otherwise, this will be the end of the puzzle genre again.
Actually, the feature is much older - dates back to the early 90's on the 68k Macs as well. Though, they didn't have Firewire ports, they did have SCSI ports. You could set them into "SCSI Disk Mode", and they'd appear on the SCSI bus as a disk (with the SCSI ID you set).
Heck, the SCSI logo that bounced around the screen while this went on even displayed the SCSI ID in case you forgot to set it properly (and thus can do some black magic to get your SCSI bus working again).
Was a great way of transferring files from my old Macs (one of which didn't have Ethernet!) to my new Powerbook about 4 years ago. (Admittedly, another neat thing was the fact that the old Mac with Ethernet didn't do AppleTalk over IP (which unfortunately, is all OS X supported natively). But OS X Classic could be booted and Chooser (remember that?) could find it, and it still magically appears as a mounted disk in OS X. I don't think I want to know how many layers of software was used for that to happen.
USB is much harder though - you can't just plug a USB Host port into another USB Host port - that's an illegal USB topology. (There can only be one host on a USB bus since it's a master-slave bus, unlike Firewire/SCSI which are peer-to-peer).
Don't see why Apple can't sell it as an unlocked phone.
It's got double activation, so the first one would be to sign up for an Orange contract. Oh, the phone's unlocked alright, but you'll have to sign this contract to use it, so you'll pay your provider plus Orange. Sure you can probably get out of it, who knows what the contract termination fees are (probably along the lines of, "You think $200 is expensive?").
Or heck, maybe Apple will just sell it through Orange dealers, who'll probably give you plenty of warning that yes, it's unlocked, but you're still bound by the contract. (The sim lock and an external contract with a service provider are two separate things...). To cancel the contract early (i.e., standard return policy), return the phone as per EU directives and French laws - none of this AT&T style cancel the plan but keep the phone. Heck, I'm sure there are ton of other ways to ensure that even though you can use the phone with any network in the world, well, you're gonna pay Orange still.
Actually, while that is true, the reality is, Apple buys parts in huge quantities. Sure IBM could laugh them off, but think of their other customers as well - they have Microsoft, Sony/Toshiba and Nintendo as major customers also buying parts in equally big quantities from IBM, but on friendlier terms. (Add to this the inability for IBM to scale up G5 production to the quantities Apple desired - remember when Steve said there would be 3GHz G5s that never materialized? Or how the top end part *always* has shortages?) Given the choice, Apple only wants high end parts, while the yields are low (and leaving IBM with the parts that don't make it), and ending up with a pile of G5s no one wants, well, IBM simply said "no". Apple bullied, IBM bullied back, let the bigger bully win.
End result, Apple goes x86, seeing that PowerPC wasn't keeping up with the brute force and raw GHz of the x86, and supplies of the x86 CPUs are relatively plentiful. Apple could choose between AMD and Intel. They went with Intel as AMD unfortunately is at full production, and at the quantities Apple buys stuff at, it would basically strain supply (like IBM and Motorola / Freescale had). Intel instead has plenty of fab capacity, good yields, and would gladly supply chips without missing a beat.
Heck, Apple managed to take Toshiba's full production of 1.8" hard drives during the first few years of iPod production. This difficulty in supplying tiny formfactor drives led to other manufacturers to start making 1.8" drives as well (Hitachi). Now Toshiba has upgraded their facilities to make the same hard drive with ever greater capacity. (The iPod is 6 years old. In that time, the hard drive used in the iPod has grown 32 times (5GB -> 160GB) and shrunk in height to maybe 1/3rd the thickness.
For the Nanos and Shuffles, well, Apple is causing a lot of the shortages as well - prices have risen the past couple of months in anticipation of the holiday season - blame put squarely on Apple for buying up all the parts.
Yes, right now there's a problem on the supply side. It turns out that Apple is one of the largest customers of flash memory (with all the iPods...), enough so that if anyone supplying Apple sneezes, prices go up. Flash memory prices are already on their way up in anticipation of Apple's increased demand for the holiday season, in fact (which is around now for production). (This is for the large single chip NAND flash - 1GB+)
If you think about it, Apple is really hard on suppliers - think of them as the Wal-Mart of the computer industry. If they can get a part cheaper, they'll bully their suppliers to get it. Thus, it's really in the supplier's interest to find better ways of making the chips cheaper. 8GB chips are already here, and 16GB ones are going to be commercially available shortly, but still, it's a tight market.
Memory technology has moved to the latest and greatest processes already (no, not 65nm... that's old tech. 35nm for memory is the standard nowadays). Problem is, spinning platters improvements have come about far faster than Moore's law. Heck, there was a time when tape was considerably cheaper (cost per megabyte/GB) than a hard disk, but those days have more or less gone (reserved for those who can afford the ultra expensive systems with TB's of space, where it may be cheaper still, but the initial startup costs are prohibitive for normal people).
Ah, but Blu-Ray IS region coded. There are 3 regions in Blu-Ray. And the DRM in HD-DVD has long been hacked (remember that stupid Digg day where they banned that number? Guess what?). So in this day and age, why not support the format that's progressive? The DVD Forum decided that region coding caused more issues, and decided to eliminate it in the next standard.
Maybe that's why Blu-Ray has more big studio support - they want region coding that Blu-Ray has (despite the availability and legality of regionfree hacks for DVD players).
It's just another hassle in the unlocking of Blu-Ray...
Obviously someone who has never watched or read about the Diebold systems. They already have printers attached! Which proves it's not a technical issue at all, since part of the process is to print out a "zero tape" to prove that the totals inside the machine are zero. (Whether or not such thing is useful is debatable, since a zero tape proves nothing. It's trivial to change the software from printing the actual total to actually print a literal zero... more complex if you want to pass by an audit, but not terribly difficult to make a simple slip-up and actually print zeros when the internal totals aren't zero).
I think the printers even have a little window to which you can peek at them, and they don't necessarily output a slip, but remain in a locked box, too... (well, as secure as the memory card lock, anyhow...)
I don't see anything that implies they have to be desktop PCs - they could very well be laptops. I mean, a lot of people use them as desktops now, and many people do leave them on their desks when they leave for the night. Last I checked, a normal person can carry away a nice collection of laptops in a single trip.
This is especially so for the "creative" types who desire to have the ability to quickly jot down stuff while they're away from the office. They carry their laptops into meetings for notes and presenting their ideas, but other than that, it stays at the office since if they don't want to bring work home.
Except if it's on their side of the demarc box, it's their copper. If it's on your side, then yes, you have a say in it, since you own that copper. That's the sole reason why the demarc box exists - or even why it's called a demarc box. It tells you which wire belongs to whom.
And getting rid of jumping as a means to locomotion gets rid of one of the most annoying things about a FPS - jumping puzzles! Seriously... who likes jumping puzzles? Or who designs buildings and worlds where the primary way to get around is jumping from floors spaced just-a-bit-under-the-maximum-the-guy-can-jump?
We can blame poor controls and such, but jumping puzzles aren't fun. Adding poor controls that make it impossible to control the landing (such that you always fall off), doesn't help when you have to backtrack all the way to the beginning.
How is that possible? It would mean either the power supply can only supply around 1.3kW, or you're gonna have to hire an electrician to wire in a new 20 amp circuit just for that PC.
A regular 15 amp service at 110V only gives you 1650 watts of power. A PSU rated at 1600W, at "80+" certification (which so far appears to mean they're 80-82% efficient) is going to need 2kW of input power.
Also assuming it draws it at PF 1.0, which isn't unusual since newer power supplies come with power factor correction devices, but if it doesn't, you're going to be close to even a 20 amp circuit from the virtual power (virtual power still means you're handling real currents).
Of course, those who aren't in Japan or North America/South America, do have the benefit of nearly 3kW of power per circuit (using 220V at 13 amps). Might be the power supply that can't be used with 110V...
Question is, what's different when you sell via eBay?
If you create a home-based business and sell products and services out of your home, you are expected to pay all the necessary business and income taxes that accrue based on your business. If you create an e-commerce website (or use Yahoo or Amazon), you're expected to do the same. All you've done is increased your potential customer base from the local area to worldwide.
It may be an unfamiliar concept, but eBay isn't just about people hocking their old crap. eBay is a marketplace, and like Amazon, there are businesses that operate by selling goods via eBay. Unlike Amazon (who automatically handles your income taxes for you), eBay expects you do self-report it properly. Using eBay doesn't mean that Apple or Microsoft can suddenly sell their products that way without reporting it as business income. And some sellers make plenty of money through buying and selling via eBay that it's a home-based business. They may not be registered business, but it's still a business.
The CRA is basically going after people who basically make a living or potentially earning significant income via eBay, and making sure that they're reporting it as business or personal income as the case may be. All the CRA has done is basically tell businesses and people using it as a business that it's not a way to hide income...
Don't forget you also get a nice massive 4 lbs (just under 2kg) manual telling you how to put together those 5000 pieces into the huge Millenium Falcon.
My only concern is - what do you do if you're missing a piece? Cataloging 5000 pieces is a huge task in and of itself...
The question is, what does "TKO" stand for? I notice a *LOT* of phishes all have that somewhere (usually in the subject as "TKO Notice:" in them. You'd think most eBay phishes would use plain English, and not techie words like "TKO" (to which I don't know what it means).
BTW, according to eBay, all email from them includes your eBay username in them. (Likewise, from Paypal, which will have your real name in them and in the To header). For eBay, that's public information (except the username to e-mail address isn't, until you make it so by replying rather than using the message center - even the recipient is blocked by the "eBay_username members@ebay.com" reply address).
You rely on the fact that it's a private tracker, and most (>99%) don't expect you to seed 1:1 for every torrent.
Get in on one earlier and seed it 2:1 or more. You don't have to stop at 1:1, you know. I've done torrents where I only seeded 0.5 because, like you said, it was all seeders and no leechers. (Rare for Demonoid due to the sheer number of users. I had year-old+ torrents where I still ended up seeding 2:1). Just remember to make it up. Even as a new user the first GB is often "free". Just if you want to download more than that...
Or, another trick - go the front page and pick a popular torrent you don't care about. Use it to get your ratio above 1:1. Then stop it and delete the file. (Just be mindful about your limit, though - don't go all crazy and download 4GB torrents planning to seed to 2:1!).
Heck, that's why I liked Demonoid - even the lowest popularity torrent still gets a good bunch of leechers for unknown reasons. But if it wasn't overly large (maybe under 100MB), even at 10kB/s, I'd still have 2.5+:1 over the course of a day. All the little ones add up. Last I checked, I had maybe a 100GB differential over the course of 3 years or so (100GB more upload than downloaded).
It's the total of upload:download that matters to most private sites, not whether you downloaded 4GB and only uploaded 10MB on one torrent after a week (as long as your ratio can absorb that 4GB without dipping below 1:1).
Actually, if the infringed party feels that the infringing party is unduly harming them, they can ask the judge to issue a temporary injunction from operations. However, in that case, the site can remain operational to explain the situation. Of course, the legality of providing links to files, and not files themselves has yet to be tested in Canadian courts.
It more likely is a hardware failure than anything. When I first tried Demonoid on Monday, the site was returning no data (it was responding to HTTP, however). Tuesday, it was returning connection resets. Blocked for firewalled sites time out, not return no data or connection resets. Heck, if you had torrents running, the torrent tracker server is contactable at the announce URL. If they shut it ALL down, the tracker servers will also be dead, but they're still being scraped normally. (Heck, it appears a few clients with cached torrent files are still connecting...).
It's not like it hasn't happened before - Demonoid has suffered a hardware failure earlier this year (in June, I believe) - took them 3 or 4 days to get the server to the point of "We had a hardware failure". being posted on the main page. Speculation ran that it was a shutdown, as well.
(I didn't know Demonoid was Canadian, honestly... either. That's news to me). As for torrents sapping bandwidth - most good clients have bandwidth throttles you can use to prevent you going over your gig limit. Shaw's "draconian" gig limits (30 for "lite", 60 for "regular", 100 for "regular plus", and 160 for "extreme" or so) aren't that bad, really. And Shaw's are known to be draconian. You can calculate the maximum upload rates if you want to not exceed these, but they're still quite reasonable (I believe 10kB/sec (bytes) will get you at most half way through the 60GB limit a month, roughly, if you uploaded 24/7 continually). If it's a private tracker, well, just keep it running and eventually you'll hit 1:1 ratio. May take a few days compared to the 3 hours to download, but oh well.
Heck, Linux isn't even running on the bare metal of the PS3. The tax bracket difference must be pretty huge for Sony to actually design and implement a hypervisor and virtualization system for the PS3 so it can run "Other OS" but not cripple the gaming and security aspects of the PS3.
The hard disk, card slots, etc. are all virtualized. That's why WiFi, RSX and Bluetooth don't work - the hypervisor doesn't allow access to that hardware, or offer virtualized interfaces.
Also adds to the latency in updating the display - you modify the framebuffer, then call into the hypervisor to update the display. Heck, everytime I use it, "ps3fb" is one of the tasks that's always consuming CPU time...
Actually, I wonder now... "GPLv2 or later" code is now effectively multiply licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and later revisions of the GPL) - are we going to run into problems where someone adds a block of GPLv3 code to GPLv2 or Later code, thus locking out that block of code from GPLv2-only projects (who until then could happy incorporate GPLv2 or Later code)?
Hmm, why does this sound familiar?
Actually, it already happened. I believe it was in the Windows 2000 era (befors iPods and iTunes), but Windows Media Player defaulted to WMA *with* DRM ("Copy protect music"). You could go and switch it to MP3 or turn off DRM, but by default, it was on. A lot of people were screwed when they reinstalled Windows and ended up with gigs of music they had to re-rip.
A quick Google reveals it was Windows Media Player 9 that had it "on" by default. Windows Media Player 10 turned it off by default...
Sheesh, if you're gonna fart in an elevator, do it just when the door opens and you get off on your floor (helps if others get off with you). Only when the doors close do people start to react. Also helps in case your attempt turns into a shart instead, since you have a quick getaway to the nearest bathroom.
If the elevator is empty, then do the same, leaving a nicely "air freshened" elevator for the next guy. Helps if the elevator has poor ventilation and is otherwise busy enough that the next guy gets on within a minute of you leaving.
Ever consider that it's an integrity check? Remember how Vista broke iPods? (Turns out "Safely Remove Hardware" doesn't - it on occasion fails to flush all the buffers. There's a patch out, but even then, I'm not entirely confident it works. I found filesystem errors on my iPod after hooking it to a patched Vista machine). It's a somewhat well known issue with Vista. Perhaps this is Apple's way of ensuring that even if you don't have a patched Vista install (hint: the patch is NOT INSTALLED via Windows Update - you have to download the patch yourself).
For the serial number hashing, maybe the user has multiple iPods. Could be possible they plug in one after another. Can't have the wrong DB on the wrong iPod, or write the wrong hash to the wrong iPod. There is a remote chance, after all, that hashes can collide.
Heck, maybe they want to have some fun with the Linux guys? Make them release a new version of their software for the new iPods. Or maybe the database changed subtly again, and they're afraid third party tools may not catch the changes, so they make a huge OMGWTF change?
If they really wanted to lock up the iPod, they could just do it like the iPhone and iPod Touch - deny USB Mass Storage access. Heck, the Zune even modified MTP so that you have to authenticate against the Zune before any access can take place.
since they're now one and the same...
*grin*