If Steve Jobs is even a little bit like the person that reading about Apple would lead you to believe, I'd have a hard time imagining that he expected the Rokr to accomplish much of anything. That leads me to wonder why he would've gone ahead with it at all, and I wonder if it wasn't in a way used as a bargaining chip to help get cingular/at&t to make some compromises when the real apple phone came along. Jobs could point to the rokr and say, "Look this is what happens when our awesome Apple/itunes/etc brand is mixed with your crappy phone development. You end up with barely-functional garbage that noone buys. Now whey don't you just go on vacation and let us design our phone from top to bottom and we'll let you help us sell them by the truckload."
Come to think of it, that makes sense. Apple's products don't sell on features alone (they're often lacking features - look when the iPod came out - the competition had a 6GN (compared to the iPod's 5) hard disk, sound "enhancement" up the wazoo, recording, and probably a dozen other features I've never used (I owned a Nomad Jukebox). Heck, the original Slashdot editor comment said it all "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame". Heck, the iPod came out a month after the 9/11 attacks (October 2001) - it's not like people really wanted to spend money on luxury goods (especially when it costed $500) at that time as it would make them look insensitive at spending half a grand on something for themselves than helping the 9/11 efforts. So we can say the iPod had everything going against it - cheaper, better competitors, a tough market... as we know how it turns out.
What the iPod did do, was make an existing MP3 player work better. First was to get rid of the god-awful Nomad formfactor to something that was a large pack of playing cards. Next was to change the interface from the crappy USB1.1 to the superior FireWire (leading to minutes to transfer songs, rather than days.
The iPhone by itself, isn't that exciting. Face it - a Windows Mobile phone probably has more features than the iPhone has on its debut. Or maybe even a Blackberry. It's also entering a tight market - people want subsidized near-free phones. Even though most Smartphones probably cost just as much as an iPhone, they're heavily subsidized so it doesn't seem so expensive. The only thing Apple can do to make the iPhone work would be to redo how phones work.
It could be like the Newton - did a lot of neat stuff we wish existed today (Newton assist, anyone? The quintessial demo of writing "Lunch with Bob at 12pm tuesday", selecting that, tapping the Assist button, and having a Calendar entry made up with Bob (from Addressbook), topic "Lunch", scheduled at 12pm the coming Tuesday.) That's really all that the iPhone can bring, because everything else... has been done before. So all Apple can do is make a UI (that possibly doesn't suck), and add little bits of functionality everywhere that people don't know they need, but do. (E.g., if you were setting up Bluetooth pairing to use the iPhone as a modem, wouldn't it be helpful if it also gave you stuff like the phone number, username and password to get on the network as well, rather than having to memorize them or keep them on a little note?)
Actually, your analysis still doesn't hold up because my post was refuting the comment about a lack of sales, not the moneysink comment. However, to refute the moneysink would require an analysis of the cost of upkeep for starcraft (right now they have minimal development on patches, so the primary cost is server maintenance and bandwidth) subtract the revenue from tournaments, the revenue from advertisements on battle.net and the revenue from sales.
Yeah, and the fact that bandwidth costs for battle.net aren't that high. Maybe when it comes time for a new patch, but during all other times, it's quite low. All battle.net really does is serve as a central player aggregator and chat medium. When players wish to play the game, they disconnect from battle.net and connect to the guy that's hosting the game. No game traffic really passes back to battle.net. It's like the napster model for p2p. Thus, a few servers can serve tons on a not-very-fast link, so all sales of blizzard's games go to pay for battle.net.
A friend of mine does this on his OpenBSD box designated for routing. It is actually a pain in the rear because he needs to spin off a new CD when patching is necessary for security. Wisely, he does not trust a rewriteable CD. The only advantage realized is that the attacker cannot implant any of his or her programs. It isn't feasible from a manageability standpoint, however.
You know, you can pick up a CD/DVD-ROM drive fairly cheap (or free from a friend)... unless someone has a magic new technology that can turn a reader into a rewriter using just a bit of software.
I have no idea if HL2 is any good, as I won't buy a game that won't run unless it checks in with the steaming mothership first. Yes, I realize that through some arcane procedure you can get it to run without connecting, but if you accidently forget to do that while online and then go offline you are SOL. I choose not to support such schemes buy not buying anything that uses steam. Kind of like not buying games that use starforce.
Uh, how is "Unplug network cable" before starting Steam arcane? Heck, if you were lazy, you could just hit the "standby" button on your cable modem if you were lazy. Or if you're technically advanced, prevent Steam from getting access to the Internet via your firewall. Windows Firewall can prevent egress packets per-application. All you have to do is prevent Steam from getting on the Internet.
And if you forget to go offline... just restart Steam. It's not like you have to reboot your computer or anything. It takes a minute, tops, to shut down and restart Steam. Most of it is waiting for Steam to try to connect to the Internet.
I understand that the early days of Steam, it was arcane to go offline, but things have changed a lot since then - it's improved tremendously.
All the articles state is that it's more likely to happen that the tax moratorium may end under the Democratic controlled house and senate, than if the government was composed of more Republican members.
Looks like it's just a cheap call to try to get some votes and cheap political points in. After all, the next round of elections will probably be heavily Internet based, and they're only a year away. What better way to rally people who haven't decided yet by saying their precious Internet is not going to be the tax-free haven it once was? (Especially given how the current Republican in power is potentially making life difficult for Republicans in swing states. Might as well try to score some cheap political points amongst bloggers and stuff when they post "OH NOES, INTERNET TAXES!!!!" when it's just a bill being discussed, and chances are better that the moratorium may end under a Democrat-controlled senate. They never actually said what chances are, after all. If it was likely to end with a 1% chance under Republicans and 1.5% under Democrats, well, chances are better (but no way it'll pass)...
You may now resume your "OH NOES, INTERNET TAXES ARE HERE!!!!" posts.;-)
Is it a unique product users will find interesting, that Sling something? (writing comments so that part of story isn't showing up)
It's a place-shifting box. Sure, all the Linux-heads can do 100x better with Linux, a capture card, and VLC, and some hacked lirc stuff, but for the rest of us who don't want to leave a PC on all day, it's effectively all that in a little box. Plus your cable TV coax to it (or your composite/svideo/component outputs), plug in the power supply, plug in the Ethernet, and in a few minutes of setup, you're watching your TV on your computer (PC/Mac), phone or PDA.
The smart ones hook it to their TiVos. There's an IR blaster so you can use the virtual (i.e., onscreen) remote control to control it.
Can it be done with a regular Windows PC? Yes. Linux? Most definiteiy. But if you want something easy to set up, a Slingbox works.
The simplified control scheme lets people who just have a good sense of rhythm and basic finger control play the game. If I had to hit some of those chorts in real life and use a real whammy bar instead of the soft one on the controller I'd probably never pick it up after my first couple of tries.
I wonder if anyone playing it has gotten interested in learning in real life. The first Guitar Hero said, during a loading screen, "At some point you might want to look into a real guitar" or something like that.
I bought Guitar Hero for the 360, and when the owner of a sandwich shop I frequent saw it, he commented on how interested he was in it (he practices with a real guitar at the back when I come in). Next week when I'm getting my sandwich, I find out he's bought it and used it to not only have some fun, but also improve his technique. So I'd say it may help those struggling with some things to relax and try to replicate what happens in GH in real life. Turns out he wasn't strumming properly and thus his whole arm hurt after practicing for real. But with GH, he "learned" to strum better, so he's not hurting so badly after practice.
So I can say that real-life guitar students might just want to check it out just to see if it might help them. If not, it's a great way to just have some fun playing songs that one wants to play - those practice songs get old quick, and everyone wants to try to play their favorite song one day or another.
My request - I wish they'd have the Top Gun theme in there. Movie was OK (Cruise, 'nuff said), but have to admit, that theme is fairly distinct and definitely guitar-heavy.
No P2P provider has ponied up the "protection" money to ensure that their traffic gets the full bandwidth. I wonder how long it will be before one does to get the edge over competitors?
Depends how they filter the traffic. If they specifically say "traffic from domain yyy.tld has higher priority" then it's against network neutrality. Instead, they may do "if traffic has the evil bit set, it has higher priority", which can then be considered as a type of traffic that's filtered less, it isn't considered network neutrality. In the latter case, others can simply flip the magic bit and their traffic also gets carried with higher priority.
But don't just think this is happening in the UK. It's happening in Canada as well. Shaw cable has installed Ellacoya packet shapers that throttle BitTorrent traffic (mostly uploads, since uploads are the weakness of cable broadband). Rogers cable (the other big cable ISP - Shaw for the west, Rogers for the East) has started throttling encrypted connections to counter the encrypted BitTorrent traffic. Of course, there are other ISPs out there - like DSL providers and smaller cable companies that don't throttle.
Of course, I suppose it's only a matter of time until people realize that for the service they're getting, they could save tons using dialup... (especially dialup-over-cable and other services) which may just end up giving them *more* bandwidth for what they're doing. (It's a common argument I hear - cable's better because it's faster, so why pay for 1.5Mbps when you can get 10Mbps. However, if you're doing stuff that the cable provider dislikes, the slower connection may be faster because they don't do throttling...).
HDMI has audio and a better connector and compatibility with DVI. There are a lot of things about HDMI that are theoretically very good. but there are some problems with it that overall I think make HDMI a negative.
Except the connector doesn't have any sort of catch. Super expensive overpriced (and unnecessary) HDMI cables can be fairly heavy, and a lot of displays have the HDMI cables running along the bottom. End result? Damn thing just falls out! At least DVI had a mechanical cinch to lock it in.
The main reason the FCC doesn't require the print to be on the radio anymore is because most of them were impossible to read anyway.
I'd guess it has more to do with companies with deep pockets wanting to keep their circuits secret.
Actually, I haven't come across ANY recent FCC filings where the schematics are public these days.
Take a trolling of the FCC filings of anything these days, and the "summary" view lists schematics, internal theory of operation, etc, but it says they aren't public. The "detail" view (which lets you grab the filed documents) doesn't even list those. All you can get are the test report, test setup, manual, photos, internal photos, and maybe a couple of letters. Try it on your wifi card, or your cellphone, or your wireless mouse. It's a rare product where the schematic is actually available for free download from the FCC site.
The problem with Lithium chemistries is they don't last long, i.e. they have a low number of recharge cycles. Guess what the hybrid car industry uses?
Actually, lithium-ion batteries have a great cycle life - typically around 500 cycles (about the same as NiMH, though shorter than NiCd's 1000-ish). They can be prolonged by partial cycling - e.g., rather than let it drain all the way, you drain it partly then put it back on charge. (Which is why you really should just put everything on charge at the end of the day or if you're done using them - there's no reason to not put your cellphone in its charger at the end of the day other than general laziness. It's easier on the battery).
Lithium ion batteries have, however, a short *LIFETIME*. They age, grow old, and stop holding the charge they one had. Typically this is around 2-5 years from date of manufacture. So a catch-22 is often you can buy a spare battery now, but when you need it, that spare isn't going to perform like new - it may be a little bit better (if properly cared for in storage) than the existing one, but that's it. The catch is that by the time you need the spare/replacement, they often aren't made anymore. It's also why one should avoid buying "New Old Stock" batteries as they've aged some time. What's worse are those battery packs hanging on the wall - I want to buy a PSP battery pack, but it's not easy to tell from the packaging when they were manufactured.
Well, I guess that when you come to expect that a company's news comes primarily from intentional and unintentional leaks due to their own secrecy, it makes sense that people would buy this. Maybe it's time Apple re-thinks their super-secret policies.
Perhaps, or maybe it's Apple's way of finding out who's been breaking their NDA. Perhaps by first looking at trading activity, then by looking at the wording of the email that was posted on Engadget. After all, if you found this out, you'd want to either short stock or something first, then leak it out... Remember, Apple still has to deal with leaks, and something as wild as this may make it obvious since it'll hit the big sites (one of which is likely to post it verbatim, thus identifying the culprit). And people who react to silly things like "A well-connected Apple employee said..." or "Our insider Apple employee" do deserve to get burned if they make financial decisions based on an unverifiable source. The source could very well be real, but it could also be made up. Speculation on new products is one thing, but actually doing stuff based on news whose validity is as good as the neighbourhood bum...
As for intentional leaks, that's hard to determine. But if you're going to do stuff like sell stock, you might want to wait for official confirmation. Because it's so easy to write "A VP of marketing at Apple has told me that the iPhone will support 3rd party applications, and there is going to be an SDK released June 1. Developer iPhones will be released then as well."
Flash memory is no good because it has a limited number of write cycles (typically about 10,000 - after which it becomes 'random'. If a swap file was on flash memory, it'd soon die..)
Very low-end flash memory has that kind of write cycles. And it's typically limited to NOR flash, which is used only for code memory and limited data store due it its large cell size (largest NOR flash chips are around 256MB). Even so, Intel's StrataFlash had write lifetimes of at least 100,000 erase-write cycles, and most flash chips are underrated by an order of magnitude.
Modern bulk-dsta storage flash is NAND flash, which due to its smaller cell size (partly due to its design, and partly due to operation), means 16GB (byte, not bits) per chip is starting to become practical. NAND flash is faster erasing and writing than NOR flash, but much slower (order of magnitude) slower at reading. Plus it's I/O based - you can't "boot" from NAND flash like you can from NOR. (Write/Erase/Reads are on the order of microseconds for NAND - typically 100-500uS for write/erase, and 10uS for reads. For NOR, writes are typically 300-1000milliseconds, erases 1000ms, but reads on the order of 100ns or less).
Because of the operational characteristics of NAND flash, it typically has a 100,000 write-erase cycle limit at the minimum, with most offering at least 1,000,000 cycles (and typically lasts an order of magnitude more).
Wear-levelling algorithms and bad-block handling increase the time between writes and erases to the point where it almost isn't a consideration anymore - when the drive dies eventually, it'll really be timeto change it. And at least when an SSD dies, it dies on erases and writes, and very rarely on read. So if you get write errors, you still have a great probability of recovering all the data (except the data which was just written).
It's write-erase cycles, because erasing turns "0" bits into "1" bits. Writing turns "1" bits into "0" bits. Within certain restrictions, you can do multiple writes to a block (turning "1" bits into "0" bits, but you can't turn a "0" bit into a "1" bit without erasing), but those don't count towards write-erase cycles. (This behavior is often exploited when marking blocks as dirty and such). And they only fail on writes or erases due to internal timeouts (each cell takes progressively longer and longer to erase and write). Reads can be considered as never failing.
how 'bout playing chess while the computer player processes environmental data, is distracted by bowel movements, wants pizza, oh yeah call the wife after game,be aware of how high the ceiling is?
if a computer can process all these and still play chess then we need to worry.
Problem is, a computer can isolate tasks so much better than us. So one process can do the environmental processing, another does bowel movements, a third wants pizza, a forth handles the wife, and the fifth does the ceiling height. All running independently of each other. If they get in the way, just run 'em inside separate VMs...
I have two Series2 units and I love them. But there's no way in hell I'd spend PS3-level prices on a Series3 recorder, especially with the lack of TivoToGo and now this bullshit.
Look, if I buy a device that has a hard drive in it, that hard drive is mine. The data on it is mine. If you don't want me to access it from the "wrong" host, maybe you shouldn't have sold it in the first place. You can have all the control you want over that hard drive while it's gathering dust in your warehouse.
The blame for that doesn't go with TiVo, but with CableLabs. You see, either the Series 3 TiVo cannot receive high-def cable at all using CableCARDs, (in which case, well, you might as well stick with a tried and true series 2), or you have to agree to the rather onerous terms of the CableLabs license to use CableCARD. And part of the CableLabs agreement involves stuff like what TiVoToGo does.
Heck, only recently have Series 3 TiVos had their eSATA ports turned on. Part of this is where the CableLabs agreement was modified to allow external storage of CableCARD protected media, provided said media was encrypted (I'm sure TiVo was the primary cause of this change). In fact, it's possibly the reason why TiVO got this patent - the encryption is for the external eSATA disk.
That's probably why if you can stand it, your cable company's HD box can output via Firewire - its not bound by the CableLabs agreement since the cable company wants you to rent their boxes. And would prefer to lock you into those boxes, rather than letting outsiders mess with their locked-up cable signal. It's the only reason CableCARD is around - the FCC demanded a way for people to get access to encrypted cable signals without needing a special cable box to do it. (And many cable companies are trying to make CableCARDs as inconvenient to get as possible.)
Also why development of CableCARDs has been slow. Cable companies want to control everything - the menu you see, the guide, the layout of graphics, etc (and the ads in the cable menus). TiVo conveniently skips all that crap and uses its own interface.
Cable companies would prefer to have everything locked up and under their control, much like cellular carriers. Unlike cellular carriers, there often isn't competition about it. Heck, in Canada, my cable company (Shaw) does not carry CableCARDs because the current revision won't let them have their crappy UI, and support pay-per-view or other "enhanced" (i.e, pay to use) features, just receive their digital cable and high-def cable service. (Of course, they don't have to, but it would be nice. I'd buy a series 3 TiVo in an instant if they did, instead of going without and thus losing the potential subscription revenue.)
I think there is a definite need for the Greenpeace campaign. I think what we really need to address the environmental issues concerning chemical waste and recycling policies, is informed choices. That means that the information comes from a trusted an unbiased source. Greenpeace undermines it position as such by running an uninformed campaign. That's sad, cause Greenpeace are one of the only entities which can pull a campaign with some impact of. I think greenpeace should take Job's advice: Hire experts and get the facts right. This way their campaign will have a lot more impact. Even though the Apple affair was a bit of a FUD-filled the need for the campaign is still there. They have got peoples attention, I hope they will use that attention constructively. Besides pressuring PC manufacturers I think that Greenpeace should push for legislation.
So Apple's near the top in a more objective ranking backed by an quantifiable IEEE standard, while fails horribly in Greenpeace's ranking (which has been discovered to basically be "High scorers have lots of environmental PR" (i.e., what they say, rather than do)), while EPEAT's is what they do, rather than say.
And here I thought they gave Master Chief the helmet so they wouldn't have to bother with pesky things like facial animation...
They could also just do it Half-Life style, where all the cutscenes and stuff are rendered such that Gordon never talks nor appears (short of turning on third-person view on the original Half-Life). Heck, it leads to the great Half-Life mystery of the helmet...
If this is an industrial application, you really don't want to homebrew it.
Well, I thought that way too, until I re-read his requirements. It really depends. If it's automation to control stuff, I'd go with off-the-shelf professional type things. One, there's a lot of CYA - if anything goes wrong, you can blame the hardware, rather than it being your fault (even if it really isn't). Secondly, it's control - things go wrong, and unless there are tons of failsafes and alarms redundantly connected, well... (and hopefully a profession would know how to avoid having a single point of failure for all the redundancy).
But in this case, it's a simple monitoring thing. The guy wants some values to report to higher ups. The machine has its own controller (can't be screen-scraped), and all that's really happening is just a way to say "valve X is open Y%", without worrying about alarms and crap (presumably the machine has alarms and everything built in). As long as the monitoring won't be doing anything safety critical (it shouldn't interfere with the existing controller), a homebrew solution is perfectly fine.
Heck, a different way is to simply find a way to capture the display output - a camera works. Do it properly and it should be possible to analyze the image and generate the data that way, too.
It bothers me that everyone uses man, but so many man pages say, "This man page is incomplete; see the info page for complete details."
Shouldn't doc writers acknowledge that info hasn't displaced man and isn't likely to do so?
I've mostly noticed that this happens when you use man on the GNU tools. It appears the GNU standard is to use info rather than man, and the man page basically is an older revision. Info's nice, but it's a pain to navigate at the command line (it appears to be a severely stripped down version of Emacs). Wish it had a similar navigation style as lynx/links since info pages are really hypertext, and going back/forth can be painful. (info without a GUI is unusable for new users).
However, they really didn't bother to actually test market these things before putting them out there. For one, the lack of a keyboard really limits usability. Heck, keyboards are becoming standard on phones these days. To not have a keyboard on a laptop replacement is silly.
Two, they don't fit anywhere. They're way too big for a pocket, so you have to put them in a bag or backpack. At that point, you might as well just use a 3 lb Sony Vaio Tx, or a 4 lb Lenovo v, or a 4.5 lb Dell Xps or one of many other ultralight portables out there. And really, that's the key: laptops are losing weight as fast as the balance between performance and price will allow.
Obviously you've only seen the Origamis, which frankly, suck. There's a huge conglomerate (who unfortunately released a very expensive console that few are buying, and had issues producing round plastic discs that infected computers) that has a very nice UMPC.
You may wish to look up the Sony UX series of UMPCs. They don't run tablet edition, but they have touchscreen, a thumbboard, nice screens (honestly - 1024x600 in a 4.5" screen, beats the crap out of a WVGA (800x480) screen at 5-8"), and light weights (around 1.2lbs). And if you have a fairly large pocket, people have pocketed them. It's a bit faster than the OQO 02, too (being that the UX uses an Intel Core Solo 1.33GHz, vs the 1.5GHz Via-something-or-other in the OQO).
Ultimately, all of the tasks that were supposed to be delegated to the UMPC were actually far better served by high-end phones. Need e-mail, texting, intranet access to a client database, and synching to a desktop? Just get a treo. They're about 1,000 dollars cheaper, and they fit in your pocket.
True, but while the UX Is fairly pricey (at $2k), high end phones are costing as much as UMPCs or more. Everyone's calling the iPhone a dud at $500, when that's actually a fairly reasonable price for a high-end phone (cheap, even). They even reach prices of $1000 or more. Of course, heavy carrier subsidies help offset most of the cost, but still. High end PDAs and phones are starting to feel the crunch from the top when UMPCs start costing either a little more or a little less than the phones itself (and once you start adding in the mobile software licenses, VPN clients, management, etc...). Plus a lot of mobile versions of software are seriously cut down. It's kind of why high-end PDAs more or less are dead - for the price, you can get faster machines that are more capable and run existing software - no need for special mobile software that may work with the VPN client (or may not), may give you all the data you need (or not), or hell, even a new interface. And licensing can be a killer.
The only real downside to a UMPC compared to a PDA or phone? Battery life. You can probably get around a day's use of a phone if you're using it heavily, while most UMPCs struggle with 2 hours.
I have to wonder if the huge amount of HD-DVD hack coverage lately is starting to make Sony wish that someone would spend more time hacking Blu-Ray. There's no such thing as bad press?
Sony's probably really happy about it, actually. If they can show that HD-DVD is worthless, studios will drop it in favor of the far more DRM-heavy Blu-Ray.
There are things that Blu-Ray could use (they're in the spec) but possibly aren't at the moment.
Basically, HD-DVD only has AACS to protect it. It doesn't have region coding (yet?) or other crap that just didn't work on DVD (someone at the DVD Forum saw the writing on the wall for region codes and just didn't put them in for HD-DVD). Every HD-DVD/DVD combo has the Region 1 logo, followed by "DVD Only" - implying that the region code is strictly for the DVD part. Same goes on the HD-DVD player - Region 1 logo, "DVD Only".
Blu-Ray has the BD+ protection, plus something they call ROM Mark. And of course, region codes. Though, Sony at least tried to be reasonable, and instead of the 9-odd regions of DVD, they reduced it to 3. ROM Mark protection basically says every Blu-Ray disc has to have a fingerprint that tells the type of the disc, and who pressed it. So if a flood of pressed Blu-Ray discs come out, the Blu-Ray association can find out who pressed it, pull their license and shut them down. (And discs without said mark... just don't work). It also keeps stuff like movies from being played if they're on the wrong medium (e.g., BD-R).
Blu-Ray is far more technologically advanced (25GB/layer) than HD-DVD, however, the latter makes use of existing DVD production lines (trivial upgrade, which is why HD-DVD/DVD flipper discs are around), and uses lessons learned about DVDs to produce a better product (like the uselessness of region coding). I suspect that the DVD production tools also underwent just minor changes (support for new codecs and JavaScript) since the HD-DVD releases seem to be of better quality despite the fact that they're 20GB smaller (dual layer BD vs. dual layer HD-DVD) to fit the data... (extras and everything).
According to one of the linked articles, it has a very bog standard looking 16 bit DAC. The analogue output stage looks singularly unremarkable.
Actually, it isn't a bog-standard 16-bit DAC. It's a professional-quality DAC. AKM is the choice for DACs and ADCs used by pros (along with the likes of Burr-Brown (now TI, I believe). A lot of pro soundcards use AKM. What's surprising is that Sony went with them (I guess it's because they're Japanese and all...). Note that in the same articles, later revisions of the PSX stopped using them (I think up to around the 75xx models used them).
Until the X-Fi, Creative Labs used the bog-standard codecs by SigmaTel - nothing special, just cheap (and were used on the high end cards costing more than equivalent E-mu (owned by Creative) cards). I believe the X-FIs finally use something other than cheap DACs to help justify their cost...
Any time I read about a lithium battery catching fire, I always wonder why the reporting sources don't educate the public about the inherent danger of a lithium fire, specifically the fact that water really isn't a good thing to be putting on it.
Could it be, perhaps, that it's because it's actually a lithium-ION batteries? As in, no (or very little) metallic lithium since everyone knows the dangers of lithium by itself?
The flames themselves are caused by chemical instability at high temperatures, causing them to rupture and ignite gases (producing more flames), heating the cells beside it until they too become unstable...
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems that if these virus/worm/malware writers are buying Google Ads, then they're paying for the links.
Shouldn't it be possible then to do these searches, find out which ones lead to the virus, and just click from a safe browser? Surely it's possible to cost these people tons of money (to pay Google), and no returns (because no one gets infected)? Or at the very least, we'll end up hitting their click limit and their ads don't show anymore.
If it happens to be a hacked Google account, well, then maybe the owners will secure their site better (a third party hacked site distributing malware is just as bad)? At least it will get them off the rotation earlier so maybe they'd get a clue why their account needs money but there's no follow-through.
It would be a very bad day for Apple investors if Jobs is forced to resign - honestly, he's done a lot for revitalizing Apple in the last 10 years he's been around (iMac practically saved the company, and iPods are doing relatively well). It's hard to argue that public interest is served by firing Jobs and hiring some other person in his place (everyone else who tried has failed).
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Come to think of it, that makes sense. Apple's products don't sell on features alone (they're often lacking features - look when the iPod came out - the competition had a 6GN (compared to the iPod's 5) hard disk, sound "enhancement" up the wazoo, recording, and probably a dozen other features I've never used (I owned a Nomad Jukebox). Heck, the original Slashdot editor comment said it all "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame". Heck, the iPod came out a month after the 9/11 attacks (October 2001) - it's not like people really wanted to spend money on luxury goods (especially when it costed $500) at that time as it would make them look insensitive at spending half a grand on something for themselves than helping the 9/11 efforts. So we can say the iPod had everything going against it - cheaper, better competitors, a tough market... as we know how it turns out.
What the iPod did do, was make an existing MP3 player work better. First was to get rid of the god-awful Nomad formfactor to something that was a large pack of playing cards. Next was to change the interface from the crappy USB1.1 to the superior FireWire (leading to minutes to transfer songs, rather than days.
The iPhone by itself, isn't that exciting. Face it - a Windows Mobile phone probably has more features than the iPhone has on its debut. Or maybe even a Blackberry. It's also entering a tight market - people want subsidized near-free phones. Even though most Smartphones probably cost just as much as an iPhone, they're heavily subsidized so it doesn't seem so expensive. The only thing Apple can do to make the iPhone work would be to redo how phones work.
It could be like the Newton - did a lot of neat stuff we wish existed today (Newton assist, anyone? The quintessial demo of writing "Lunch with Bob at 12pm tuesday", selecting that, tapping the Assist button, and having a Calendar entry made up with Bob (from Addressbook), topic "Lunch", scheduled at 12pm the coming Tuesday.) That's really all that the iPhone can bring, because everything else... has been done before. So all Apple can do is make a UI (that possibly doesn't suck), and add little bits of functionality everywhere that people don't know they need, but do. (E.g., if you were setting up Bluetooth pairing to use the iPhone as a modem, wouldn't it be helpful if it also gave you stuff like the phone number, username and password to get on the network as well, rather than having to memorize them or keep them on a little note?)
Yeah, and the fact that bandwidth costs for battle.net aren't that high. Maybe when it comes time for a new patch, but during all other times, it's quite low. All battle.net really does is serve as a central player aggregator and chat medium. When players wish to play the game, they disconnect from battle.net and connect to the guy that's hosting the game. No game traffic really passes back to battle.net. It's like the napster model for p2p. Thus, a few servers can serve tons on a not-very-fast link, so all sales of blizzard's games go to pay for battle.net.
You know, you can pick up a CD/DVD-ROM drive fairly cheap (or free from a friend)... unless someone has a magic new technology that can turn a reader into a rewriter using just a bit of software.
Uh, how is "Unplug network cable" before starting Steam arcane? Heck, if you were lazy, you could just hit the "standby" button on your cable modem if you were lazy. Or if you're technically advanced, prevent Steam from getting access to the Internet via your firewall. Windows Firewall can prevent egress packets per-application. All you have to do is prevent Steam from getting on the Internet.
And if you forget to go offline... just restart Steam. It's not like you have to reboot your computer or anything. It takes a minute, tops, to shut down and restart Steam. Most of it is waiting for Steam to try to connect to the Internet.
I understand that the early days of Steam, it was arcane to go offline, but things have changed a lot since then - it's improved tremendously.
All the articles state is that it's more likely to happen that the tax moratorium may end under the Democratic controlled house and senate, than if the government was composed of more Republican members.
;-)
Looks like it's just a cheap call to try to get some votes and cheap political points in. After all, the next round of elections will probably be heavily Internet based, and they're only a year away. What better way to rally people who haven't decided yet by saying their precious Internet is not going to be the tax-free haven it once was? (Especially given how the current Republican in power is potentially making life difficult for Republicans in swing states. Might as well try to score some cheap political points amongst bloggers and stuff when they post "OH NOES, INTERNET TAXES!!!!" when it's just a bill being discussed, and chances are better that the moratorium may end under a Democrat-controlled senate. They never actually said what chances are, after all. If it was likely to end with a 1% chance under Republicans and 1.5% under Democrats, well, chances are better (but no way it'll pass)...
You may now resume your "OH NOES, INTERNET TAXES ARE HERE!!!!" posts.
It's a place-shifting box. Sure, all the Linux-heads can do 100x better with Linux, a capture card, and VLC, and some hacked lirc stuff, but for the rest of us who don't want to leave a PC on all day, it's effectively all that in a little box. Plus your cable TV coax to it (or your composite/svideo/component outputs), plug in the power supply, plug in the Ethernet, and in a few minutes of setup, you're watching your TV on your computer (PC/Mac), phone or PDA.
The smart ones hook it to their TiVos. There's an IR blaster so you can use the virtual (i.e., onscreen) remote control to control it.
Can it be done with a regular Windows PC? Yes. Linux? Most definiteiy. But if you want something easy to set up, a Slingbox works.
I bought Guitar Hero for the 360, and when the owner of a sandwich shop I frequent saw it, he commented on how interested he was in it (he practices with a real guitar at the back when I come in). Next week when I'm getting my sandwich, I find out he's bought it and used it to not only have some fun, but also improve his technique. So I'd say it may help those struggling with some things to relax and try to replicate what happens in GH in real life. Turns out he wasn't strumming properly and thus his whole arm hurt after practicing for real. But with GH, he "learned" to strum better, so he's not hurting so badly after practice.
So I can say that real-life guitar students might just want to check it out just to see if it might help them. If not, it's a great way to just have some fun playing songs that one wants to play - those practice songs get old quick, and everyone wants to try to play their favorite song one day or another.
My request - I wish they'd have the Top Gun theme in there. Movie was OK (Cruise, 'nuff said), but have to admit, that theme is fairly distinct and definitely guitar-heavy.
Depends how they filter the traffic. If they specifically say "traffic from domain yyy.tld has higher priority" then it's against network neutrality. Instead, they may do "if traffic has the evil bit set, it has higher priority", which can then be considered as a type of traffic that's filtered less, it isn't considered network neutrality. In the latter case, others can simply flip the magic bit and their traffic also gets carried with higher priority.
But don't just think this is happening in the UK. It's happening in Canada as well. Shaw cable has installed Ellacoya packet shapers that throttle BitTorrent traffic (mostly uploads, since uploads are the weakness of cable broadband). Rogers cable (the other big cable ISP - Shaw for the west, Rogers for the East) has started throttling encrypted connections to counter the encrypted BitTorrent traffic. Of course, there are other ISPs out there - like DSL providers and smaller cable companies that don't throttle.
Of course, I suppose it's only a matter of time until people realize that for the service they're getting, they could save tons using dialup... (especially dialup-over-cable and other services) which may just end up giving them *more* bandwidth for what they're doing. (It's a common argument I hear - cable's better because it's faster, so why pay for 1.5Mbps when you can get 10Mbps. However, if you're doing stuff that the cable provider dislikes, the slower connection may be faster because they don't do throttling...).
Except the connector doesn't have any sort of catch. Super expensive overpriced (and unnecessary) HDMI cables can be fairly heavy, and a lot of displays have the HDMI cables running along the bottom. End result? Damn thing just falls out! At least DVI had a mechanical cinch to lock it in.
Actually, I haven't come across ANY recent FCC filings where the schematics are public these days.
Take a trolling of the FCC filings of anything these days, and the "summary" view lists schematics, internal theory of operation, etc, but it says they aren't public. The "detail" view (which lets you grab the filed documents) doesn't even list those. All you can get are the test report, test setup, manual, photos, internal photos, and maybe a couple of letters. Try it on your wifi card, or your cellphone, or your wireless mouse. It's a rare product where the schematic is actually available for free download from the FCC site.
Actually, lithium-ion batteries have a great cycle life - typically around 500 cycles (about the same as NiMH, though shorter than NiCd's 1000-ish). They can be prolonged by partial cycling - e.g., rather than let it drain all the way, you drain it partly then put it back on charge. (Which is why you really should just put everything on charge at the end of the day or if you're done using them - there's no reason to not put your cellphone in its charger at the end of the day other than general laziness. It's easier on the battery).
Lithium ion batteries have, however, a short *LIFETIME*. They age, grow old, and stop holding the charge they one had. Typically this is around 2-5 years from date of manufacture. So a catch-22 is often you can buy a spare battery now, but when you need it, that spare isn't going to perform like new - it may be a little bit better (if properly cared for in storage) than the existing one, but that's it. The catch is that by the time you need the spare/replacement, they often aren't made anymore. It's also why one should avoid buying "New Old Stock" batteries as they've aged some time. What's worse are those battery packs hanging on the wall - I want to buy a PSP battery pack, but it's not easy to tell from the packaging when they were manufactured.
Perhaps, or maybe it's Apple's way of finding out who's been breaking their NDA. Perhaps by first looking at trading activity, then by looking at the wording of the email that was posted on Engadget. After all, if you found this out, you'd want to either short stock or something first, then leak it out... Remember, Apple still has to deal with leaks, and something as wild as this may make it obvious since it'll hit the big sites (one of which is likely to post it verbatim, thus identifying the culprit). And people who react to silly things like "A well-connected Apple employee said..." or "Our insider Apple employee" do deserve to get burned if they make financial decisions based on an unverifiable source. The source could very well be real, but it could also be made up. Speculation on new products is one thing, but actually doing stuff based on news whose validity is as good as the neighbourhood bum...
As for intentional leaks, that's hard to determine. But if you're going to do stuff like sell stock, you might want to wait for official confirmation. Because it's so easy to write "A VP of marketing at Apple has told me that the iPhone will support 3rd party applications, and there is going to be an SDK released June 1. Developer iPhones will be released then as well."
Very low-end flash memory has that kind of write cycles. And it's typically limited to NOR flash, which is used only for code memory and limited data store due it its large cell size (largest NOR flash chips are around 256MB). Even so, Intel's StrataFlash had write lifetimes of at least 100,000 erase-write cycles, and most flash chips are underrated by an order of magnitude.
Modern bulk-dsta storage flash is NAND flash, which due to its smaller cell size (partly due to its design, and partly due to operation), means 16GB (byte, not bits) per chip is starting to become practical. NAND flash is faster erasing and writing than NOR flash, but much slower (order of magnitude) slower at reading. Plus it's I/O based - you can't "boot" from NAND flash like you can from NOR. (Write/Erase/Reads are on the order of microseconds for NAND - typically 100-500uS for write/erase, and 10uS for reads. For NOR, writes are typically 300-1000milliseconds, erases 1000ms, but reads on the order of 100ns or less).
Because of the operational characteristics of NAND flash, it typically has a 100,000 write-erase cycle limit at the minimum, with most offering at least 1,000,000 cycles (and typically lasts an order of magnitude more).
Wear-levelling algorithms and bad-block handling increase the time between writes and erases to the point where it almost isn't a consideration anymore - when the drive dies eventually, it'll really be timeto change it. And at least when an SSD dies, it dies on erases and writes, and very rarely on read. So if you get write errors, you still have a great probability of recovering all the data (except the data which was just written).
It's write-erase cycles, because erasing turns "0" bits into "1" bits. Writing turns "1" bits into "0" bits. Within certain restrictions, you can do multiple writes to a block (turning "1" bits into "0" bits, but you can't turn a "0" bit into a "1" bit without erasing), but those don't count towards write-erase cycles. (This behavior is often exploited when marking blocks as dirty and such). And they only fail on writes or erases due to internal timeouts (each cell takes progressively longer and longer to erase and write). Reads can be considered as never failing.
Problem is, a computer can isolate tasks so much better than us. So one process can do the environmental processing, another does bowel movements, a third wants pizza, a forth handles the wife, and the fifth does the ceiling height. All running independently of each other. If they get in the way, just run 'em inside separate VMs...
The blame for that doesn't go with TiVo, but with CableLabs. You see, either the Series 3 TiVo cannot receive high-def cable at all using CableCARDs, (in which case, well, you might as well stick with a tried and true series 2), or you have to agree to the rather onerous terms of the CableLabs license to use CableCARD. And part of the CableLabs agreement involves stuff like what TiVoToGo does.
Heck, only recently have Series 3 TiVos had their eSATA ports turned on. Part of this is where the CableLabs agreement was modified to allow external storage of CableCARD protected media, provided said media was encrypted (I'm sure TiVo was the primary cause of this change). In fact, it's possibly the reason why TiVO got this patent - the encryption is for the external eSATA disk.
That's probably why if you can stand it, your cable company's HD box can output via Firewire - its not bound by the CableLabs agreement since the cable company wants you to rent their boxes. And would prefer to lock you into those boxes, rather than letting outsiders mess with their locked-up cable signal. It's the only reason CableCARD is around - the FCC demanded a way for people to get access to encrypted cable signals without needing a special cable box to do it. (And many cable companies are trying to make CableCARDs as inconvenient to get as possible.)
Also why development of CableCARDs has been slow. Cable companies want to control everything - the menu you see, the guide, the layout of graphics, etc (and the ads in the cable menus). TiVo conveniently skips all that crap and uses its own interface.
Cable companies would prefer to have everything locked up and under their control, much like cellular carriers. Unlike cellular carriers, there often isn't competition about it. Heck, in Canada, my cable company (Shaw) does not carry CableCARDs because the current revision won't let them have their crappy UI, and support pay-per-view or other "enhanced" (i.e, pay to use) features, just receive their digital cable and high-def cable service. (Of course, they don't have to, but it would be nice. I'd buy a series 3 TiVo in an instant if they did, instead of going without and thus losing the potential subscription revenue.)
You know, there's , which uses as its baseline the IEEE 1680-2006 environmental performance standard. EPEAT was started by funding from the EPA. While no one can claim the Gold standard yet, Apple has been at the top, or near it for the Silver awards in practically every category they participate in. (There are 3 award levels - "Bronze" means you fulfill just the mandatory requirements. "Silver" is mandatory plus at least 50% of optional requirements. "Gold" is mandatory plus 75% optional requirements).
So Apple's near the top in a more objective ranking backed by an quantifiable IEEE standard, while fails horribly in Greenpeace's ranking (which has been discovered to basically be "High scorers have lots of environmental PR" (i.e., what they say, rather than do)), while EPEAT's is what they do, rather than say.
They could also just do it Half-Life style, where all the cutscenes and stuff are rendered such that Gordon never talks nor appears (short of turning on third-person view on the original Half-Life). Heck, it leads to the great Half-Life mystery of the helmet...
Well, I thought that way too, until I re-read his requirements. It really depends. If it's automation to control stuff, I'd go with off-the-shelf professional type things. One, there's a lot of CYA - if anything goes wrong, you can blame the hardware, rather than it being your fault (even if it really isn't). Secondly, it's control - things go wrong, and unless there are tons of failsafes and alarms redundantly connected, well... (and hopefully a profession would know how to avoid having a single point of failure for all the redundancy).
But in this case, it's a simple monitoring thing. The guy wants some values to report to higher ups. The machine has its own controller (can't be screen-scraped), and all that's really happening is just a way to say "valve X is open Y%", without worrying about alarms and crap (presumably the machine has alarms and everything built in). As long as the monitoring won't be doing anything safety critical (it shouldn't interfere with the existing controller), a homebrew solution is perfectly fine.
Heck, a different way is to simply find a way to capture the display output - a camera works. Do it properly and it should be possible to analyze the image and generate the data that way, too.
I've mostly noticed that this happens when you use man on the GNU tools. It appears the GNU standard is to use info rather than man, and the man page basically is an older revision. Info's nice, but it's a pain to navigate at the command line (it appears to be a severely stripped down version of Emacs). Wish it had a similar navigation style as lynx/links since info pages are really hypertext, and going back/forth can be painful. (info without a GUI is unusable for new users).
Obviously you've only seen the Origamis, which frankly, suck. There's a huge conglomerate (who unfortunately released a very expensive console that few are buying, and had issues producing round plastic discs that infected computers) that has a very nice UMPC.
You may wish to look up the Sony UX series of UMPCs. They don't run tablet edition, but they have touchscreen, a thumbboard, nice screens (honestly - 1024x600 in a 4.5" screen, beats the crap out of a WVGA (800x480) screen at 5-8"), and light weights (around 1.2lbs). And if you have a fairly large pocket, people have pocketed them. It's a bit faster than the OQO 02, too (being that the UX uses an Intel Core Solo 1.33GHz, vs the 1.5GHz Via-something-or-other in the OQO).
True, but while the UX Is fairly pricey (at $2k), high end phones are costing as much as UMPCs or more. Everyone's calling the iPhone a dud at $500, when that's actually a fairly reasonable price for a high-end phone (cheap, even). They even reach prices of $1000 or more. Of course, heavy carrier subsidies help offset most of the cost, but still. High end PDAs and phones are starting to feel the crunch from the top when UMPCs start costing either a little more or a little less than the phones itself (and once you start adding in the mobile software licenses, VPN clients, management, etc...). Plus a lot of mobile versions of software are seriously cut down. It's kind of why high-end PDAs more or less are dead - for the price, you can get faster machines that are more capable and run existing software - no need for special mobile software that may work with the VPN client (or may not), may give you all the data you need (or not), or hell, even a new interface. And licensing can be a killer.
The only real downside to a UMPC compared to a PDA or phone? Battery life. You can probably get around a day's use of a phone if you're using it heavily, while most UMPCs struggle with 2 hours.
Sony's probably really happy about it, actually. If they can show that HD-DVD is worthless, studios will drop it in favor of the far more DRM-heavy Blu-Ray.
There are things that Blu-Ray could use (they're in the spec) but possibly aren't at the moment.
Basically, HD-DVD only has AACS to protect it. It doesn't have region coding (yet?) or other crap that just didn't work on DVD (someone at the DVD Forum saw the writing on the wall for region codes and just didn't put them in for HD-DVD). Every HD-DVD/DVD combo has the Region 1 logo, followed by "DVD Only" - implying that the region code is strictly for the DVD part. Same goes on the HD-DVD player - Region 1 logo, "DVD Only".
Blu-Ray has the BD+ protection, plus something they call ROM Mark. And of course, region codes. Though, Sony at least tried to be reasonable, and instead of the 9-odd regions of DVD, they reduced it to 3. ROM Mark protection basically says every Blu-Ray disc has to have a fingerprint that tells the type of the disc, and who pressed it. So if a flood of pressed Blu-Ray discs come out, the Blu-Ray association can find out who pressed it, pull their license and shut them down. (And discs without said mark... just don't work). It also keeps stuff like movies from being played if they're on the wrong medium (e.g., BD-R).
Blu-Ray is far more technologically advanced (25GB/layer) than HD-DVD, however, the latter makes use of existing DVD production lines (trivial upgrade, which is why HD-DVD/DVD flipper discs are around), and uses lessons learned about DVDs to produce a better product (like the uselessness of region coding). I suspect that the DVD production tools also underwent just minor changes (support for new codecs and JavaScript) since the HD-DVD releases seem to be of better quality despite the fact that they're 20GB smaller (dual layer BD vs. dual layer HD-DVD) to fit the data... (extras and everything).
Actually, it isn't a bog-standard 16-bit DAC. It's a professional-quality DAC. AKM is the choice for DACs and ADCs used by pros (along with the likes of Burr-Brown (now TI, I believe). A lot of pro soundcards use AKM. What's surprising is that Sony went with them (I guess it's because they're Japanese and all...). Note that in the same articles, later revisions of the PSX stopped using them (I think up to around the 75xx models used them).
Until the X-Fi, Creative Labs used the bog-standard codecs by SigmaTel - nothing special, just cheap (and were used on the high end cards costing more than equivalent E-mu (owned by Creative) cards). I believe the X-FIs finally use something other than cheap DACs to help justify their cost...
Could it be, perhaps, that it's because it's actually a lithium-ION batteries? As in, no (or very little) metallic lithium since everyone knows the dangers of lithium by itself?
The flames themselves are caused by chemical instability at high temperatures, causing them to rupture and ignite gases (producing more flames), heating the cells beside it until they too become unstable...
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems that if these virus/worm/malware writers are buying Google Ads, then they're paying for the links.
Shouldn't it be possible then to do these searches, find out which ones lead to the virus, and just click from a safe browser? Surely it's possible to cost these people tons of money (to pay Google), and no returns (because no one gets infected)? Or at the very least, we'll end up hitting their click limit and their ads don't show anymore.
If it happens to be a hacked Google account, well, then maybe the owners will secure their site better (a third party hacked site distributing malware is just as bad)? At least it will get them off the rotation earlier so maybe they'd get a clue why their account needs money but there's no follow-through.
It would be a very bad day for Apple investors if Jobs is forced to resign - honestly, he's done a lot for revitalizing Apple in the last 10 years he's been around (iMac practically saved the company, and iPods are doing relatively well). It's hard to argue that public interest is served by firing Jobs and hiring some other person in his place (everyone else who tried has failed).