it always seems to me that their conclusions are specious. I can't think of any specific episodes right now but they over simplify the data, build elaborate setups that are prone to error, and use inadequate controls.
Or, more likely, test a subset and claim it applies to the entire set.
E.g., the Cell phones on a plane episode, where they claim a cellphone will not interfere with the avionics of a jet. Unfortunately, this is true for the cellphones they tested, plus the jet they tested. It unfortunately doesn't apply to the general case (sure, they did find 800MHz phones interfered, but modern phones don't...). The IEEE did a more elaborate series of experiments and found some very surprising results, including loss of GPS satellite lock, to instrumentation drift. Or heck, I've even heard interference of the cellphones while flying (the characteristic buzzing was easily heard over the radio).
That's the rumor that's been all over the place, but here it is almost the end of April and I still can't find a Wii anywhere. If they were holding units back so they could dump them on the market in April, the second part of their plan isn't working so well.
I think the "stockpiling units until April" rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else.
Well, a store where I visit sold 90 units in last week - the store was stockpiling them. All sold out a couple of hours later. So it looks like there is still a huge pent-up demand - people are still asking about the Wii. They got a huge shipment of wiimotes and such though - wiimotes are no longer harder to find than the wii.
PS3 on the other hand are so numerous, there's even a preprinted cardboard sign saying "PS3 in stock!", and an open box one still available to be purchased.
Shouldn't that be FAA? And when are these asshats going to learn that cell phones do not interfere with flight controls? You'd figure at least one of them had to watch that MythBusters episode.
Uh, the IEEE have conducted a few more detailed experiments than the Mythbusters (nothing against them - I like the show), and have found that certain cellphones cause issues with avionics.
Not all cellphones, not all planes, not all avionics - its combinations of them. The interesting one is causing GPS to lose satellite lock, which can be serious if using GPS approaches, since the plane must abort and divert (won't happen at big airports with traditional ILS, but smaller ones who find that a GPS approach is far cheaper than the expensive ILS equipment).
And it's not just cellphones, but certain consumer electronics have had documented effects. Whether anything has actually caused a crash is yet to be determined since most accidents are a chain of events, rather than a single smoking gun. (BTW, unrelated fact - yes, most accidents actually happen near airports than enroute cruise. Just want to spoil the joke.)
Personally, I've heard the cellphone "buzz" over the radio - picked up either by the radio stack or the audio panel - on the Cessnas I've flown. A minor annoyance every few minutes during a flight, but still, a distraction to the pilot. And there are claims airline pilots can hear them too in their radios - some may even say "And by the way, thanks to whoever left their cellphone on...".
But it's more for the FCC preventing use of cellphones (DoS of cell towers by causing interference). I suppose a terrorist would just need a few dozen cellphones and flights to take down significant portions of the cell network.
I suppose it's good that it's just data and SMS for the moment - air rage incidents would rise sharply had they done voice. Plus relaying data is far simpler than relaying voice (less latency constraints). Though, I suppose a major holdup for voice is negotiating the roaming agreements - airlines are probably salivating at the ability to ding people $5/minute for using their cellphones via the roaming agreemnts, while cell carriers are having difficulties because a domestic flight will then have them paying loads for roaming...
There's an offline mode I believe, but generally you just stay logged in to the service and play your games. I much prefer it to dealing with swapping CD/DVDs every time I want to play, and I don't have to deal with things like Starforce, or hacked.exe files from people I have no reason to trust.
Yes, there's an offline mode, I've used it. It's quite nice - though it does delay startup by about 30 seconds while it tries to log into your account. The only thing is that you have to be offline when you start up steam, and of course, you can't play online. (For this reason, I wish Steam actually had an auto-quit option...).
As for what games you bought - those are linked to your account - just like non-AC/. posts are linked to the account.
But yeah, given the nastiness of commercial copy protection systems right now, and the rather lightness of Steam, I'd prefer Steam to installing tons of wierd crap in my system. Plus, you can backup your games to CD/DVD if you ever envision going back to dialup - Steam even splits the files into nice bundles of user-selectable size so you can burn them onto DVDs or something. Just remember to grab a copy of the Steam installer since the restoration process requires it. But heck, the first CD even has an autorun and stuff so it's trivial to restore. Or just re-download the whole thing. I'm on my 3rd download off a number of games...
Steam sucks, but it's like iTunes - among the best of a very broken system. (Slightly OT - Warner music has issues with AnywhereCD - a DRM free music store carrying major labels (which for a nominal extra fee, will even get you a real CD). So it's gonna take a while.)
Who knows where the credit card numbers came from, really. There's no evidence that the ones they got were from Steam purchases (I think?). But I wouldn't be surprised anyway. Valve's security is notoriously bad, and they require the last four digits of your credit card number in order to recover lost Steam accounts, so they're at least storing a portion of it.
Reports are all over the map - Valve's official statement says it's only cybercafe owners who are affected (Valve has their credit card information for billing purposes - looks like Valve licenses their games by the hour). And they claim it's the third party host that's afflicted who manages the cybercafe program, and that steam itself wasn't hacked.
Where the whole story lies, is somewhere in-between.
What I don't get is this:
It seems that VALVe is being held for ransom. If this is true, VALVe may be in trouble, as California Senate Bill 1386 requires that credit card holders be informed of any breach of their information, and MaddoxX already knows exactly how much money they have available.
What does a California bill have to do with a company based in Washington? (Valve was formed out of some people from Microsoft). They may have to alert CA residents, I suppose?
I only had to send one. My next message to them reminding them their From: address could indeed be faked bounced back with a mailbox full message from their ISP. Seems his spam-bounce script had seen my email to him with my domain listed in the body, sent back 100 rude messages all to the From: field address (which was himself), each of which also carried my domain in the text. those hundred emails to himself also each must have triggered his spam bounce script, making 10,000 emails to himself from himself... and so on.
And the delicious irony of it is... once he manages to clean out his inbox, there's probably a few dozen other messages in the send queue to start it all over again! Depending how busy his mailserver is, he may be safe for a few minutes before his email client again says "Retrieving email 1 of 192,390,372,302...".
Or, I wonder if the ISP got fed up with their mailserver queue being suddenly flooded by a billion messages from one user...
There's actually no indication of feedback at all here (which is the whole point of a PLL). In general, actually, feedback slows systems down. They do mention that they are using a VCO -- also used in PLLs -- but I get the impression that the purpose here is to, say, generate frequency modulated radio signals; such a modulator would be an open-loop system.
Perhaps the technique is standard frequency mixing, a standard technique used in practically every radio receiver these days. It's basically a three terminal device - you feed in two signals, and a third one appears. If the mixer is your standard physics lab ideal mixer, you get the sum and difference frequencies at the output. (In reality, you get the sum, difference, and a bit of bleed through of the original signals). It's used by radio receivers to downcovert the original signal to a 10.7MHz IF (which is how things like "radar detector detectors" work - by detecting the VCO output which would be the expected frequency plus or minus 10.7MHz, and how some radar detectors use non-standard IFs to prevent this). So they'd have three mixers, which can be completely passive devices, first two combine two to get the doubled frequency, then the last one to get the quadrupled one.
All it really needs is a non-linear device to make mixing happen. If you've every been near a transmitter and heard the radio go nuts, it's because the local transmitter is causing the input amplifier to go non-linear and mix its signal with your desired one, also known as intermodulation distortion.
Archos seems to have a nice line up of players. I don't see why they aren't more popular. They are defintely better than the current offering of video iPods. There's also a couple other companies like Cowon and Creative that have pretty good offerings. My guess is that not a lot of people see much of a need for a portable video player, as you can't watch TV while doing something else. But the iPod is marketed as an audio player first, with the ability to play movies, which to most people seems like a much better idea.
Probably because of several factors.
1) User interface. Until the 604WiFi was out, the UI has steadily deteriorated since the AV300 series (I have an AV420, which was probably the last model before they messed up the UI). These models had simplistic interfaces - you had a 5 way navigator, a back button, and three "soft" keys. And still could do everything. Now they took the same UI, and remapped everything differently - the softkeys now access some sub-menu thingy on the edge of the screen, settings are hidden either along the top bar or the edge buttons, and you still havigate the main icons via the 5 way navigator (+back). Exiting menus and going back doesn't quite seem so easy anymore. The iPod interface hasn't changed much the past 5 years - you use "Menu" for back, center ro select, wheel to choose... with the only things really braeking this are the iPod games you can buy off iTunes.
2) Button placement - The AV300/400 had simple intuitive placement. The new 400/500/600/700 series put all the buttons in rectangular areas along the edge, with left and right doing different things. Not only are they hard to press, but the button layout makes you go WTF as they all feel alike.
3) Size - Even the 404 is still very much bigger than an iPod... The only thing the 704 is missing is well... the DVD drive.
4) Possibly DRM - if you record anything with Macrovision encoded in the signal, the Archos AV400 onwards put DRM on the video so only that unit can play it back. It also regenerates Macrovision on the TV-out. I'm not sure if the current ones store the video in the protection partition these days (since the disk is partitioned for both Windows Media DRM and general disk storage.
Of these, I think #1 and #3 are the reason the Archos haven't really taken off - even after 5 minutes of playing with it I can't confidently say I can easily make my way around it. (I suppose the default wallpapers don't help by making it impossible to read...).
Yep, Apple wouldn't want users to watch these on their TVs, which is why they aren't selling a device to allow you to do so. Oh, wait...
You mean the Video iPod? Or do you mean the AppleTV?
(Yes, the 5th and 5.5gen iPods do TV output - you can get it via the dock for Svideo, or composite via the headphone jack, though the dock has the advantage of an IR port).
So sorry that you drank the DRM Kool-Aid from Apple. Now you are stuck - stick with Apple or lose your DRM'ed tunes. Really a shame.
He said supports MP3 and M4A.
iTunes DRM'ed songs are M4P (think 'p' for protected). (which will mean the EMI ones are M4A as well). The interesting thing is that a number of WinMo things are starting to support M4A quite well - shocked me when I stuck in an SD card with my defanged iTunes Store songs and they were playable. And naturally, I always test my defanged songs using VLC (which plays M4A/AAC trivially).
l code (and other documents, research, etc) written/created by government employees is, by law, public domain.
Try telling that to our President. Please.
You forgot the other half of his post - the public domain policy does not apply in cases of privacy and national security. (And that contractors are excluded, as well.) So you know, it's all in the name of national security!
These email lapses and information destruction policies are becoming turning points in lawsuits all too often. It is absurd that major corporations are not required to keep all executive email on record, forever. Not just for lawsuits, more so to protect investors and the public against illegal and unethical behavior by the company's officers. The Sarbanes-Oxley act requires that records be made available to "Understand how significant transactions are initiated, authorized, supported, processed, and reported;", and I would think email is a significant component of this.
On the other hand, if you're the executive (how do you define them? CxO's? Presidents? VPs? Managers? their assistants (who may very well be dealing with all the email in the first place)?), you probably get tons of mail. Depending on how tech-savvy they are, that may include a significant amount of non-business related email (everyone does it). This may also include spam and other crap. It becomes a nightmare of archival - what do you keep, what do you toss, and what do not want to keep because it's got information that people outside really shouldn't get a hold of (e.g., banking information and such)?
The reasonable consideration is that if there's something that could potentially be bad, someone will keep a copy somewhere. If I got an email from my manager saying I should do something unethical, I would probably print it out, and forward it to my home account as a CYA. So someone out there would have it. Unless there's a conspiracy for everyone involved to simultaneously delete that email (and ensuring it's done - I'm sure some execs will have some meeting to go off to, and ensuring every last trace is deleted?).
Heck, maybe the emails merely say "This agreement may hurt our competitors." Which isn't evidence, since every company is out to try to screw their competitors.
Probably at least 5M units broken...
on
100 Million iPods
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If we assume a failure rate of 5%...
Of course, the real question is whether or not the proportion of lost/broken/damaged/stolen/etc iPods is similar to other devices. After all, do iPods really have a higher failure rate, or is it because there's more of them, you hear more about them?
(And before you start blaming the non-replacable battery - there are few devices other than cellphones, cameras and laptops where having a replacable battery actually is useful - it's likely by the time you need a replacement, the battery isn't even made anymore... Can you get replacement Li-Ion batteries for the many HPaq PDAs out there other than the current model/phone models? Or the multitude of 'superior' mp3 players of at least a couple years vintage?)
A lot of machines have the Realtek HD Audio thing in them to provide audio - notably most of the Core/Core2 based ones (HD Audio is a standard by Intel, Realtek being one of the first to offer it).
Seems like this isn't really an "isolated" problem, but a fairly common one if you own a desktop made in the last year or a recent laptop...
Remeber the Pros, like the XServes, take ECC RAM. No matter who you buy it from, it isn't cheap. Apple's price for the Pro isn't much more than (~$140 at this point), than decent third-party RAM. (4 1GB ECC from Crucial is $560, 2x2GB is $840) The HD's may be more comparable, but check access time, cache size, and warranty.
Not just ECC DDR-SDRAM, but FB-DIMM. The latter's even harder to get since it's only used for Intel's Xeon line of processors (which the Mac Pro and xServe use, and any workstation or server with multiple physical CPUs (not cores)).
When I purchased my Mac Pro, Apple's RAM was very close to the price of FB-DIMMs locally and not too much more online - it was worth it buying Apple's stuff, have it all installed and having Apple actually being forced to fix it should it cause kernel panics and stuff. Plus, Apple's RAM has larger heatsinks - I think Crucials do too (if you ask for them). I saw a memory test somewhere the revealed the memory can run hot, and you get a number of correctable ECC errors. But if your RAM has the larger Apple-recommended heatsinks on them, the ECC errors drop to zero.
But yes, FB-DIMMs are also why the Xeon platform's memory numbers aren't that great due to their higher latency - for raw memory-intensive stuff, a regular desktop Core2 processor will run rings around a Xeon Core2, even though the latter may have much faster RAM.
My 11th grade English teacher would assign essays every week or two that were due at the end of class. No real possibility of plagiarism there. We never had term papers in science classes, either. My physics and chemistry classes had a term project, but that required lab work & demonstration, so again, no possibility of plagiarism. I don't think the teachers operated this way to eliminate plagiarism, per se, but it just wasn't a real problem. Nobody in college really gives a shit; if you are stupid enough to plagiarize and the TA is actually reading the paper for some reason, then there's a whole honesty policy that kicks in. Depending on the professor, it can actually be quite serious.
That's one way I thought of to combat plagiarism. Of course, when I was in university, grades were mostly 60% based on your final exam, and the rest made up of papers/midterms/etc, and you had to pass the final to pass.
So I suppose for those classes, have the term paper weighed a lot less compared to the final exam - so getting a good grade on the term paper doesn't really help much, and those that cheat, well, cheat, but they don't get much. Add in a policy of if the final exam mark is higher than the term paper mark, then the term paper mark is cancelled and your grade is based more heavily on the final exam.
Or, another method is to have people do the research for their term paper, but not actually write it. They can write their term paper over the last class or during final exam times (if the class doesn't have a final exam). The caveat is that all materials brought in for the composition must be turned in as well.
I don't like how updates are forced on you though, you can't play any of your games unless they are completely up to date which is a problem for people on slower internet. Also, I don't want some updates. Just recently Valve have rolled out in-game advertising in Counter-Strike 1.6, along with the ads comes more FPS lag and the ads don't even attempt to be non-intrusive. There is a huge ad right above the scoreboard and they just stuck the in-game ads randomly on level walls, not even on a billboard. For a company that got so much right with Half-Life i'm disappointed in Valve...
Well, if you're willing to give up some CS servers, you can tell Steam not to update your software. Just go to the game, right click Properties, then uncheck the box that says "Keep this game up to date". Some servers may check software versions and not allow you to join, but I'm sure you can run your own or find one that will let you on. I would suggest backing up the game onto DVDs or CDs so you can stay at this version, since if you re-download, you'll get the latest.
If you're a business, there's also KlocWork which seems to work well enough. Bit pricey and can't be installed for home use, but enterprise use is quite nice (hint: competitor to Coverity). I heard they may offer F/OSS scanning as well - one of the nice things is that you can disable a warning on a block of code once it's been verified as a false positive so a subsequent scan won't bring it up again.
I don't know, but when Nintendo replaces a Wii, they normally transfer all the data over (VC games purchased, account with Wii points, game saves, miis, etc) - does this not include the friend code as well?
Just would seem odd that Nintendo would transfer everything over except the friend code...
What I want to see is the goddamn Unix nerds getting the hell out of the eighties and realizing that HCI for text editors has made a whole lot of progress in the last two and a half decades.
It really depends what an improved UI is. For intuitiveness, nothing beats Notepad - so it must be the best editor because it's HCI interface is incredibly intuitive and works, right? I open the file, I see it, I click and I edit where I clicked. Nothing simpler.
Of course, if you want something more powerful, then things get interesting. Some editors tack on stuff to their Notepad-derivatives, which end up being wildly confusing mess of functionality (e.g., Microsoft Word - is there any other way (than clicking the toolbar button or key accellerator) to do stuff like bold/italics? Other than going to Format..Paragraph, choosing Bold, then clicking OK?
You can say similar things like vi/vim and emacs - they're incredibly powerful, and while the HCI doesn't really appeal, it is learnable. (To fan the flames of vi vs emacs, I find the vi commands intuitive).
I learned vim on Windows. I had to use vi on an embedded Linux device using a serial port, and managed to do the basics after pestering some coworkers. So one weekend, I sat down, ran vimtutor, and learned it. I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times). So the HCI of vim isn't that great since you've really got to learn the UI, but once you do, you can be productive...
So personally, I hope they all succeed. I hope they all turn a profit. And I hope they all continue to drive innovation in the console market.
Uh, Nintendo's already turning a profit - they don't sell consoles for a loss. Even though the Wii is probably pretty close to cost of production (retailer price), Nintendo's not in the hole. A retailer makes around $12 per Wii console (not including expenses, i.e., gross profit), which is more than say a PS3 (around $3) and a Xbox360 (about $5).
So technically, Nintendo's walking away with gobs of money because they're not taking a loss.
I wonder if Sony's made back the money from my purchase of the PS2... I realized I didn't buy that many games for it. And definitely not on my Xbox, I think (but it might've). I play and buy so few games that most home consoles are probably sold to me at a loss that's never recouped. Handhelds, I think I bought enough PSP games to cover its cost (bought 1 month after release). (DS and GBA, well, Nintendo made no loss).
Well, if anyone important (i.e. licensed) gets affected by it, they can just increase their signal and drown you out since they have the right to do so. That should give you the hint to change to a different frequency.
Well, that's true if the equipment allows it. Most likely, what will happen is that they call the FCC - remember, as licensed users, they don't have to do anything if there's interference. They can complain, get the FCC to roll their trucks and send you a fine plus the cost of finding the interference.
Remember, primary users of a frequency have priority. They just have to complain to the FCC to sieze your equipment, and you end up with no equipment, and a nasty fine. Said equipment may include attached computers if your laptop was modified as well.
Honestly, you can probably get away with it. However, the consequences and damage could be quite severe, not just to yourself and your equipment, but to open source. After all, we may end up like what happened with the Athereos drivers - a binary HAL block with GPL'd wrappers.
And if anyone followed on, Linus says he got the values out of the Intel i386 ABI book, which would be a good place to get a lot of the comments as well. After all, a lot of the entries would be summaries from the book. And there are very few ways of saying stuff concisely. Heck, some of those values may have comments already put it!
Agreed. If you're both serious about the product and the sale, then run an eval. It takes some effort replicating your production environment, to a level where you can put this product 'in parallel' to see how it copes, but it's worth it, for exactly the reasons outlined above.
Of course, if your company is a fairly big one and you're thinking of doing a major purchase, many manufacturers will trip over themselves to let you do free evaluations for extended periods of time (easily 3 months, 6 months to a year maybe), with support and all that. They'll send the hardware, you set it up (or they may even set it up for you!), and let it run. If it works but doesn't do something critical, you can always return the equipment and say "I can't use this - it doesn't do X".
It's funny, but these days, Steam is practically the distirbution system. I wasn't around when HL2 was originally released, but some searching has revealed numerous issues, but the last time I saw a "Steam Sucks" post was dated 2004-ish.
It looks like Valve has learned a few things and made it easier. First, you only have to be connected once to authenticate the game. The games are stored locally, and can be played locally without "phone home" access (it tries, but then goes into offline mode if it can't connect), so laptop users are not tethered to an internet connection. Updates are optional to play. And there's a backup option that makes preformatted directories of games you can burn, or just store somewhere else. Or if you want, just redownload the games. I've done it at least 3 times already...
I'm guessing that's why Steam is popular now - Valve honestly listened to its users and fixed lots of issues...
Slashdot Mirror
Or, more likely, test a subset and claim it applies to the entire set.
E.g., the Cell phones on a plane episode, where they claim a cellphone will not interfere with the avionics of a jet. Unfortunately, this is true for the cellphones they tested, plus the jet they tested. It unfortunately doesn't apply to the general case (sure, they did find 800MHz phones interfered, but modern phones don't...). The IEEE did a more elaborate series of experiments and found some very surprising results, including loss of GPS satellite lock, to instrumentation drift. Or heck, I've even heard interference of the cellphones while flying (the characteristic buzzing was easily heard over the radio).
Well, a store where I visit sold 90 units in last week - the store was stockpiling them. All sold out a couple of hours later. So it looks like there is still a huge pent-up demand - people are still asking about the Wii. They got a huge shipment of wiimotes and such though - wiimotes are no longer harder to find than the wii.
PS3 on the other hand are so numerous, there's even a preprinted cardboard sign saying "PS3 in stock!", and an open box one still available to be purchased.
Uh, the IEEE have conducted a few more detailed experiments than the Mythbusters (nothing against them - I like the show), and have found that certain cellphones cause issues with avionics.
Not all cellphones, not all planes, not all avionics - its combinations of them. The interesting one is causing GPS to lose satellite lock, which can be serious if using GPS approaches, since the plane must abort and divert (won't happen at big airports with traditional ILS, but smaller ones who find that a GPS approach is far cheaper than the expensive ILS equipment).
And it's not just cellphones, but certain consumer electronics have had documented effects. Whether anything has actually caused a crash is yet to be determined since most accidents are a chain of events, rather than a single smoking gun. (BTW, unrelated fact - yes, most accidents actually happen near airports than enroute cruise. Just want to spoil the joke.)
Personally, I've heard the cellphone "buzz" over the radio - picked up either by the radio stack or the audio panel - on the Cessnas I've flown. A minor annoyance every few minutes during a flight, but still, a distraction to the pilot. And there are claims airline pilots can hear them too in their radios - some may even say "And by the way, thanks to whoever left their cellphone on...".
But it's more for the FCC preventing use of cellphones (DoS of cell towers by causing interference). I suppose a terrorist would just need a few dozen cellphones and flights to take down significant portions of the cell network.
I suppose it's good that it's just data and SMS for the moment - air rage incidents would rise sharply had they done voice. Plus relaying data is far simpler than relaying voice (less latency constraints). Though, I suppose a major holdup for voice is negotiating the roaming agreements - airlines are probably salivating at the ability to ding people $5/minute for using their cellphones via the roaming agreemnts, while cell carriers are having difficulties because a domestic flight will then have them paying loads for roaming...
Yes, there's an offline mode, I've used it. It's quite nice - though it does delay startup by about 30 seconds while it tries to log into your account. The only thing is that you have to be offline when you start up steam, and of course, you can't play online. (For this reason, I wish Steam actually had an auto-quit option...).
As for what games you bought - those are linked to your account - just like non-AC
But yeah, given the nastiness of commercial copy protection systems right now, and the rather lightness of Steam, I'd prefer Steam to installing tons of wierd crap in my system. Plus, you can backup your games to CD/DVD if you ever envision going back to dialup - Steam even splits the files into nice bundles of user-selectable size so you can burn them onto DVDs or something. Just remember to grab a copy of the Steam installer since the restoration process requires it. But heck, the first CD even has an autorun and stuff so it's trivial to restore. Or just re-download the whole thing. I'm on my 3rd download off a number of games...
Steam sucks, but it's like iTunes - among the best of a very broken system. (Slightly OT - Warner music has issues with AnywhereCD - a DRM free music store carrying major labels (which for a nominal extra fee, will even get you a real CD). So it's gonna take a while.)
Reports are all over the map - Valve's official statement says it's only cybercafe owners who are affected (Valve has their credit card information for billing purposes - looks like Valve licenses their games by the hour). And they claim it's the third party host that's afflicted who manages the cybercafe program, and that steam itself wasn't hacked.
Where the whole story lies, is somewhere in-between.
What I don't get is this:
What does a California bill have to do with a company based in Washington? (Valve was formed out of some people from Microsoft). They may have to alert CA residents, I suppose?
And the delicious irony of it is... once he manages to clean out his inbox, there's probably a few dozen other messages in the send queue to start it all over again! Depending how busy his mailserver is, he may be safe for a few minutes before his email client again says "Retrieving email 1 of 192,390,372,302...".
Or, I wonder if the ISP got fed up with their mailserver queue being suddenly flooded by a billion messages from one user...
Perhaps the technique is standard frequency mixing, a standard technique used in practically every radio receiver these days. It's basically a three terminal device - you feed in two signals, and a third one appears. If the mixer is your standard physics lab ideal mixer, you get the sum and difference frequencies at the output. (In reality, you get the sum, difference, and a bit of bleed through of the original signals). It's used by radio receivers to downcovert the original signal to a 10.7MHz IF (which is how things like "radar detector detectors" work - by detecting the VCO output which would be the expected frequency plus or minus 10.7MHz, and how some radar detectors use non-standard IFs to prevent this). So they'd have three mixers, which can be completely passive devices, first two combine two to get the doubled frequency, then the last one to get the quadrupled one.
All it really needs is a non-linear device to make mixing happen. If you've every been near a transmitter and heard the radio go nuts, it's because the local transmitter is causing the input amplifier to go non-linear and mix its signal with your desired one, also known as intermodulation distortion.
Probably because of several factors.
1) User interface. Until the 604WiFi was out, the UI has steadily deteriorated since the AV300 series (I have an AV420, which was probably the last model before they messed up the UI). These models had simplistic interfaces - you had a 5 way navigator, a back button, and three "soft" keys. And still could do everything. Now they took the same UI, and remapped everything differently - the softkeys now access some sub-menu thingy on the edge of the screen, settings are hidden either along the top bar or the edge buttons, and you still havigate the main icons via the 5 way navigator (+back). Exiting menus and going back doesn't quite seem so easy anymore. The iPod interface hasn't changed much the past 5 years - you use "Menu" for back, center ro select, wheel to choose... with the only things really braeking this are the iPod games you can buy off iTunes.
2) Button placement - The AV300/400 had simple intuitive placement. The new 400/500/600/700 series put all the buttons in rectangular areas along the edge, with left and right doing different things. Not only are they hard to press, but the button layout makes you go WTF as they all feel alike.
3) Size - Even the 404 is still very much bigger than an iPod... The only thing the 704 is missing is well... the DVD drive.
4) Possibly DRM - if you record anything with Macrovision encoded in the signal, the Archos AV400 onwards put DRM on the video so only that unit can play it back. It also regenerates Macrovision on the TV-out. I'm not sure if the current ones store the video in the protection partition these days (since the disk is partitioned for both Windows Media DRM and general disk storage.
Of these, I think #1 and #3 are the reason the Archos haven't really taken off - even after 5 minutes of playing with it I can't confidently say I can easily make my way around it. (I suppose the default wallpapers don't help by making it impossible to read...).
You mean the Video iPod? Or do you mean the AppleTV?
(Yes, the 5th and 5.5gen iPods do TV output - you can get it via the dock for Svideo, or composite via the headphone jack, though the dock has the advantage of an IR port).
He said supports MP3 and M4A.
iTunes DRM'ed songs are M4P (think 'p' for protected). (which will mean the EMI ones are M4A as well). The interesting thing is that a number of WinMo things are starting to support M4A quite well - shocked me when I stuck in an SD card with my defanged iTunes Store songs and they were playable. And naturally, I always test my defanged songs using VLC (which plays M4A/AAC trivially).
You forgot the other half of his post - the public domain policy does not apply in cases of privacy and national security. (And that contractors are excluded, as well.) So you know, it's all in the name of national security!
On the other hand, if you're the executive (how do you define them? CxO's? Presidents? VPs? Managers? their assistants (who may very well be dealing with all the email in the first place)?), you probably get tons of mail. Depending on how tech-savvy they are, that may include a significant amount of non-business related email (everyone does it). This may also include spam and other crap. It becomes a nightmare of archival - what do you keep, what do you toss, and what do not want to keep because it's got information that people outside really shouldn't get a hold of (e.g., banking information and such)?
The reasonable consideration is that if there's something that could potentially be bad, someone will keep a copy somewhere. If I got an email from my manager saying I should do something unethical, I would probably print it out, and forward it to my home account as a CYA. So someone out there would have it. Unless there's a conspiracy for everyone involved to simultaneously delete that email (and ensuring it's done - I'm sure some execs will have some meeting to go off to, and ensuring every last trace is deleted?).
Heck, maybe the emails merely say "This agreement may hurt our competitors." Which isn't evidence, since every company is out to try to screw their competitors.
If we assume a failure rate of 5%...
Of course, the real question is whether or not the proportion of lost/broken/damaged/stolen/etc iPods is similar to other devices. After all, do iPods really have a higher failure rate, or is it because there's more of them, you hear more about them?
(And before you start blaming the non-replacable battery - there are few devices other than cellphones, cameras and laptops where having a replacable battery actually is useful - it's likely by the time you need a replacement, the battery isn't even made anymore... Can you get replacement Li-Ion batteries for the many HPaq PDAs out there other than the current model/phone models? Or the multitude of 'superior' mp3 players of at least a couple years vintage?)
A lot of machines have the Realtek HD Audio thing in them to provide audio - notably most of the Core/Core2 based ones (HD Audio is a standard by Intel, Realtek being one of the first to offer it).
Seems like this isn't really an "isolated" problem, but a fairly common one if you own a desktop made in the last year or a recent laptop...
Not just ECC DDR-SDRAM, but FB-DIMM. The latter's even harder to get since it's only used for Intel's Xeon line of processors (which the Mac Pro and xServe use, and any workstation or server with multiple physical CPUs (not cores)).
When I purchased my Mac Pro, Apple's RAM was very close to the price of FB-DIMMs locally and not too much more online - it was worth it buying Apple's stuff, have it all installed and having Apple actually being forced to fix it should it cause kernel panics and stuff. Plus, Apple's RAM has larger heatsinks - I think Crucials do too (if you ask for them). I saw a memory test somewhere the revealed the memory can run hot, and you get a number of correctable ECC errors. But if your RAM has the larger Apple-recommended heatsinks on them, the ECC errors drop to zero.
But yes, FB-DIMMs are also why the Xeon platform's memory numbers aren't that great due to their higher latency - for raw memory-intensive stuff, a regular desktop Core2 processor will run rings around a Xeon Core2, even though the latter may have much faster RAM.
That's one way I thought of to combat plagiarism. Of course, when I was in university, grades were mostly 60% based on your final exam, and the rest made up of papers/midterms/etc, and you had to pass the final to pass.
So I suppose for those classes, have the term paper weighed a lot less compared to the final exam - so getting a good grade on the term paper doesn't really help much, and those that cheat, well, cheat, but they don't get much. Add in a policy of if the final exam mark is higher than the term paper mark, then the term paper mark is cancelled and your grade is based more heavily on the final exam.
Or, another method is to have people do the research for their term paper, but not actually write it. They can write their term paper over the last class or during final exam times (if the class doesn't have a final exam). The caveat is that all materials brought in for the composition must be turned in as well.
Well, if you're willing to give up some CS servers, you can tell Steam not to update your software. Just go to the game, right click Properties, then uncheck the box that says "Keep this game up to date". Some servers may check software versions and not allow you to join, but I'm sure you can run your own or find one that will let you on. I would suggest backing up the game onto DVDs or CDs so you can stay at this version, since if you re-download, you'll get the latest.
If you're a business, there's also KlocWork which seems to work well enough. Bit pricey and can't be installed for home use, but enterprise use is quite nice (hint: competitor to Coverity). I heard they may offer F/OSS scanning as well - one of the nice things is that you can disable a warning on a block of code once it's been verified as a false positive so a subsequent scan won't bring it up again.
I don't know, but when Nintendo replaces a Wii, they normally transfer all the data over (VC games purchased, account with Wii points, game saves, miis, etc) - does this not include the friend code as well?
Just would seem odd that Nintendo would transfer everything over except the friend code...
It really depends what an improved UI is. For intuitiveness, nothing beats Notepad - so it must be the best editor because it's HCI interface is incredibly intuitive and works, right? I open the file, I see it, I click and I edit where I clicked. Nothing simpler.
Of course, if you want something more powerful, then things get interesting. Some editors tack on stuff to their Notepad-derivatives, which end up being wildly confusing mess of functionality (e.g., Microsoft Word - is there any other way (than clicking the toolbar button or key accellerator) to do stuff like bold/italics? Other than going to Format..Paragraph, choosing Bold, then clicking OK?
You can say similar things like vi/vim and emacs - they're incredibly powerful, and while the HCI doesn't really appeal, it is learnable. (To fan the flames of vi vs emacs, I find the vi commands intuitive).
I learned vim on Windows. I had to use vi on an embedded Linux device using a serial port, and managed to do the basics after pestering some coworkers. So one weekend, I sat down, ran vimtutor, and learned it. I was impressed how nice it was editing around without scrambling for the mouse (switching between mouse/keyboard is quite a context switch at times). So the HCI of vim isn't that great since you've really got to learn the UI, but once you do, you can be productive...
Uh, Nintendo's already turning a profit - they don't sell consoles for a loss. Even though the Wii is probably pretty close to cost of production (retailer price), Nintendo's not in the hole. A retailer makes around $12 per Wii console (not including expenses, i.e., gross profit), which is more than say a PS3 (around $3) and a Xbox360 (about $5).
So technically, Nintendo's walking away with gobs of money because they're not taking a loss.
I wonder if Sony's made back the money from my purchase of the PS2... I realized I didn't buy that many games for it. And definitely not on my Xbox, I think (but it might've). I play and buy so few games that most home consoles are probably sold to me at a loss that's never recouped. Handhelds, I think I bought enough PSP games to cover its cost (bought 1 month after release). (DS and GBA, well, Nintendo made no loss).
Well, that's true if the equipment allows it. Most likely, what will happen is that they call the FCC - remember, as licensed users, they don't have to do anything if there's interference. They can complain, get the FCC to roll their trucks and send you a fine plus the cost of finding the interference.
Remember, primary users of a frequency have priority. They just have to complain to the FCC to sieze your equipment, and you end up with no equipment, and a nasty fine. Said equipment may include attached computers if your laptop was modified as well.
Honestly, you can probably get away with it. However, the consequences and damage could be quite severe, not just to yourself and your equipment, but to open source. After all, we may end up like what happened with the Athereos drivers - a binary HAL block with GPL'd wrappers.
And if anyone followed on, Linus says he got the values out of the Intel i386 ABI book, which would be a good place to get a lot of the comments as well. After all, a lot of the entries would be summaries from the book. And there are very few ways of saying stuff concisely. Heck, some of those values may have comments already put it!
Of course, if your company is a fairly big one and you're thinking of doing a major purchase, many manufacturers will trip over themselves to let you do free evaluations for extended periods of time (easily 3 months, 6 months to a year maybe), with support and all that. They'll send the hardware, you set it up (or they may even set it up for you!), and let it run. If it works but doesn't do something critical, you can always return the equipment and say "I can't use this - it doesn't do X".
It's funny, but these days, Steam is practically the distirbution system. I wasn't around when HL2 was originally released, but some searching has revealed numerous issues, but the last time I saw a "Steam Sucks" post was dated 2004-ish.
It looks like Valve has learned a few things and made it easier. First, you only have to be connected once to authenticate the game. The games are stored locally, and can be played locally without "phone home" access (it tries, but then goes into offline mode if it can't connect), so laptop users are not tethered to an internet connection. Updates are optional to play. And there's a backup option that makes preformatted directories of games you can burn, or just store somewhere else. Or if you want, just redownload the games. I've done it at least 3 times already...
I'm guessing that's why Steam is popular now - Valve honestly listened to its users and fixed lots of issues...