This says nothing about the format and everything about the movie.
woo a popular bond movie making it to the top of the charts on release?! OMG CALL THE PAPERS!!
Quite accurate. I have a blu-ray player (and HD-DVD), and my opinion of blu-ray is that Sony is just pushing releases out without a care on quality - honestly, some blu-ray movies are worse than if the DVD was upconverted (talladega nights anyone? My HD-DVD player did a much better job upconverting the DVD to 1080i than the PS3 did outputting a native 1080p (I have a 1080p TV) - honestly, the blu-ray version looked like someone recorded it to a VCR, then ran some lame upconverter on it, then ran the "blur" filter on it).
The good blu-ray I have is Employee of the Month, which at least looks decent. But I've had sharper images from HD-DVD (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being particularly sharp). I don't understand it since blu-ray has so much more capacity (50GB vs. 30GB), so HD-DVD should theoretically have worse picture quality, worse extras, worse everything because it's space-constrained.
In the end, I just picked up the cheaper DVD version - there weren't much extras, but I don't have faith in blu-ray transfers (I've got a few blu-rays simply in the search of "high def"). Being two-thirds the price clinched the deal.
(I should note that in Canada, the pricing of the LG "Super Multi Blue" player is more expensive than a PS3 and a regular HD-DVD player (and still pricier if you gave up the HD-DVD standalone player for the Xbox380+HD-DVD drive), yet you get two better players (PS3 can do blu-ray iHD, and a proper HD-DVD player must be able to do iHD) in the bargain. LG's player doesn't do iHD, which is why there's no official HD-DVD *LOGO* on it. Just "HD-DVD" in fancy suggestive type.)
You forgot to mention that it's only really in North America does the concept of heavily subsidized "free" phones really exist. Go to Asia and Europe (which have way more phones in all shapes and sizes) and you'll find plenty of high end phones people actually buy. Dropping $1k on a phone isn't too unusual. There are ton of Asia and Europe exclusive phones (if you want Windows Mobile, it's a case of "what features do you want, and what manufacturer?" - more so than just the meagre selection here of Motorola, HPaq, Audiovox and clones). Of course, most are tri or quadband GSM, so you can import them into North America and use them. But of course, you'll be dropping easily $400+.
The quest for "free" and "cheap" phones in North America has meant that high-end phones really don't appear very often.
Apple actually has guts to introduce the iPhone into the US first, where paying more than $100 for a phone is rare. Of course, doing so in Europe, means they'll have to compete against the other half-million phones occupying the same price point.
The poster did not state that the nodes are end user PC's. Ever try using DHCP to assign addresses to your load balanced application servers? Oracle servers? er, DHCP servers?:-)
Don't most DHCP servers these days support assigning "static" IPs to hosts based on their MAC address? Hence if you do reconfigure the networ, all it takes is going to each server and releasing/renewing the DHCP lease on each of them, rather than trying to reconfigure the myriad of machines and IP addresses. (Plus, most OSes let you release/renew the DHCP lease as a "less-than-admin"). Or just restart them, whichever's easier. Leave the problem of static IPs to the much fewer DHCP servers you have.
And hey, I'm sure a script running on the DHCP server can notify the load balancer of machines that are actually up and have valid leases, so if a machine goes down, the load balancer will be notified within a lease period, and it's one less thing to actually do...
Wikipedia says that NOR flash is good for "10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles" and NAND flash has "ten times the endurance". Lets hope they've used the good stuff.
NAND and NOR flash are completely different types of flash chips.
NOR flash is good for holding code - it's basically nonvolatile RAM. You can execute code straight out of NOR flash easily by hooking it up to a memory bus.
NAND flash is good for holding bulk data. It's interface is strictly I/O based (like a hard drive) - you cannot directly execute code from NAND flash without copying it to RAM first. Some NAND-based devices have fancy tricks (Like samsung's ONENAND and M-System's DiskOnChip) where they put in some SRAM so you can execute, but they basically have to copy it from the array into the SRAM. (NAND flash also has stuff like "bit flips" where read data does not exactly match written data - and reading data can change it, but this is compensated for by using ECC codes in the "spare area").
All NAND-flash handling code has to handle bad blocks as a typical chip can have up to 2% bad from the factory.
The reason we use NAND flash is because it's extremely dense. While flash gets increasingly expensive as you go larger (32-64MiB is the "sweet spot" in price/storage for NOR flash), NAND flash achieves really dense storage. For the price of a 32MiB NOR flash, you'd get 1GiB NAND flash chip easily. So for things like memory cards and stuff which use I/O interfaces, the flash is exclusively NAND. NOR is used for stuff like BIOS code which doesn't change very often anyhow, and often just enough of it to have code where we can pull out data from cheaper storage devices (NAND flash and hard disk, for example).
At home, not so much, maybe a year's worth when I was switching between Windows and MacOS (pre-X), but I'm fairly certain except for that one year or so, I've got pretty much every email worth keeping somewhere on my Mac. (Outgoing emails are sent on my PC, so I've got that there - my Mac mostly just archives email). By worth keeping, it's stuff like mailing lists and other stuff other than spam.
At work, though, I've inadvertently lost several years worth of email (at least 3+ years). Outlook archived them faithfully, and I moved the archives to the fileserver. I then compressed the pst file with WinZip. No problem so far. Problem is, I then encrypted them using an Authenex A-Key, which encrypted fine, and test documents encrypted and decrypted fine. Unfortunately, it appears binary files aren't quite restored correctly (or were stored incorrectly) and WinZip claims the files are corrupted. I'm guessing the test files were just tolerant of the errors introduced, but I don't know. I suppose I can try again...
These guys will let you experience zero G for a couple grand last I checked. I don't exactly remember what their fitness requirements are, but I believe it's fairly light.
I had huge hopes for "Hotel Dusk: Room 251", a graphic novel in game form. It is actually a pretty good game if you enjoy a decent story. The interesting, interactive puzzles mixed in here and there help set off the story.
But I can't help but wonder how mind blowingly great it could have been had the creators hired a real, honest to God writer, like Stephen King, or Neil Gaiman, etc... Damn that would be cool. Anyhow, thats my "most wanted"...
Yeah, that would be great. Though, I have to admit that Hotel Dusk really is quite good. Especially when you consider the original game was in Japanese, the localizers did a really good job. (Yes, they hired some North American localization team, but still). For a "game" based on text, it was remarkably well translated. I'm guessing if it really does well, we may see more "games" like it - I can't wait, certainly!
PS3 owners should be really exploiting the motion sensitivity of the PS3 as this is sooo current generation. So current generation that our developers haven't made many games for it. (Although the Wii is obviously a gimmick.)
Having taken apart my PS3's controller to clean it, I'd have to disagree.
First of all - there's no way SIXAXIS was designed for manufacturing (when you build millions, you tend to do a hardware revision for manufacturability - save the assembly worker 5 minutes can be huge (can mean she builds another unit in say, 30 minutes), or find a way to save a penny or a dime... (which save you $10,000 or $100,000 per million units)). There are so many fiddly little pieces that are almost symmetrical that you really need a +10 agility boost just to put the thing together. There are also three circuitboards in it - mainboard, button flexi-board, and motion sensor board (take note - this is important). Sure you do it "next revision", but still.
Secondly, because the motion sensor board is on a separate PCB, it's connected via wires, covered in foam tape, and stuffed in a little alcove on the button chassis. The alcove wasn't designed to hold a circuit board - it's just a little square area. Which means the board is more likely than not to be skewed when its inserted into it. This skew alone makes it difficult to design really good motion sensing games because the accellerometer's axes are all aligned in a random orientation (the alcove doesn't provide any sort of orientation slots, either). Nintendo's Wiimote has the sensor soldered to the main PCB, so the only variance is how the pick'n'place machine puts parts down, and plastic tolerance, but it'll be fairly closely aligned. Sony's design can mean the sensor is oriented quite randomly, and that "up" is "down" to the sensor and what not (or more likely, "down-right" or "down-left"). Oddly enough, I'm sure the space on the main PCB occupied by the motion sensor's 4pin connector is larger than the sensor chip itself. I suspect that somewhere along the manufacturing line the SIXAXIS undergoes some high accellerations (which can destroy the tiny MEMS in the accellerometer if mounted improperly - usually even dropping the sensor on the floor can do it) - perhaps when the populating is done it's all tossed into a big container and the shock of the boards hitting the walls and other boards could damage a large number of them.
So without calibration, the motion sensor is fairly useless if the player has to figure out how to rotate the controller to get the motion it needs.
Fun trivia - the PlayStation logo is designed to light up - the button material below it is translucent and pokes down throught he button chassis to two pads on the main circuitboard - an LED is supposed to go there, but isn't populated. Wonder why that changed... it really would look nicer if it was lit up.
Having developed for embedded systems, I'm amazed at how well DRAM can retain data. I've had it such that RAM disks were preserved after power cycles (~1 second without power, and SDRAM controllers not initialized until many milliseconds after powerup). There was at one point a hack we had to implement in the bootloader to clear a bit of memory so a power cycle really would start clean.
Heck, it's a great way when debugging - the OS could log all messages to the screen, but that greatly slows down operations. So we log into a circular RAM buffer. When the board crashes, we power cycle, then inspect the RAM buffer for the last few messages written.
Out of curiousity, I once experimented to see how long the data was retained - I wrote a data pattern to RAM, looked at it back, then removed power for varying lengths of time. It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute before the data gets hopelessly corrupted. But before then, if you knew what you were looking for, you could find it.
Just switch to Firefox. I'm using it right now on Windows XP, and I haven't noticed any problems with memory le*$@!!- NO CARRIER
Firefox on OS X is nice. Except it doesn't support middle-click for opening/closing new tabs, for whatever reason. Which is kinda stupid if you use multibutton mice (yes, they work) on OS X. For single button usage, CMD-Click works, but it's a poor substitute since CMD-Click on a tab doesn't close it like middle click does.
Check the analog refresh rate too - I'm running dual LCDs via VGA out and they're both sharp *and* crisp. No fuzziness I can detect. (There probably is a tiny bit, but it's something you have to put up an alternating pattern to see). A lot of monitors accept 75Hz or higher refresh rates, but I find if you crank it back down to 60Hz or so, a lot of the fuzziness goes away - I guess jitter in the sampling clocks matters a heck of a lot more at 75hz than 60hz.
(This was vertical bands of fuzziness that no amount of fine tuning will correct - it just shifts the bands around).
60Hz on an LCD is flicker free, after all. No need to crank the refresh rate. You'd think that even with the D/A-A/D conversion you'd get sample beats since both clocks aren't aligned (and no clock signal is sent via VGA) as with 75hz, but it doesn't seem to happen. At least on all the different panels I tried.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of why this is can explain...?
No. The PS3 also uses a hypervisor to keep Linux out of things Sony doesn't want you to touch. They allow basic framebuffer access, including direct YUV video modes at all of the popular HD resolutions. But 3D is reserved for PS3 games who pay their percentage to Sony. Hard drive access is also regulated to keep Linux inside the portion of the drive reserved for it.
Yes, we really need a crack for the PS3's hypervisor. I believe it's similar to VMWare - Linux on the PS3 runs under a highly virtualized environment - not only can Linux not access the RSX, but it can only touch the stuff Sony wants touched (e.g., no wifi). The Linux partitioning is transparent to Linux (i.e., you can't access the "Game OS Partition" - Linux just sees its partition as a blank disk), and the hypervisor presents incomplete SCSI emulation of the 6 storage devices (hard disk, 4MB of flash memory, blu-ray drive, SD, CF and memory stick slots).
The emulation is so incomplete, if you have a bad block somewhere, the hypervisor returns an I/O error without reporting a media error. Makes for interesting times when your filesystem suddenly goes read-only for no apparent reason (you don't get anything logged other than "I/O Error" and "Filesystem is read-only", no media sense errors...). I think this is testing codepaths in Linux that really couldn't be tested since the errors they handled would be caught earlier...
The things that the hypervisor doesn't let you do: * RSX access, obviously * WiFi adapter * Full access to Blu-Ray drive * Full hard drive access * Full configuration flash access * Access to the EE/GS hardware
If you want fun, you can boot into Linux without formatting the hard drive - the hard drive doesn't appear at all.
Verizon's market capitalization is just over 100 billion dollars, so 200k is a drop in the ocean in comparison with the company as a whole. I speculate that the company was trying to run SPaMaH out of business rather than trying to turn a profit.
Actually, it's because the spammers are costing Verizon money. Think about it - if spamming via SMS is successful, then more people won't go for (overpriced) text packages, thus costing Verizon money. If by going after spammers it clears up their network for a large majority of users, they will merrily continue to text away running up their phone bills.
After all, the recipient pays for every text received. If they get a few spams that cost them real money, they either will make sure they disable text reception, and likewise they won't send texts. It's a variant of "sender pays" where "recipient pays". And if they're paying for every spam received...
One bug I'd like to see fixed is to get the damn middle button working on OS X. I mean, Opera and Safari let me open a link in a new tab by middle clicking it. And middle-clicking opens a link in new tabs on Linux and Windows.
I know you can Cmd-click on a link to open in a new tab, but that's just a workaround, and Cmd-click on a tab doesn't close the tab clicked on like it does on Windows and Linux.
Sure, OS X users are used to modifier keys for clicking (ctrl/cmd + click), but that's OK when you're using a single button mouse. When you're using a multibutton mouse and the middle button doesn't work where it works everywhere else (other browsers in same OS, same browser in other OS), it gets frustrating. I believe several people have submitted patches to fix the OS X port, but they keep getting rejected...
I'm not sure I agree with this. No company with any sense ties their R&D budget directly to their incoming revenue. R&D is an investment and the amount should be based upon a risk/reward/intitial cost assessment. Just because I lower prices by 20% does not necessarily mean my investment in some new tech has any less potential for profit in the future. The real danger is not lower quality, but the possibility that one company might "win" and monopolize the market, then use that monopoly to entrench their position and ruin other markets.blockquote>
Though there is a certain point where this happens. Competition to the bottom works great, until you hit a certain point where it's really detrimental to the consumer. Take for example cellphones. Ever notice that Europe and Asia get a lot more cellphones that do everything or nothing, while we get 3-generations behind phones here in North America? I'm talking about the phone handsets, not the network (which has good reasons for being behind). I'm fairly certain this drive towards the "free phone" has led to this, as manufacturers make innovative products for the more lucrative European/Asian market (and charge accordingly), then when the phone's so old that manufacturing's fairly trivial, they bring it over and sell it for cheap. (There are a few exceptions, like the Blackberry, which doesn't really exist much outside of North America...).
I believe this has happened in other markets as well where the almighty dollar has led to innovation being withheld - ever notice places like Japan and Asia tend to get the latest in technology first? Now it could just be that it's easiest to recoup costs in places where having expensive high-tech toys is a status symbol moreso than cheap products, or even live alongside them, and people still buy expensive stuff.
At least with AMD and Intel, they haven't reached this stage yet where people aren't willing to pay and will go for the cheaper competitor. Though, given that the performance of those processors aren't as great, people aren't willing to pay for them. Transmeta, anyone?
A more likely *correction* by Google will be to not list said website at all in any search. Let's see how long this ruling (and supporting law) lasts when companies that complain start getting delisted from Google.
I don't want Google to delist. That's the easy way and Google obeys the 10 million ways to not have your site indexed/cached/traversed/whatever. Let Google drop those sites to forced pagerank zero. Which is known to cause some interesting side effects, actually. If they complain that their traffic drops off, well, that's what they wanted...
First thing banned - all links to apple.com. Voila, the iTunes Store is now officially closed in Norway! That will take care of all the pesky people complaining about iTunes Store bought stuff...
I believe for a while, there was an 'iPod tax' around. It actually taxed storage media used to primarily hold music, but well... it essentially was an iPod tax.
I think the general annoyance of clippy was the fact it kept popping up whenever you did something. In many ways it was actually successful for Office. It showed people that they could use other features that people didn't know it had. Which really did put a nail in the coffin for tools such as word perfect. Now that people know how to do a lot of these advanced features and got use to them, they got frustrated when other word processors don't have or they don't know where the features they enjoy are. That being said because Microsoft successfully monopolized the Office software, they don't need advertise all there features all the time.
As a case in point, you remember all the annoying auto-formatting Word does from time to time? I actually learned from clippy that well, you can get Word to undo what it did by clicking Undo. And Word is smart enough to not try to autoformat the line again. I didn't know that, and had always had the fun of hunting around fixing stuff like that when it started interfering.
I suppose another thing was well, PCs were too slow to really run all of Clippy's features simultaneously. It was only until a few years ago that the side-by-side help was actually usable and didn't bring your system down to swapfile thrashing or graphic stuttering as Word redrew itself.
Flash is getting cheaper, yes, but even the 32GB flash hard drive is still way more pricey than the spinning media version by an order of magnitude. An 80GB flash hard drive will probalby set you back the better part of $5k or so. Even at Apple's flash pricing, we're still looking north of a grand... and no, I won't give up my disk space. My iPod functions great as a general purpose portable hard disk (that also happens to play mp3s and videos).
One thing I feel should be noted is that in the Wii game Warioware: Smooth Moves, there is a game mode exclusively designed to give you a workout.
That's the "Dr. Crygor and Mike" game. It comes after you finish all the modes once (so you get muliplayer), plus finish Orbulon (uses both the Form Baton (wiimote) and Balance Stone (nunchuck)), to unlock.
Mind you, you should play the other modes to "earn" more minigames. The story mode is short, but exposes you to very few of the 200 microgames that are actually available.
Gawker media (who owns sites like lifehacker, gizmodo, valleywag, kotaku and others) is putting the ads in front of it. Go to Gizmodo and look at their videos - the Gizmodo produced ones will have Gizmodo ads on it.
I believe it's Gawker media policy to do that for all Gawker-media originated (i.e., wasn't off some other (non-Gawker) blog) videos to put the ads in the front.
I'm surprised it's come up now - Gizmodo has been doing this for a few months now...
Seriously, find a display company who can design a proper trade show booth for you. Think ahead and plan to use it for many functions.
And please, PLEASE, if your company logo embellishes the name in it, please have the company name in regular type elsewhere! Sometimes you see in the "program" interesting companies, but because of the crowds, you can't find their booth (you may be right on top of them) because one can't read the logo. (It may be for a company you haven't heard of, but whose name is interesting enough for a chat to find out if there are any suitable positions. But rather than catch people passing by, those of us who note down who we want to visit would like to make a beeline for said company. So rather than getting passers-by, you get people who are truly interested).
The only thing that is limited is GPU support. Sony doesn't want you running pirated or homebrew games on it, so now graphics hardware acceleration (until someone writes an unofficial driver).
I've played with PS3 linux. I can tell you, the hypervisor is just that. It virtualizes the PS3 hardware. About the only thing Linux has "raw" access to (which could also be virtualized) are the USB ports.
The hard disk must be PS3-formatted before Linux will see it. Otherwise the hypervisor will not see it and make it available.
BTW:/dev/sda - hard disk, if available (else this node is the following devices.)/dev/sdb - flash memory - configuration area storing the bootloader (kboot), and a few configuration flags/dev/sdc - Memory stick, I believe/dev/sdd - SD Card/dev/sde - CompactFlash card/dev/sr0 - blu-ray drive.
The hypervisor is a lot like VMWare/Virtual PC/etc. I suspect the Power Processing Elements aren't even fully accessible and that the hypervisor is trapping everything and passing it on as appropriate, like virtualization software you run.
BTW, the virtualization also causes some issues. When I bought a new hard disk for PS3 Linux, it had bad sectors on it (I returned it in the end), but instead of the usual IDE error messages (DriveError) or SCSI errors (with media sense keys), you get nothing, other than a generic "I/O Error reading sector XXXX", which causes the filesystem in use to suddenly go read-only (not sure if ext3 did that or if the hypervisor just disabled the ability to write to the disk - I never had many bad disks with ext3). Basically, you don't even know it's a bad sector as it isn't reported. I suspected it when I could get dd to consistently put the filesystem into read-only mode 16GB in. Another system helped prove the point.
The video hardware is identical - it's virtualized the same way. It's not a driver issue - it's just that Sony has virtualized the video hardware away, and there's no direct access available. Heck, there aren't any WiFi devices accessible either - not for lack of a driver, but that Sony didn't make the WiFi hardware accessible.
Actually, it's worse than that. HDCP runs over DVI just fine. After all, HDMI is just DVI + Audio. Using an HDMI->DVI cable does absolutely nothing to bypass the real problem, the friggin' HDCP protocol.
I suspect that the Westinghouse TVs don't support HDCP over their DVI ports. My TV (Sharp Aquos LC37D90U) supports HDCP on the two HDMI ports *and* the DVI-I port (digital side only, of course, since DVI-I supports both analog and digital). Heck, many newer PC monitors support HDCP over DVI. I'm willing ot bet that the Westinghouse ones don't - they only support HDCP over their HDMI ports...
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This says nothing about the format and everything about the movie.
woo a popular bond movie making it to the top of the charts on release?! OMG CALL THE PAPERS!!
Quite accurate. I have a blu-ray player (and HD-DVD), and my opinion of blu-ray is that Sony is just pushing releases out without a care on quality - honestly, some blu-ray movies are worse than if the DVD was upconverted (talladega nights anyone? My HD-DVD player did a much better job upconverting the DVD to 1080i than the PS3 did outputting a native 1080p (I have a 1080p TV) - honestly, the blu-ray version looked like someone recorded it to a VCR, then ran some lame upconverter on it, then ran the "blur" filter on it).
The good blu-ray I have is Employee of the Month, which at least looks decent. But I've had sharper images from HD-DVD (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being particularly sharp). I don't understand it since blu-ray has so much more capacity (50GB vs. 30GB), so HD-DVD should theoretically have worse picture quality, worse extras, worse everything because it's space-constrained.
In the end, I just picked up the cheaper DVD version - there weren't much extras, but I don't have faith in blu-ray transfers (I've got a few blu-rays simply in the search of "high def"). Being two-thirds the price clinched the deal.
(I should note that in Canada, the pricing of the LG "Super Multi Blue" player is more expensive than a PS3 and a regular HD-DVD player (and still pricier if you gave up the HD-DVD standalone player for the Xbox380+HD-DVD drive), yet you get two better players (PS3 can do blu-ray iHD, and a proper HD-DVD player must be able to do iHD) in the bargain. LG's player doesn't do iHD, which is why there's no official HD-DVD *LOGO* on it. Just "HD-DVD" in fancy suggestive type.)
You forgot to mention that it's only really in North America does the concept of heavily subsidized "free" phones really exist. Go to Asia and Europe (which have way more phones in all shapes and sizes) and you'll find plenty of high end phones people actually buy. Dropping $1k on a phone isn't too unusual. There are ton of Asia and Europe exclusive phones (if you want Windows Mobile, it's a case of "what features do you want, and what manufacturer?" - more so than just the meagre selection here of Motorola, HPaq, Audiovox and clones). Of course, most are tri or quadband GSM, so you can import them into North America and use them. But of course, you'll be dropping easily $400+.
The quest for "free" and "cheap" phones in North America has meant that high-end phones really don't appear very often.
Apple actually has guts to introduce the iPhone into the US first, where paying more than $100 for a phone is rare. Of course, doing so in Europe, means they'll have to compete against the other half-million phones occupying the same price point.
Don't most DHCP servers these days support assigning "static" IPs to hosts based on their MAC address? Hence if you do reconfigure the networ, all it takes is going to each server and releasing/renewing the DHCP lease on each of them, rather than trying to reconfigure the myriad of machines and IP addresses. (Plus, most OSes let you release/renew the DHCP lease as a "less-than-admin"). Or just restart them, whichever's easier. Leave the problem of static IPs to the much fewer DHCP servers you have.
And hey, I'm sure a script running on the DHCP server can notify the load balancer of machines that are actually up and have valid leases, so if a machine goes down, the load balancer will be notified within a lease period, and it's one less thing to actually do...
NAND and NOR flash are completely different types of flash chips.
NOR flash is good for holding code - it's basically nonvolatile RAM. You can execute code straight out of NOR flash easily by hooking it up to a memory bus.
NAND flash is good for holding bulk data. It's interface is strictly I/O based (like a hard drive) - you cannot directly execute code from NAND flash without copying it to RAM first. Some NAND-based devices have fancy tricks (Like samsung's ONENAND and M-System's DiskOnChip) where they put in some SRAM so you can execute, but they basically have to copy it from the array into the SRAM. (NAND flash also has stuff like "bit flips" where read data does not exactly match written data - and reading data can change it, but this is compensated for by using ECC codes in the "spare area").
All NAND-flash handling code has to handle bad blocks as a typical chip can have up to 2% bad from the factory.
The reason we use NAND flash is because it's extremely dense. While flash gets increasingly expensive as you go larger (32-64MiB is the "sweet spot" in price/storage for NOR flash), NAND flash achieves really dense storage. For the price of a 32MiB NOR flash, you'd get 1GiB NAND flash chip easily. So for things like memory cards and stuff which use I/O interfaces, the flash is exclusively NAND. NOR is used for stuff like BIOS code which doesn't change very often anyhow, and often just enough of it to have code where we can pull out data from cheaper storage devices (NAND flash and hard disk, for example).
So yes, it'll be the "good stuff".
At home, not so much, maybe a year's worth when I was switching between Windows and MacOS (pre-X), but I'm fairly certain except for that one year or so, I've got pretty much every email worth keeping somewhere on my Mac. (Outgoing emails are sent on my PC, so I've got that there - my Mac mostly just archives email). By worth keeping, it's stuff like mailing lists and other stuff other than spam.
At work, though, I've inadvertently lost several years worth of email (at least 3+ years). Outlook archived them faithfully, and I moved the archives to the fileserver. I then compressed the pst file with WinZip. No problem so far. Problem is, I then encrypted them using an Authenex A-Key, which encrypted fine, and test documents encrypted and decrypted fine. Unfortunately, it appears binary files aren't quite restored correctly (or were stored incorrectly) and WinZip claims the files are corrupted. I'm guessing the test files were just tolerant of the errors introduced, but I don't know. I suppose I can try again...
These guys will let you experience zero G for a couple grand last I checked. I don't exactly remember what their fitness requirements are, but I believe it's fairly light.
Yeah, that would be great. Though, I have to admit that Hotel Dusk really is quite good. Especially when you consider the original game was in Japanese, the localizers did a really good job. (Yes, they hired some North American localization team, but still). For a "game" based on text, it was remarkably well translated. I'm guessing if it really does well, we may see more "games" like it - I can't wait, certainly!
Having taken apart my PS3's controller to clean it, I'd have to disagree.
First of all - there's no way SIXAXIS was designed for manufacturing (when you build millions, you tend to do a hardware revision for manufacturability - save the assembly worker 5 minutes can be huge (can mean she builds another unit in say, 30 minutes), or find a way to save a penny or a dime... (which save you $10,000 or $100,000 per million units)). There are so many fiddly little pieces that are almost symmetrical that you really need a +10 agility boost just to put the thing together. There are also three circuitboards in it - mainboard, button flexi-board, and motion sensor board (take note - this is important). Sure you do it "next revision", but still.
Secondly, because the motion sensor board is on a separate PCB, it's connected via wires, covered in foam tape, and stuffed in a little alcove on the button chassis. The alcove wasn't designed to hold a circuit board - it's just a little square area. Which means the board is more likely than not to be skewed when its inserted into it. This skew alone makes it difficult to design really good motion sensing games because the accellerometer's axes are all aligned in a random orientation (the alcove doesn't provide any sort of orientation slots, either). Nintendo's Wiimote has the sensor soldered to the main PCB, so the only variance is how the pick'n'place machine puts parts down, and plastic tolerance, but it'll be fairly closely aligned. Sony's design can mean the sensor is oriented quite randomly, and that "up" is "down" to the sensor and what not (or more likely, "down-right" or "down-left"). Oddly enough, I'm sure the space on the main PCB occupied by the motion sensor's 4pin connector is larger than the sensor chip itself. I suspect that somewhere along the manufacturing line the SIXAXIS undergoes some high accellerations (which can destroy the tiny MEMS in the accellerometer if mounted improperly - usually even dropping the sensor on the floor can do it) - perhaps when the populating is done it's all tossed into a big container and the shock of the boards hitting the walls and other boards could damage a large number of them.
So without calibration, the motion sensor is fairly useless if the player has to figure out how to rotate the controller to get the motion it needs.
Fun trivia - the PlayStation logo is designed to light up - the button material below it is translucent and pokes down throught he button chassis to two pads on the main circuitboard - an LED is supposed to go there, but isn't populated. Wonder why that changed... it really would look nicer if it was lit up.
Having developed for embedded systems, I'm amazed at how well DRAM can retain data. I've had it such that RAM disks were preserved after power cycles (~1 second without power, and SDRAM controllers not initialized until many milliseconds after powerup). There was at one point a hack we had to implement in the bootloader to clear a bit of memory so a power cycle really would start clean.
Heck, it's a great way when debugging - the OS could log all messages to the screen, but that greatly slows down operations. So we log into a circular RAM buffer. When the board crashes, we power cycle, then inspect the RAM buffer for the last few messages written.
Out of curiousity, I once experimented to see how long the data was retained - I wrote a data pattern to RAM, looked at it back, then removed power for varying lengths of time. It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute before the data gets hopelessly corrupted. But before then, if you knew what you were looking for, you could find it.
Firefox on OS X is nice. Except it doesn't support middle-click for opening/closing new tabs, for whatever reason. Which is kinda stupid if you use multibutton mice (yes, they work) on OS X. For single button usage, CMD-Click works, but it's a poor substitute since CMD-Click on a tab doesn't close it like middle click does.
Check the analog refresh rate too - I'm running dual LCDs via VGA out and they're both sharp *and* crisp. No fuzziness I can detect. (There probably is a tiny bit, but it's something you have to put up an alternating pattern to see). A lot of monitors accept 75Hz or higher refresh rates, but I find if you crank it back down to 60Hz or so, a lot of the fuzziness goes away - I guess jitter in the sampling clocks matters a heck of a lot more at 75hz than 60hz.
(This was vertical bands of fuzziness that no amount of fine tuning will correct - it just shifts the bands around).
60Hz on an LCD is flicker free, after all. No need to crank the refresh rate. You'd think that even with the D/A-A/D conversion you'd get sample beats since both clocks aren't aligned (and no clock signal is sent via VGA) as with 75hz, but it doesn't seem to happen. At least on all the different panels I tried.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of why this is can explain...?
Yes, we really need a crack for the PS3's hypervisor. I believe it's similar to VMWare - Linux on the PS3 runs under a highly virtualized environment - not only can Linux not access the RSX, but it can only touch the stuff Sony wants touched (e.g., no wifi). The Linux partitioning is transparent to Linux (i.e., you can't access the "Game OS Partition" - Linux just sees its partition as a blank disk), and the hypervisor presents incomplete SCSI emulation of the 6 storage devices (hard disk, 4MB of flash memory, blu-ray drive, SD, CF and memory stick slots).
The emulation is so incomplete, if you have a bad block somewhere, the hypervisor returns an I/O error without reporting a media error. Makes for interesting times when your filesystem suddenly goes read-only for no apparent reason (you don't get anything logged other than "I/O Error" and "Filesystem is read-only", no media sense errors...). I think this is testing codepaths in Linux that really couldn't be tested since the errors they handled would be caught earlier...
The things that the hypervisor doesn't let you do:
* RSX access, obviously
* WiFi adapter
* Full access to Blu-Ray drive
* Full hard drive access
* Full configuration flash access
* Access to the EE/GS hardware
If you want fun, you can boot into Linux without formatting the hard drive - the hard drive doesn't appear at all.
Actually, it's because the spammers are costing Verizon money. Think about it - if spamming via SMS is successful, then more people won't go for (overpriced) text packages, thus costing Verizon money. If by going after spammers it clears up their network for a large majority of users, they will merrily continue to text away running up their phone bills.
After all, the recipient pays for every text received. If they get a few spams that cost them real money, they either will make sure they disable text reception, and likewise they won't send texts. It's a variant of "sender pays" where "recipient pays". And if they're paying for every spam received...
One bug I'd like to see fixed is to get the damn middle button working on OS X. I mean, Opera and Safari let me open a link in a new tab by middle clicking it. And middle-clicking opens a link in new tabs on Linux and Windows.
I know you can Cmd-click on a link to open in a new tab, but that's just a workaround, and Cmd-click on a tab doesn't close the tab clicked on like it does on Windows and Linux.
Sure, OS X users are used to modifier keys for clicking (ctrl/cmd + click), but that's OK when you're using a single button mouse. When you're using a multibutton mouse and the middle button doesn't work where it works everywhere else (other browsers in same OS, same browser in other OS), it gets frustrating. I believe several people have submitted patches to fix the OS X port, but they keep getting rejected...
I don't want Google to delist. That's the easy way and Google obeys the 10 million ways to not have your site indexed/cached/traversed/whatever. Let Google drop those sites to forced pagerank zero. Which is known to cause some interesting side effects, actually. If they complain that their traffic drops off, well, that's what they wanted...
First thing banned - all links to apple.com. Voila, the iTunes Store is now officially closed in Norway! That will take care of all the pesky people complaining about iTunes Store bought stuff...
I believe for a while, there was an 'iPod tax' around. It actually taxed storage media used to primarily hold music, but well... it essentially was an iPod tax.
Oh yeah, Canada Quashes Copyright Tax on MP3 Players, which lead to Apple refunding the tax on iPods.
Can't seem to find the original article though...
As a case in point, you remember all the annoying auto-formatting Word does from time to time? I actually learned from clippy that well, you can get Word to undo what it did by clicking Undo. And Word is smart enough to not try to autoformat the line again. I didn't know that, and had always had the fun of hunting around fixing stuff like that when it started interfering.
I suppose another thing was well, PCs were too slow to really run all of Clippy's features simultaneously. It was only until a few years ago that the side-by-side help was actually usable and didn't bring your system down to swapfile thrashing or graphic stuttering as Word redrew itself.
Flash is getting cheaper, yes, but even the 32GB flash hard drive is still way more pricey than the spinning media version by an order of magnitude. An 80GB flash hard drive will probalby set you back the better part of $5k or so. Even at Apple's flash pricing, we're still looking north of a grand... and no, I won't give up my disk space. My iPod functions great as a general purpose portable hard disk (that also happens to play mp3s and videos).
Mind you, you should play the other modes to "earn" more minigames. The story mode is short, but exposes you to very few of the 200 microgames that are actually available.
And the "high score" resets daily!
Gawker media (who owns sites like lifehacker, gizmodo, valleywag, kotaku and others) is putting the ads in front of it. Go to Gizmodo and look at their videos - the Gizmodo produced ones will have Gizmodo ads on it.
I believe it's Gawker media policy to do that for all Gawker-media originated (i.e., wasn't off some other (non-Gawker) blog) videos to put the ads in the front.
I'm surprised it's come up now - Gizmodo has been doing this for a few months now...
The hard disk must be PS3-formatted before Linux will see it. Otherwise the hypervisor will not see it and make it available.
BTW:
The hypervisor is a lot like VMWare/Virtual PC/etc. I suspect the Power Processing Elements aren't even fully accessible and that the hypervisor is trapping everything and passing it on as appropriate, like virtualization software you run.
BTW, the virtualization also causes some issues. When I bought a new hard disk for PS3 Linux, it had bad sectors on it (I returned it in the end), but instead of the usual IDE error messages (DriveError) or SCSI errors (with media sense keys), you get nothing, other than a generic "I/O Error reading sector XXXX", which causes the filesystem in use to suddenly go read-only (not sure if ext3 did that or if the hypervisor just disabled the ability to write to the disk - I never had many bad disks with ext3). Basically, you don't even know it's a bad sector as it isn't reported. I suspected it when I could get dd to consistently put the filesystem into read-only mode 16GB in. Another system helped prove the point.
The video hardware is identical - it's virtualized the same way. It's not a driver issue - it's just that Sony has virtualized the video hardware away, and there's no direct access available. Heck, there aren't any WiFi devices accessible either - not for lack of a driver, but that Sony didn't make the WiFi hardware accessible.
I suspect that the Westinghouse TVs don't support HDCP over their DVI ports. My TV (Sharp Aquos LC37D90U) supports HDCP on the two HDMI ports *and* the DVI-I port (digital side only, of course, since DVI-I supports both analog and digital). Heck, many newer PC monitors support HDCP over DVI. I'm willing ot bet that the Westinghouse ones don't - they only support HDCP over their HDMI ports...