First they do the two-format-thing all over again. Then they keep all kinds of crap that pissed people off with DVDs such as the Regional Code. After that, they tell us that there will be draconian DRM. The prices are simply sick. And in the end, the added quality just doesn't change my life. Cool, yes, impressive with computer generated films, of course, but worth the price, the loss of control and the hassle? No way.
Actually, Blu-Ray sucks worse in the protection department than HD-DVD. I believe HD-DVD has eliminated the region coding as everyone disliked it and it never worked that well anyhow. HD-DVD players still have a region, but that's for DVDs. I believe the box of the HD-DVD player I saw said "DVD only region" with the region mark, and I don't recall any mark on the HD-DVD discs themselves. Even the HD-DVD/DVD combo discs have a region code marked with "DVD Only". So it looks like HD-DVD has no region coding at all.
At the very least, the DVD Forum learned something for their next-gen format. Too bad Sony didn't, and not only kept region coding, but added additional protections over what HD-DVD has (they both have ICT and AACS, and Blu-Ray adds to that, too).
An example in a nutshell: The Michael Jackson song "Bad". Weird Al makes a song called "Fat" that is similar to the song "Bad" to make fun of the song "Bad" itself. That is parody.
Except that Wierd Al gets permission from the original artist to do the parodies. Check it out some time - he couldn't get permission to do a song based on one of Eminem's songs (I believe Eminem even tried to sue Wierd Al over it), so he dropped the entire thing.
With "You're Pitiful", Wierd Al got permission from the original artist, but the label didn't want anything to do with it, so he released it online to prevent a label-on-label shootout.
If the writeup is correct, however, we could get some awesome Northern Lights. The negative repercussions would most likely be limited to fleeting disruptions in some radio traffic. Some phone calls and television feeds may have momentary issues, but even at its worst I doubt all of the doomsday predictions that claim we will arrive back at the stone age from having everything in orbit nuked.
Well, not everything will be nuked - only the less protected satellites (either by design, or through age and/or collisions with micrometeorites/space debris). Rad hard stuff only lasts so long after the main shielding's rendered potentially ineffective. So some TV, radio, GPS etc. will probably be knocked offline, but there are always backups to those.
Potentially more devestating would be power outages - these particles wreak havoc on the magnetosphere, and could induce severe currents in long haul power lines as magnetic induction induces current flows that trip protective breakers. (The Earth's magnetic field, weak as it is, being modified by the solar storms can induce significant currents over long enough stretches of wire). Source - http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eiskappenman.html and http://www.spacew.com/gic/index.html
Given the fragile state of the electric grid, having transmission lines tripping all the time will cause problems. Maybe to the point of the great blackout of 2003.
On the other hand, this may be one of the last times of good sunspot activity without BPL interfering with worldwide communications, so as a ham, it could be the last time to enjoy it! (High sunspot activity also increases the ionosphere and makes long-range communications easier. Good sunspot activity can raise the frequency into the low VHF range).
Or are you one of those "backwards" users stuck using CDMA and thus (in North America and most other CDMA-using places (except Korea)) locked by phone and provider?
One of GSM's major features (and less so in Korea) is that your subscriber info is stored in a tiny chip. That chip came on a credit card sized piece of plastic a la a "smart card" (if you've used GSM phones in the 90's, you'd know that there were phones that accepted the entire card as is). That chip enables you to take it out of your current GSM phone, buy a new phone (unlocked or same carrier), stick the chip in the new phone, and voila, you have a new phone, with your existing subscription info!
And look, you can get those 10 phones for $1 contract deals and use those chips in different phones than what was provided (depending on the provider, this route may be more economical than just buying the activation kit).
This is one reason why I went GSM looking for a new phone - so I can use it with my phone, but then stick it in a PC card modem when I wanted to use it with my computer. One subscription. Two devices. Only one can be used at a time, of course, but I have the freedom to change phones willy-nilly, or in this case, surf the web using the modem's faster GPRS modem. (The provider can tell, since the IMEI number changes, but there's little they can do).
Korea is special for CDMA because they force CDMA providers to do the same thing ("RUIM" cards) but in North America, most CDMA phones are locked and activated by carrier. But from what I can tell, Cingular and T-Mobile both provide GSM service, and thus would work just fine.
All you have to do is make sure the phone supports the frequencies of your local area. "Quadband" phones (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz) work pretty much anywhere. Triband phones are often 900, 1800 and 1900 and work in most places in North America (850 being the old AMPS frequency, and isn't in widespread use where a Triband phone will leave you stuck vs. a quadband phone).
They're convenient while programming, but they can certainly be a PITA to use properly. First they don't compare properly (you can't test equality), and if you have to do multiplatform programming transferring floats, they had better be stored in standard format (which can have a nasty side-effect of slowing down your floating point arithmetic since after each operation the unit has to return it back to IEEE format from machine native).
I've seen programmers who never realized these facts and had them ask why their code didn't work (they stored statistics gathered from a monitoring unit on an ARM Linux embedded board, transferred them to a PC, and had nonsensical results). Altering the way they serialized their floats and doubles fixed that issue. And nevermind that processing a float on different architectures can have slightly different results (or big results, depending on how you write your code). I guess some people treat floating point numbers the same way as integers, when they're more approximation than anything.
The only thing I can guess it needs Linux for is to do the routing and QoS services (see lartc.org)...
Then again, considering I get sub-1ms latencies across my network (only 100Mbps...), and this is with some rather pathetic equipment (Celeron system running Win2k), I fail to see how I can improve my 80ms ping with a better network card.
It seems that hardcore gamers are starting to become the computing equivalent of the "audiophile". From CRT displays that do 120hz refresh (do they notice the difference between 100 and 120, I wonder?) since LCDs that do 6ms are "too slow". Gaming mice that do 10k-dpi for ultra-precise positioning, videocards that cost the better part of a grand. And now, network cards that cut down microseconds or give you that extra frame per second. There's also keyboards, the gaming mousepad (though, some are nice for general use), and god knows what other accessories, doodads and other monster-cable-type things.
I don't think this is obvious at all. In the last 5 years, I believe I have shipped maybe 2 things from online retailers to myself with USPS. Everything else (and I'm talking dozens of packages) went Fedex or UPS. How many sites even -offer- USPS as a shipping option?
It is if you want to be successful at shipping products internationally (either by eBay or as a store). UPS *SUCKS* for international shipping - sure it only costs the sender $10 or $20, but the buyer is then stiffed with a fee to cross the border (broker fees). And in practically all my experience, the broker fees have come out *MORE* than the taxes I would've paid. (Case in point, a seller only shipped UPS, and they stopped shipping to Canada after learning that buyers were being forced to pay $70 (off a $200 item) in fees. My experience was a $10 declared item (taxes owing: $1.40) wanting another $20 in fees. The best rates I had was paying $110 on a $300 item (including taxes, which were around $42)) This gets bad quickly for the seller as I can refuse the shipment, and chargeback the cost. Now the seller has to pay shipping *BOTH* ways (or shipping one way, plus the cost of the item as "abandoned"), plus chargeback costs. Though, most sellers will just simply refund the money. Technically, the item wasn't "delivered" so you can't force RMA or restock fees, or deduct shipping from the refund.
FedEx is a bit better - fixed rate $25 plus taxes. But the post office has the best rates yet - $5 plus taxes, or $8 express shipping plus taxes. And that's if they even bother applying the tax - sometimes they wont just to save the paperwork, especially on items that may or may not be taxable in the first place (used goods, for example, may have some exemptions). So rather than bother with the paperwork and possible contesting of the fees (MORE paperwork), they let it go.
Plus someone has to explain to me how sites that have UPS/FedEx shipping can often cost way more than USPS. Especially on small items where the shipping can easily be $30 (plus whatever they charge when they deliver), while USPS can be under $10. And this is using bog-standard ground shipping (UPS/FedEx) or airmail (USPS - airmail is often cheaper and is much faster than economy ground). Overnight, and UPS/FedEx have no competition (but the prices are equally high).
When it was ZDTV, it was very different. It was all computers (Ziff Davis, after all). They had some of the shows that existed up until recently (The Screen Savers being the prime example). But they also had other programming. I remember a show that showed nothing but computer generated animation that people could send in. A user content show, it was ahead of it's time. It also showed some very neat stuff (as companies would send in neat stuff too to show what they could do). This was how I first found Animusic.
I believe the show you're talking about was Eye Drops - while the Wikipedia entry is a bit skimpy (it doesn't have the later seasons with the Animusic ones on it...), this was the show that had all the CG animation in it. They also showed what tools people used to create them - there were many flash ones, but also ones done in Maya and SoftImage and others. Animusic rocked - I believe the first time around I caught Pipe Dreams, but what got me hooked was Future Retro.
If you ripped games for the sole purpose of making them onto ISOs so you can play them off memory stick, the PSP firmware is similar. Sure it's got a more advanced kernel that can do more stuff (multithreading!), but most games come with their own versions of the system libraries (and the 2.x ones are updated to look for 2.x kernels even if they don't use any features of it).
UMDs suck, so I rip my PSP games to ISOs and play off of memory stick - you won't believe how fast games can run that way (or how godawful slow UMD is). Of course, for new games, that involves decrypting the game files, replacing the system libraries with 1.x ones, and a few other tricks. A library of 1.x games will provide the necessary 1.x system libraries, and there are decryption programs to decrypt executables using keys stored in firmware.
The firmware provides some system libraries as well, but I believe those are only for the built-in apps, rather than games. (Makes sense, since no one wants to have to deal with library hell when they buy a console game!)
Everyone ought to know to not buy first-gen Apple hardware by now - the large majority of first gen hardware have issues that get resolved in the second revision.
Of course, this whine sounds more like a power supply issue than anything else - modern electronics use switching supplies to generate the various voltages needed, and they tend to operate anywhere from 10kHz and up, but are well known to drop lower in frequency, or induce noise in other bits of the system. The fact that the noise can appear and disappear as the system is loaded is key to the problem as switching supplies rely on feedback loops to ensure regulation. Increase the load and the power supply works harder and likely generating more switching noise which induces itself in analog lines to speakers and such. And if the switching transistors have to remain on longer, it could reduce the switching frequency to something people start to notice. Most recommendations for eliminating noise comes from reducing system load, turning down the backlight (double effect, since the backlight inverter is yes, another switching supply).
Liebermann got out of the computer business 2004-2005ish. Though I would be very surprised if that Grand Canyon Display actually shipped or was just some fanciful marketer's dream. (Very hard to describe Liebermann - the laptops they shipped were merely rebadged Sagers, that is, the models they could ship. In between the Apple-copycat site design, the wild products that just aren't possible realistically, and the overpriced laptops you *could* buy (hint: you think Apple was overpriced? Try Liebermann.).)
They shut their doors because sites like Gizmodo were (rightfully) putting them down due to impossible-to-buy products, long shipping times, and well, you could get the same laptop for half price.
Back on topic, there are places that sell racks of monitors - I recall one that had 3x2 configurations of LCDs or bigger. Though pricey - anywhere from $20,000 on up...
Right now, it's not possible to use aftermarket hard drives.
There's a special hash put on the drives that tells the Xbox360 whether's an xbox360 drive or not.
You can image the hard drive (it's just a standard SATA disk), but you cannot restore it over another hard drive, or a different Xbox360 hard drive. In fact, if you do the latter without imaging it, you'll lose the ability to use that hard drive in an Xbox360.
And there are tools to rip out stuff from the hard drive and onto your PC. Check out Xplorer360 and the forums/tutorials. Tell you how to connect your drive/memory unit to your PC.
The new version (b5) of Xplorer360 restores images without overwriting the hash now.
The ironic thing is those trolls tend to be Sony or Microsoft fanboys. Which built their userbase on general/casual gamers. Sad that they harp on the whole casual gamer vs hardcore gamer. Nobody cares about the hardcore gamer, the profit they make from hardcore gamers is laughable. If Sony say (this upcoming PS3 era) lost its casual userbase...sure Sony might survive (Nintendo did) but they'd find themselves in Nintendo's shoes during its N64-GCN era.
I would think the "hardcore gamer" is the videogame equivalent to the "audiophile" or "videophile" in that it may not be a huge market, but a wildly profitable one. Who else is willing to drop $400 for a *sound card* or $500+ for the latest video card? Or heck, even the lowly NIC gets accelleration (?!). Then there's all the gaming mice and keyboards with super high framerates and low latency button pushes (a good keyboard and mouse helps, yes, but considering the differences between good and "hardcore"...). And since LCD screens have taken over more or less the monitor market, big screen CRTs with high end gamer features are even more pricey (because 6/10ms refresh isn't fast enough). Sure you can buy CRT monitors still, but the half-decent ones are hard to find compared to the crappy ones always on sale (partly because a few bucks more gets you an LCD that's half decent and not fuzzy). Oh yeah, said gamer also never uses wireless, because the latency of wireless affects their ping (true, but we're still shaving milliseconds here).
I expect to see basic 10/100 switches with cut-through switching touted as the next greatest thing in gaming shortly because cut-through switching has less latency than store-and-forward (still talking about milliseconds).
The only thing that reallys keeps "hardcore gamers" at bay tends to be that most tend to be intelligent and can look through the marketing...
You must be using the "1MB=1000000 bytes" methodology, because I only see 957MB on my formatted SD card.:)
Actually, flash memory cards are measured using the binary system, so a "1GB" card has a 1GiB flash chip inside it.
However, the fact that you lose 67MB is easily found.
NAND flash chips (the kind used in flash storage media) is inperfect, and bad blocks abound. Typically 2% of the available blocks are reserved for bad block remapping and replacement. 20MB gone.
SD cards have to have a special "secure" mode for storing DRM keys (which use a CSS-like procedure of media key (individual per SD card), device key, and other keys to produce a final hashed key that'll unlock it. This is quite big, and is probably accounting for the vast majority of the leftover space (or all of it). Then there's all the little bits - partitioning (lose 64kB due to PC partition limitations), file system (FAT16, usually), and SD controller persistent data.
and was just an attempt by redhat to push the subpar RPM package format. If they were serious about a somewhat standard linux, they would have started with debian.
There is nothing wrong with the RPM format (I do prefer Debian, though - it's a more unix-y way of doing things). It's just that for a long time there was no centralized repository of RPM packages, so everything was a mishmash, and led you to dependency hell. Debian though, has a central repository and enforced the provision that all packages must have dependencies on things inside the repository to be accepted. It's not a format issue, it's a policy issue. E.g., I can't take my Debian installation, point it at Ubuntu's servers, then just do "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" and expect my system to migrate to Ubuntu. Most likely I'd be left with a half-functional mess. Is.deb broken because of this? I hope not!
RedHat never enforced the policy nor maintained a central repository of packages. Debian has. And for a while, Debian had superior package management tools.
In fact, I really preferred the old Familiar Linux IPK format - you only need gzip and tar (it was all tarballs) to hack through those packages rather than debian's usage of ar and tarballs.
(And these days, with apt-rpm and yum, dependency issues have reduced significantly).
In my pocket, is a PocketPC (cmon, no one calls it WinCE anymore) based phone PDA. It's an I-mate JAM, made by HTC.
That's because Microsoft has two separate product lines. One is called "Windows Embedded" and encompasses WIndows CE and Windows XP Embedded. The other is called "Windows Mobile" and brings under one roof PocketPC and Smartphone.
People get confused because the first devices from Microsoft were running Windows CE, which was so poor as a PDA that well, it was laughed off the market (c'mon, double-tapping just doesn't work for touch screens).
So what Microsoft did was take the latest WinCE version at the time (3.0), fork it and turned it into PocketPC (PocketPC 2000), which evolved into 2002, etc. Windows CE continued as an embedded product. It wasn't until Windows CE.net 4.2 that the PocketPC team resynced with Windows CE (PocketPC 2003 Second Edition is based on CE.net 4.2). Then in 2005 PocketPC and Smartphone were rebranded as "Windows Mobile", on the release of Windows Mobile 5 (2005) (Magneto), based on Windows CE 5.0 (released mid 2004).
In fact, until WinCE 4.2, it was impossible to run PocketPC apps on WinCE - due to library differences (aygshell.dll being a primary culprit). Windows CE has an implementation of their own of aygshell.dll, so PocketPC apps do run now. But Casio released several Casiopeias that ran Windows CE rather than PocketPC with a custom-developed shell so it was more PDA friendly.
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
Actually, DirectX has been a part of Windows CE for years now. It was originally part of Windows CE 2.12 with the optional DirectX Pak add-on, and available built in inside of WinCE 3.0 and onwards. WinCE4 (WinCE.NET) made it more visible, and I think WinCE 5 now supports Direct3D (Mobile).
Windows *MOBILE* only acquired DirectX as of WinMo 5 (Magneto) (the reason was to support DirectShow for camera support rather than try to do a Video4Windows thing). Of course, they didn't take the CE version of DirectX, but ported DirectX from Windows XP. Big PITA when you're trying to write a driver that supports Windows CE (part of Windows Embedded) and Windows Mobile because of these differences in DirectX.
Here's a bit from the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 documentation on say, DirectDrawCreate()
Requirements OS Versions: Windows CE 2.12 and later. Version 2.12 requires DXPAK 1.0 or later. Header: Ddraw.h. Link Library: Ddraw.lib.
One of the failure modes of a Li-Ion battery is what the industry calls "vent with flame", or what everyone else calls, a fire. (A very spectacular one, at that - not just ignition, but the fire actually shoots out like a jet).
Li-Ion batteries are extremely volatile and sensitive, which is why good batteries have a variety of protective circuits on them (or can have) - e.g., physical distortion (detects if the battery balloons), over temperature (charging/discharge), over current, unsafe low voltage (if the battery voltage falls too low, you can't charge it safely), and many more. That's also why their charge regimen is so complex (charge at constant current to ~90% capacity, then constant voltage charge to 100%. Then stop all charging until capacity is around 90% again, then restart CV charge - this is why the first 80% can happen relatively quickly, while the last 20% can often take as long as it took to get to 80% in the first place) since they need charge controllers and "smart chips" to monitor the state of the battery.
Usually these events happen when the battery is actually used, but there isn't anything to say that it can happen otherwise. Those protective circuits require power, and they get their power from the battery while outside the device. And since you cannot store Li-Ion batteries discharged very well, they are often charged at the factory, during assembly and final sale. A nice short somewhere along the line and battery will vent with flame.
There's a reason why most LiIon batteries have hard to get at terminals or come with protective covers. It's not for convenience, but more for during storage/shipping, so the terminals don't get shorted.
Oh yeah, those protective circuits are optional - not all batteries have every one (some may not need it or find a way to protect it in another way - battery distortion can be handled by having the battery having to fit in a slot - if it can't fit, well...). Third party ultra cheap batteries may have *no* protective circuits at all (hence those "Nokia Exploding Batteries").
Haven't we learned enough about bandwidth leechers to cause them significant pain already?
I mean, the fact that they're direct-linking an image and using it as a background gives the owner of the website tremendous power over the users. For example, a really annoying background that makes all text unreadable? High contrast checkers can do that, or anigifs that flash incessantly. Or redirect the link to the popular "rgb.swf" (a really annoying flash that plays the Axel F theme and draws stripes of bars alternating red-green-blue constantly.).
Or heck, put up an image of something that's against MySpace TOS and report the site to MySpace!
It works so well for sellers doing the same on eBay (imagine their dismay when that "cool TV" photo they stole is replaced by one that's broken? or similar).
Or maybe redirect to a page that "breaks out" of the page and forwards them to the MySpace front page or something?
Don't rootkits need to hook into the kernel in some way, and the "some way" in Vista is via signed binaries? Overriding kernel hooks seem to imply that yes, signed binaries are needed as well...
Also, would it be able to hide from a tool like SysInternal's rootkit detector which compares API return values for the registry and filesystem with an actual analysis of the registry files themselves, and a scan of the raw blocks on the disk? (Understands NTFS and FAT, and the registry hive format).
Considering that eBay more or less has Paypal integrated into it? And where I suspect a large majority of Paypal transactions take place is to satisfy eBay transactions? While I've done a few non-eBay-related Paypal transactions, they are very few. I've used more online stores that took my credit card directly than Paypal (and a few of those stores offered Paypal - I paid Visa).
GBuy sounds like it'll be a rival for Amazon zShops and other style system, except less centralized.
We use Familiar as the basis of our distribution. Familiar is nice because it leverages most Debian-ARM packages, so you don't have to do very much compiling, and most of the build system is scripts and easily compilable programs.
I've personally ported the entire Familiar system to another architecture, too - PowerPC (IBM/AMCC 405 series), and Debian-PowerPC for the most part works. Took me a couple of weeks to create the port, which involved repackaging a number of Debian-PowerPC packages for size.
The ability to leverage a normal Linux distribution, especially Debian (there aren't many distributions that have the immense number of architectures as Debian) saves a LOT of time. Recompiling sucks.
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Actually, Blu-Ray sucks worse in the protection department than HD-DVD. I believe HD-DVD has eliminated the region coding as everyone disliked it and it never worked that well anyhow. HD-DVD players still have a region, but that's for DVDs. I believe the box of the HD-DVD player I saw said "DVD only region" with the region mark, and I don't recall any mark on the HD-DVD discs themselves. Even the HD-DVD/DVD combo discs have a region code marked with "DVD Only". So it looks like HD-DVD has no region coding at all.
At the very least, the DVD Forum learned something for their next-gen format. Too bad Sony didn't, and not only kept region coding, but added additional protections over what HD-DVD has (they both have ICT and AACS, and Blu-Ray adds to that, too).
Except that Wierd Al gets permission from the original artist to do the parodies. Check it out some time - he couldn't get permission to do a song based on one of Eminem's songs (I believe Eminem even tried to sue Wierd Al over it), so he dropped the entire thing.
With "You're Pitiful", Wierd Al got permission from the original artist, but the label didn't want anything to do with it, so he released it online to prevent a label-on-label shootout.
Ebay is, however taking preorders!
Well, not everything will be nuked - only the less protected satellites (either by design, or through age and/or collisions with micrometeorites/space debris). Rad hard stuff only lasts so long after the main shielding's rendered potentially ineffective. So some TV, radio, GPS etc. will probably be knocked offline, but there are always backups to those.
Potentially more devestating would be power outages - these particles wreak havoc on the magnetosphere, and could induce severe currents in long haul power lines as magnetic induction induces current flows that trip protective breakers. (The Earth's magnetic field, weak as it is, being modified by the solar storms can induce significant currents over long enough stretches of wire). Source - http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eiskappenman.html and http://www.spacew.com/gic/index.html
Given the fragile state of the electric grid, having transmission lines tripping all the time will cause problems. Maybe to the point of the great blackout of 2003.
On the other hand, this may be one of the last times of good sunspot activity without BPL interfering with worldwide communications, so as a ham, it could be the last time to enjoy it! (High sunspot activity also increases the ionosphere and makes long-range communications easier. Good sunspot activity can raise the frequency into the low VHF range).
Or are you one of those "backwards" users stuck using CDMA and thus (in North America and most other CDMA-using places (except Korea)) locked by phone and provider?
One of GSM's major features (and less so in Korea) is that your subscriber info is stored in a tiny chip. That chip came on a credit card sized piece of plastic a la a "smart card" (if you've used GSM phones in the 90's, you'd know that there were phones that accepted the entire card as is). That chip enables you to take it out of your current GSM phone, buy a new phone (unlocked or same carrier), stick the chip in the new phone, and voila, you have a new phone, with your existing subscription info!
And look, you can get those 10 phones for $1 contract deals and use those chips in different phones than what was provided (depending on the provider, this route may be more economical than just buying the activation kit).
This is one reason why I went GSM looking for a new phone - so I can use it with my phone, but then stick it in a PC card modem when I wanted to use it with my computer. One subscription. Two devices. Only one can be used at a time, of course, but I have the freedom to change phones willy-nilly, or in this case, surf the web using the modem's faster GPRS modem. (The provider can tell, since the IMEI number changes, but there's little they can do).
Korea is special for CDMA because they force CDMA providers to do the same thing ("RUIM" cards) but in North America, most CDMA phones are locked and activated by carrier. But from what I can tell, Cingular and T-Mobile both provide GSM service, and thus would work just fine.
All you have to do is make sure the phone supports the frequencies of your local area. "Quadband" phones (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz) work pretty much anywhere. Triband phones are often 900, 1800 and 1900 and work in most places in North America (850 being the old AMPS frequency, and isn't in widespread use where a Triband phone will leave you stuck vs. a quadband phone).
They're convenient while programming, but they can certainly be a PITA to use properly. First they don't compare properly (you can't test equality), and if you have to do multiplatform programming transferring floats, they had better be stored in standard format (which can have a nasty side-effect of slowing down your floating point arithmetic since after each operation the unit has to return it back to IEEE format from machine native).
I've seen programmers who never realized these facts and had them ask why their code didn't work (they stored statistics gathered from a monitoring unit on an ARM Linux embedded board, transferred them to a PC, and had nonsensical results). Altering the way they serialized their floats and doubles fixed that issue. And nevermind that processing a float on different architectures can have slightly different results (or big results, depending on how you write your code). I guess some people treat floating point numbers the same way as integers, when they're more approximation than anything.
Or you can write code like this guy - http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/71883.aspx
Sharp and Toshiba both make PDA-sized VGA screens. Maybe NEC, too. I think the Toshiba is a 640x480 screen, while the Sharp is a 480x640 screen.
Look up the Toshiba e805 PDA. Or the Dell Axim x51v (which can be had cheaply). Both feature a 3.8" VGA screen.
So all that's been accomplished is the screen is an inch smaller.
I've had QVGA screens that were 1.6" in size, so they had the same DPI as this screen...
The only thing I can guess it needs Linux for is to do the routing and QoS services (see lartc.org)...
Then again, considering I get sub-1ms latencies across my network (only 100Mbps...), and this is with some rather pathetic equipment (Celeron system running Win2k), I fail to see how I can improve my 80ms ping with a better network card.
It seems that hardcore gamers are starting to become the computing equivalent of the "audiophile". From CRT displays that do 120hz refresh (do they notice the difference between 100 and 120, I wonder?) since LCDs that do 6ms are "too slow". Gaming mice that do 10k-dpi for ultra-precise positioning, videocards that cost the better part of a grand. And now, network cards that cut down microseconds or give you that extra frame per second. There's also keyboards, the gaming mousepad (though, some are nice for general use), and god knows what other accessories, doodads and other monster-cable-type things.
It is if you want to be successful at shipping products internationally (either by eBay or as a store). UPS *SUCKS* for international shipping - sure it only costs the sender $10 or $20, but the buyer is then stiffed with a fee to cross the border (broker fees). And in practically all my experience, the broker fees have come out *MORE* than the taxes I would've paid. (Case in point, a seller only shipped UPS, and they stopped shipping to Canada after learning that buyers were being forced to pay $70 (off a $200 item) in fees. My experience was a $10 declared item (taxes owing: $1.40) wanting another $20 in fees. The best rates I had was paying $110 on a $300 item (including taxes, which were around $42)) This gets bad quickly for the seller as I can refuse the shipment, and chargeback the cost. Now the seller has to pay shipping *BOTH* ways (or shipping one way, plus the cost of the item as "abandoned"), plus chargeback costs. Though, most sellers will just simply refund the money. Technically, the item wasn't "delivered" so you can't force RMA or restock fees, or deduct shipping from the refund.
FedEx is a bit better - fixed rate $25 plus taxes. But the post office has the best rates yet - $5 plus taxes, or $8 express shipping plus taxes. And that's if they even bother applying the tax - sometimes they wont just to save the paperwork, especially on items that may or may not be taxable in the first place (used goods, for example, may have some exemptions). So rather than bother with the paperwork and possible contesting of the fees (MORE paperwork), they let it go.
Plus someone has to explain to me how sites that have UPS/FedEx shipping can often cost way more than USPS. Especially on small items where the shipping can easily be $30 (plus whatever they charge when they deliver), while USPS can be under $10. And this is using bog-standard ground shipping (UPS/FedEx) or airmail (USPS - airmail is often cheaper and is much faster than economy ground). Overnight, and UPS/FedEx have no competition (but the prices are equally high).
I believe the show you're talking about was Eye Drops - while the Wikipedia entry is a bit skimpy (it doesn't have the later seasons with the Animusic ones on it...), this was the show that had all the CG animation in it. They also showed what tools people used to create them - there were many flash ones, but also ones done in Maya and SoftImage and others. Animusic rocked - I believe the first time around I caught Pipe Dreams, but what got me hooked was Future Retro.
If you ripped games for the sole purpose of making them onto ISOs so you can play them off memory stick, the PSP firmware is similar. Sure it's got a more advanced kernel that can do more stuff (multithreading!), but most games come with their own versions of the system libraries (and the 2.x ones are updated to look for 2.x kernels even if they don't use any features of it).
UMDs suck, so I rip my PSP games to ISOs and play off of memory stick - you won't believe how fast games can run that way (or how godawful slow UMD is). Of course, for new games, that involves decrypting the game files, replacing the system libraries with 1.x ones, and a few other tricks. A library of 1.x games will provide the necessary 1.x system libraries, and there are decryption programs to decrypt executables using keys stored in firmware.
The firmware provides some system libraries as well, but I believe those are only for the built-in apps, rather than games. (Makes sense, since no one wants to have to deal with library hell when they buy a console game!)
Everyone ought to know to not buy first-gen Apple hardware by now - the large majority of first gen hardware have issues that get resolved in the second revision.
Of course, this whine sounds more like a power supply issue than anything else - modern electronics use switching supplies to generate the various voltages needed, and they tend to operate anywhere from 10kHz and up, but are well known to drop lower in frequency, or induce noise in other bits of the system. The fact that the noise can appear and disappear as the system is loaded is key to the problem as switching supplies rely on feedback loops to ensure regulation. Increase the load and the power supply works harder and likely generating more switching noise which induces itself in analog lines to speakers and such. And if the switching transistors have to remain on longer, it could reduce the switching frequency to something people start to notice. Most recommendations for eliminating noise comes from reducing system load, turning down the backlight (double effect, since the backlight inverter is yes, another switching supply).
Liebermann got out of the computer business 2004-2005ish. Though I would be very surprised if that Grand Canyon Display actually shipped or was just some fanciful marketer's dream. (Very hard to describe Liebermann - the laptops they shipped were merely rebadged Sagers, that is, the models they could ship. In between the Apple-copycat site design, the wild products that just aren't possible realistically, and the overpriced laptops you *could* buy (hint: you think Apple was overpriced? Try Liebermann.).)
They shut their doors because sites like Gizmodo were (rightfully) putting them down due to impossible-to-buy products, long shipping times, and well, you could get the same laptop for half price.
Back on topic, there are places that sell racks of monitors - I recall one that had 3x2 configurations of LCDs or bigger. Though pricey - anywhere from $20,000 on up...
Right now, it's not possible to use aftermarket hard drives.
There's a special hash put on the drives that tells the Xbox360 whether's an xbox360 drive or not.
You can image the hard drive (it's just a standard SATA disk), but you cannot restore it over another hard drive, or a different Xbox360 hard drive. In fact, if you do the latter without imaging it, you'll lose the ability to use that hard drive in an Xbox360.
And there are tools to rip out stuff from the hard drive and onto your PC. Check out Xplorer360 and the forums/tutorials. Tell you how to connect your drive/memory unit to your PC.
The new version (b5) of Xplorer360 restores images without overwriting the hash now.
The ironic thing is those trolls tend to be Sony or Microsoft fanboys. Which built their userbase on general/casual gamers. Sad that they harp on the whole casual gamer vs hardcore gamer. Nobody cares about the hardcore gamer, the profit they make from hardcore gamers is laughable. If Sony say (this upcoming PS3 era) lost its casual userbase...sure Sony might survive (Nintendo did) but they'd find themselves in Nintendo's shoes during its N64-GCN era.
I would think the "hardcore gamer" is the videogame equivalent to the "audiophile" or "videophile" in that it may not be a huge market, but a wildly profitable one. Who else is willing to drop $400 for a *sound card* or $500+ for the latest video card? Or heck, even the lowly NIC gets accelleration (?!). Then there's all the gaming mice and keyboards with super high framerates and low latency button pushes (a good keyboard and mouse helps, yes, but considering the differences between good and "hardcore"...). And since LCD screens have taken over more or less the monitor market, big screen CRTs with high end gamer features are even more pricey (because 6/10ms refresh isn't fast enough). Sure you can buy CRT monitors still, but the half-decent ones are hard to find compared to the crappy ones always on sale (partly because a few bucks more gets you an LCD that's half decent and not fuzzy). Oh yeah, said gamer also never uses wireless, because the latency of wireless affects their ping (true, but we're still shaving milliseconds here).
I expect to see basic 10/100 switches with cut-through switching touted as the next greatest thing in gaming shortly because cut-through switching has less latency than store-and-forward (still talking about milliseconds).
The only thing that reallys keeps "hardcore gamers" at bay tends to be that most tend to be intelligent and can look through the marketing...
You must be using the "1MB=1000000 bytes" methodology, because I only see 957MB on my formatted SD card. :)
Actually, flash memory cards are measured using the binary system, so a "1GB" card has a 1GiB flash chip inside it.
However, the fact that you lose 67MB is easily found.
NAND flash chips (the kind used in flash storage media) is inperfect, and bad blocks abound. Typically 2% of the available blocks are reserved for bad block remapping and replacement. 20MB gone.
SD cards have to have a special "secure" mode for storing DRM keys (which use a CSS-like procedure of media key (individual per SD card), device key, and other keys to produce a final hashed key that'll unlock it. This is quite big, and is probably accounting for the vast majority of the leftover space (or all of it). Then there's all the little bits - partitioning (lose 64kB due to PC partition limitations), file system (FAT16, usually), and SD controller persistent data.
and was just an attempt by redhat to push the subpar RPM package format. If they were serious about a somewhat standard linux, they would have started with debian.
.deb broken because of this? I hope not!
There is nothing wrong with the RPM format (I do prefer Debian, though - it's a more unix-y way of doing things). It's just that for a long time there was no centralized repository of RPM packages, so everything was a mishmash, and led you to dependency hell. Debian though, has a central repository and enforced the provision that all packages must have dependencies on things inside the repository to be accepted. It's not a format issue, it's a policy issue. E.g., I can't take my Debian installation, point it at Ubuntu's servers, then just do "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" and expect my system to migrate to Ubuntu. Most likely I'd be left with a half-functional mess. Is
RedHat never enforced the policy nor maintained a central repository of packages. Debian has. And for a while, Debian had superior package management tools.
In fact, I really preferred the old Familiar Linux IPK format - you only need gzip and tar (it was all tarballs) to hack through those packages rather than debian's usage of ar and tarballs.
(And these days, with apt-rpm and yum, dependency issues have reduced significantly).
In my pocket, is a PocketPC (cmon, no one calls it WinCE anymore) based phone PDA. It's an I-mate JAM, made by HTC.
That's because Microsoft has two separate product lines. One is called "Windows Embedded" and encompasses WIndows CE and Windows XP Embedded. The other is called "Windows Mobile" and brings under one roof PocketPC and Smartphone.
People get confused because the first devices from Microsoft were running Windows CE, which was so poor as a PDA that well, it was laughed off the market (c'mon, double-tapping just doesn't work for touch screens).
So what Microsoft did was take the latest WinCE version at the time (3.0), fork it and turned it into PocketPC (PocketPC 2000), which evolved into 2002, etc. Windows CE continued as an embedded product. It wasn't until Windows CE.net 4.2 that the PocketPC team resynced with Windows CE (PocketPC 2003 Second Edition is based on CE.net 4.2). Then in 2005 PocketPC and Smartphone were rebranded as "Windows Mobile", on the release of Windows Mobile 5 (2005) (Magneto), based on Windows CE 5.0 (released mid 2004).
In fact, until WinCE 4.2, it was impossible to run PocketPC apps on WinCE - due to library differences (aygshell.dll being a primary culprit). Windows CE has an implementation of their own of aygshell.dll, so PocketPC apps do run now. But Casio released several Casiopeias that ran Windows CE rather than PocketPC with a custom-developed shell so it was more PDA friendly.
No. This is because while it was capable of running CE, most of the machines out there didn't use it because of licensing and difficulty of use issues. They did like they always did with a console- they programmed to the bare metal. It's also worth noting that you'd
= /library/en-us/wcemultimedia5/html/wce50lrfdirectd rawcreate.asp
have to come up with an SH4 emulator as this is for ARM/XScale versions of CE only, along with some way of emulating the behavior of a PowerVR chip because they didn't come up with DirectX for CE (It's part of the reason they use Embedded XP in the X-Box...).
Actually, DirectX has been a part of Windows CE for years now. It was originally part of Windows CE 2.12 with the optional DirectX Pak add-on, and available built in inside of WinCE 3.0 and onwards. WinCE4 (WinCE.NET) made it more visible, and I think WinCE 5 now supports Direct3D (Mobile).
Windows *MOBILE* only acquired DirectX as of WinMo 5 (Magneto) (the reason was to support DirectShow for camera support rather than try to do a Video4Windows thing). Of course, they didn't take the CE version of DirectX, but ported DirectX from Windows XP. Big PITA when you're trying to write a driver that supports Windows CE (part of Windows Embedded) and Windows Mobile because of these differences in DirectX.
Here's a bit from the Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 documentation on say, DirectDrawCreate()
Requirements
OS Versions: Windows CE 2.12 and later. Version 2.12 requires DXPAK 1.0 or later.
Header: Ddraw.h.
Link Library: Ddraw.lib.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
One of the failure modes of a Li-Ion battery is what the industry calls "vent with flame", or what everyone else calls, a fire. (A very spectacular one, at that - not just ignition, but the fire actually shoots out like a jet).
Li-Ion batteries are extremely volatile and sensitive, which is why good batteries have a variety of protective circuits on them (or can have) - e.g., physical distortion (detects if the battery balloons), over temperature (charging/discharge), over current, unsafe low voltage (if the battery voltage falls too low, you can't charge it safely), and many more. That's also why their charge regimen is so complex (charge at constant current to ~90% capacity, then constant voltage charge to 100%. Then stop all charging until capacity is around 90% again, then restart CV charge - this is why the first 80% can happen relatively quickly, while the last 20% can often take as long as it took to get to 80% in the first place) since they need charge controllers and "smart chips" to monitor the state of the battery.
Usually these events happen when the battery is actually used, but there isn't anything to say that it can happen otherwise. Those protective circuits require power, and they get their power from the battery while outside the device. And since you cannot store Li-Ion batteries discharged very well, they are often charged at the factory, during assembly and final sale. A nice short somewhere along the line and battery will vent with flame.
There's a reason why most LiIon batteries have hard to get at terminals or come with protective covers. It's not for convenience, but more for during storage/shipping, so the terminals don't get shorted.
Oh yeah, those protective circuits are optional - not all batteries have every one (some may not need it or find a way to protect it in another way - battery distortion can be handled by having the battery having to fit in a slot - if it can't fit, well...). Third party ultra cheap batteries may have *no* protective circuits at all (hence those "Nokia Exploding Batteries").
They supply copies of their databases via BitTorrent - http://tracker.freedb.org/
(which arguably is more valuable than the server side software).
Haven't we learned enough about bandwidth leechers to cause them significant pain already?
I mean, the fact that they're direct-linking an image and using it as a background gives the owner of the website tremendous power over the users. For example, a really annoying background that makes all text unreadable? High contrast checkers can do that, or anigifs that flash incessantly. Or redirect the link to the popular "rgb.swf" (a really annoying flash that plays the Axel F theme and draws stripes of bars alternating red-green-blue constantly.).
Or heck, put up an image of something that's against MySpace TOS and report the site to MySpace!
It works so well for sellers doing the same on eBay (imagine their dismay when that "cool TV" photo they stole is replaced by one that's broken? or similar).
Or maybe redirect to a page that "breaks out" of the page and forwards them to the MySpace front page or something?
A lot of power can be had by bandwidth leeches...
Don't rootkits need to hook into the kernel in some way, and the "some way" in Vista is via signed binaries? Overriding kernel hooks seem to imply that yes, signed binaries are needed as well...
Also, would it be able to hide from a tool like SysInternal's rootkit detector which compares API return values for the registry and filesystem with an actual analysis of the registry files themselves, and a scan of the raw blocks on the disk? (Understands NTFS and FAT, and the registry hive format).
Considering that eBay more or less has Paypal integrated into it? And where I suspect a large majority of Paypal transactions take place is to satisfy eBay transactions? While I've done a few non-eBay-related Paypal transactions, they are very few. I've used more online stores that took my credit card directly than Paypal (and a few of those stores offered Paypal - I paid Visa).
GBuy sounds like it'll be a rival for Amazon zShops and other style system, except less centralized.
We use Familiar as the basis of our distribution. Familiar is nice because it leverages most Debian-ARM packages, so you don't have to do very much compiling, and most of the build system is scripts and easily compilable programs.
u x/
I've personally ported the entire Familiar system to another architecture, too - PowerPC (IBM/AMCC 405 series), and Debian-PowerPC for the most part works. Took me a couple of weeks to create the port, which involved repackaging a number of Debian-PowerPC packages for size.
The ability to leverage a normal Linux distribution, especially Debian (there aren't many distributions that have the immense number of architectures as Debian) saves a LOT of time. Recompiling sucks.
Here are some links - I did a lot of work on the build process.
http://download.intrinsyc.com/supported/iso/i-lin
The PowerPC one is similar to the 4.x releases, 5.0 is ARM only but uses a later version of Familiar, so you'll want that.