I suppose the thing is that before Apple did it, there was no way of getting access to the sensor data. I have a laptop with tha hard drive sensor in it, but the sensor is claimed by the "ACPI motion sensor" driver. Instead, the Apple driver outputs a simple value accessible from userspace.
I know you can get accellerometer and other sensors for the PC easily, but they were usually external, and internal built in ones were usually hidden from software view. All it took was Apple to start making it easy to access the information...
The problem is that most QA guys are more interested in hitting their daily/weekly quotas instead of spending the time it takes to root out serious issues that need to be fixed. For example - I'm an artist, and I'm pretty sure I'm able to notice when something is misaligned or off by a few pixels - to me, QA would be a hell of a lot more useful if they would track down a bug on a screen that crashes 1 out of every 4 times as opposed to sending me 35 bugs that are the *exact same issue* but spread across several screens.
When you're paid minimum wage for 40 hours (if you're lucky), and expected to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week (during non-crunch) for that salary, and have to file a minimum of X bugs a day or you're fired, you can't expect much quality. Coupled with the fact that most QA testers aren't properly trained professionals, but more of high-school kids trying to have a "cool" job working for a game company, it gets worse. That, and running through the same part of a level day after day gets old, quick. (Of course, I should mention that it's number of bugs filed, not actual bugs reproducible, that count - if it was the latter, expect mass firings shortly).
Real bug reports take time to file - if it's a particularly complex bug, it can take a week or more to properly reproduce and document it.
I suppose, since you're an artist, if your job productivity was based solely on the number of textures you produce, or complete models (let's say, one model a day, or 20 textures a day), then the quality of your work would go down as well (though, we might end up with a large number of trees and other simple models to compensate for that main character model). Add to that many high school students clamoring to replace you...
QA for games suck because they're not allowed to do a good job (if I came across a bug that took me a day to properly report, I'd be down 34 bugs, and my coworker beside me just files 35 identical bugs in the morning and goofs off the rest of the day...).
Community Server is the largest PoS software around, unfortunately.
One of my favorite websites runs it (The Daily WTF), and there are continual complaints about it on practically every entry. One of the primary problems (improved, but still not completely fixed) is its mysterious ability to take a nicely formatted post, and end up automagically quoting all the < and > in the HTML view. End result is the preview looks OK, but the final post ends up a gobbledegook of HTML. Turns a nice post into an unreadable mess. It gets worse if people use different browsers.
(And some people complain it's a larger WTF than the WTF's that get posted!). It makes Slashcode look good.
On the upside, Community Server does look very nice. But the mangled posts tends to be a huge problem.
I don't know. But spammers make A LOT Of money - $1M is a tiny fraction of the amount he made ($55M), and his assets have to be sold to pay that $1M. So I don't feel one iota of guilt that this guy makes $55M by stealing from people, and now loses his house because he spent $55M on god-knows-what.
And yes, spammers steal - everytime they send an email, the recipient pays for it and all intermediaries that carry it. Even if it only costed 1 cent per spam in total costs (bandwidth, electricity, hardware - to handle spam requires more bandwidth, more electricity to power more servers and cooling) from the time the spammer starts his run to when it arrives in my inbox (10 or 11 copies of same), that penny suddenly becomse $10,000 stolen from all of us. And guess who pays? We all do - in increased service fees. And what does the spammer pay? Probably a few cents for the connection time, and 10 or 15 minutes crafting the email. An hour if they want to use graphics. It certainly doesn't cost $10,000 in *his* expenses.
And I'm not even going to talk about zombie'd computers.
Busy business traveller/father is on a stop over/arriving/departing to return to family. Traveller is guilty for spending last few weeks away from kids, and maybe even missed birthday. Too busy to shop on the road, they want to buy something for them.
So they are rushing to their gate and see iPods for sale - and what better opportunity to take the 3 minutes to buy an iPod as a "make up" gift.
And for everyone else... the "Oh SH*T! I forgot my adapter!" works just fine too...
I played the Uno demo on Xbox Live Arcade recently - to indicate that the system was waiting on you (it was your turn), it would rumble the controller. So if you were watching and got confused who the current player is (easy on fast Uno games), the rumble told you that yes, it was your turn.
OT: The only thing I wish Uno had was "Hot Death" mode.
The best one yet is where the target link went to a website, and through some javascript, put an image over the URL bar! The image had the right URL in it, and if you moved the window around, the image moved too (though, because it was javascript, the image movement lagged a bit, so depending on how fast you moved the window, you could see the real URL, then the image jumped over it). The reason I spotted it? the image was off by several pixels either way - I thought the text was a few pixels too low in the addressbar (and it was too far left - it went over the icon left of the URL bar). (This was in IE. In Mozilla/Firefox, when I could get it to work, the image was in the completely wrong place). That was probably 1 in 1000, though.
The other smart ones actually do verify the information you give them, too. I suppose for those, signing up with false eBay accounts and using that is good. (Good way to get rid of negative feedback accounts).
The less-good ones had an image that was clickable. Discovered only because text that isn't normally clickable is.
The vast majority are very poorly crafted emails, though. Spelling errors, sending more than one to the same email address (If you receive 3 or 4 Paypal or eBay phishes, it kinda gives the whole game away). And they don't hide the URL at all - just plain old non-redirector links. Phishing has reached the realm of the idiots.
Luckily, eBay and Paypal have several characteristics I've noticed in their legit emails:
1) If you use a separate email account for eBay and Paypal from your regular email, well, that is clue #1 if you receive an eBay or Paypal email in an account that isn't what you use for eBay and Paypal. 2) eBay emails will *always* include your eBay username in the email, not the email address. Paypal emails will include your real name as registered. This detail is almost always impossible to get directly unless you've conducted business with the target through eBay or Paypal. 3) eBay and Paypal use specific From addresses - all eBay item questions do *not* come from aw-confirm (that's only used by the bid confirmation system). 4) For eBay specifically, if you get a phish for an item, the item description is always included, while phishes just give you the item number (because the item description will tell you "fake" immediately). In addition, all eBay messages appear in the "My eBay" message section. If unsure, log in to eBay and check there.
While I dislike NCAs, and posted earlier how they may not be seen by the courts favoriably, I've come across an article about how he defended Ubisoft's non-compete agreement when accused by EA for locking up employees by non-competes.
The legality of non-compete clauses is largely regional. In the US alone, the degrees to which such clauses are valid varies from state to state. From country to country the differences are even greater.
IANAL, but I believe in Canada, the courts have to see the "reasonableness" of the non-compete - is it for a specific geographica area for a specific period of time, that sort of thing. And the courts in general, when it is an individual v. a group (company, association, etc) fighting a case where the individual is being barred from making a living doing something by the group, the courts have tended to side with the individual. The general feeling is that preventing someone from earning a rightful living infringes on their rights.
So if the non-compete is reasonable in scope (not too large an area) and duration, it most likely will be upheld (e.g., a specific city ("Vancouver"), and for a short period of time ("1 year")), but if it's unreasonable (e.g., a geographic area ("Greater Vancouver Regional District") or a period of time considered unreasonable (probalby anything more than a year)), then they would consider it a likely to infringe on their fundamental rights and disallow the clause.
I mean, arn't they fooling enough people in the status quo? Now, they have to pay people to act like they work for a bank, and have them on call 24/7. The same stupid people are going to believe this (why would your bank email you asking you to call them?), so now the phishers will be losing money by paying actors, and not really getting enough extra to cover the cost.
I think the "Tragedy of the Commons" has struck the spam and phishing world. First, a few spams and you had a high return rate. Now that everyone's inbox is flooded, no one reads them anymore. So people turned to phishing, which made a lot of money. However, people realized that you know, the bank isn't going to send them alerts to *every* email account they have anymore (I get the same phish email in my home account (several copies), and my Gmail account), or as I mentioned in my anecdote, *several* copies. For the past week, Chase Online had a problem *EVERY SINGLE DAY*. The first time, maybe. The Nth time, well, it's obviously a scam.
Either that, or if one were to answer every phish, there would've been nothing left in the account beyond the first couple of phishers.
So now that everyone's into the phishing racket, all the low-hanging fruit is gone, since people get suspicious when the bank sends multiple emails on the same problem, or over the course of a week, or different problems with the same bank. It worked wonders when phishes were rare. Now that they happen daily, well.
Interesting how the Tragedy of the Commons can affect scams as well (which probably included a number of ways spam has evolved over the years).
But hey, calling a 1-800 number can be quite fun, since they're paying for the call. May be fun to do an automated calling thing that calls, presses random numbers, speaks sloooooooowwwwwwlllllly...
China is a good example of what happens to media production when piracy is rampant, the only content professionally created is content that the developer is guaranteed to be paid for. In the early 2000's (can't remember the year) I met a representative of a Chinese game company at the GDC. He said that their only hope for staying solvent was to find a US publisher to bring their games to the States because there was no money to be made in China under the traditional game development model. I beleive EA has said publicly that the only reason they release anything in the region (excluding Japan of course) is to "prime the market" for the day when piracy is no longer a problem there - build up the franchises now with subsidies from their successul regions because they were actually losing money with every title they shipped. Casual pirates should look to China to see what the logical end-result of their actions are: no money for new content development.
On the other hand, I would say content development over here in North America is almost nil as well. Sure there's lots of games, but they're really all rehashes of the same thing. Sure a few things get prettier here, and a few things changed there, but honestly, compared to the entire North American gaming market, unique content is quite hard to find. Or look at other content industries - is there any real new content there produced by those claiming negative losses? Or the movie industry? Same old plot rehashes, same old explosions and special effects...
Could it be that casual piracy is perhaps the result of the lack of interesting content? Could it be that piracy has different causes? Over in Asia, the relatively low wages of the general population means they can't spend $20 so casually on a DVD? And perhaps, you know, if they were to pay $40-60 on a game, that would basically kill their budget for a good few months, only really to find out it wasn't worth it? (Even in more affluent Asian countries, like Singapore, it took the effort of a local *re*publisher to get game costs down. They sought out licenses to republish games so they wouldn't have to be imported...).
Subscription games are huge outside of Asia - the rise in MMORPGs is evidence of that. In addition, the local culture can also have an influence in the types of games - teenagers in a lot of cultures (China, SE Asia) tend to spend a lot of time studying (mostly to get into the required universities...), and really don't have a lot of time sitting at the computer, so mobile games and games suited to more casual play would tend to take off.
Opera (full version) is available for Symbian UIQ and Symbian Series-60 devices... it's on their web page. (I believe the UIQ version is free for SonyEriccson phones).
This isn't a mini version, but a full blown one that renders locally. It shows how inadequate my phone is (16MB RAM, 146MHz CPU) for browsing the web - anything more than a few anigifs, javascripts, or full sized images and the phone slows to a crawl. Toss in Java applets and you've got a battery sucker as the CPU gets pegged at 100%.
(That said, it's one of the few that can view PNGs correctly...).
It's not just acronyms. It's mixed units. A METAR in North America (Canada, at least) will get you the temperature in degress Celsius, windspeeds in knots, visibility in statute miles, and cloud bases in feet. (We'll leave the altimeter setting as mmHg as a side issue.)
Of course, TAFs are worse. And lets not forget the shorthand for weather conditions (rain/showers/etc) comes from French.
are the AWFUL UMD load times! There is nothing more infuriating than the bloody load times in practically all the PSP games I have.
One of the reasons why I keep my PSP at 1.5 is to use UMD Emulator and Fastloader. Guess what? The PSP is MUCH MORE ENJOYABLE because loading off memory stick (or the hard drive accessory) is way faster. (Off memory stick, it's really quick. Hard drive is perhaps 2-4x slower, but UMD is probably 10x slower than the hard drive). Sony could make a killing if they made it possible to cache UMDs on memory sticks and have games load from there rather than the UMD itself.
Also, I do believe all the excuses are just that - excuses. Lack of buttons? Lack of analog sticks? Well, it means that one has to be a lot more intelligent in writing their games! Take Nintendo's Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time - you have 4 characters you have to control, each mapped to 1 button. That only leaves the shoulder buttons to do stuff with. It works, and is plenty fun for an RPG, and the trick to playing it is to realize that it's not what the buttons do, but combinations of characters and button pushing.
Actually, there's another reason all consoles have to have the serial number scanned - it's the warranty registration! That serial number goes to Nintendo (or Microsoft, or Sony), and it activates the warranty from the time it was scanned. If you later need service, all you have to do is call them up, give them the serial number, and they'll verify immediately if it needs service.
If they don't have the registration on file, then they'll ask for you to include your sales receipt to qualify warranty (and they'll register the remaining period in their systems).
My DS had a dud pixel, and the store I got it from didn't register it, so Nintendo took the original receipt, then created an extension on the replacement unit to the full year from the date I brought it in (not that it extended it much - just a week and a half).
When palm started out they were using those horribly underpowered Dragonball CPUs from Motorola. This was a cut-down 68K chip, with no MMU which ran at between 16 and 33MHz, giving a staggering 3MIPS. The lack of an MMU alone meant that they couldn't go with any Free POSIX-like OS available at the time. The lack of power made it even more certain. They could probably have licensed something like QNX, but then they would have been dependant on a third party for their OS.
Actually, PalmOS was designed to handle the "underpowered" DragonBall - despite only running at 16MHz, it still managed a respectable speed (instant on, extremely fast app-switching). Not only that, but by using a really underpowered CPU, they could squeeze a month's worth of battery life out of 2 AAA batteries (!). PalmOS was designed around its hardware limitations to offer acceptable to superior performance, compared to OSes with far superior processors (PocketPC was usable once it started using 133MHz and faster CPUs. They didn't tend to use regular batteries.).
And the main core kernel actually is licensed - they use the Kadak AMX kernel. Unfortunately, one of the problems with the kernel was although it was multithreaded (PalmOS *is* multithreaded), Palm could not expose any APIs that created any threads. Thus, you have your single-process multi-threaded OS (the original palmOS ran on 3 threads - the main application thread, a serial port thread, and one thread reserved for the Find operation. The serial port thread heandles all the serial communications (hotsync, modem, etc), while the find thread handles doing application searches.
No, nobody wants to see road signs two miles earlier (unless those signs warned them of traffic so they could get off at the next exit). But other applications do exist.
Seeing road signs far ahead might actually be a benefit - I'm sure practically everyone has had someone cut them off because they were in the wrong lane and needed to turn left/right (or better yet, turn from the middle lane. Double points for seeing someone turning in the middle lane while traffic around them could legally go straight or turn!). Or perhaps avoid the fender-bender caused by people slowing down excessively at an intersection to read the street names. Combine the two for SUPER JACKPOT points.
(I prefer to do the "right" thing and continue with traffic rather than try these stunts, but that's just a minority. Others seem willing to risk an accident by doing stunts like this. And the last thing one needs in the world is a somewhat newish or scared driver nearby when these stunts are attempted).
So seeing street signs 2 miles ahead (especially on busy highways and freeways) is a good idea - gives no excuse for people not having plenty of opportunity and time to get into the lane they need to. Especially somewhat tricky intersections and exits where the right lane isn't the most obvious one. Or heck, just seeing that where you want to stop has "no parking" signs down it, then you can turn into the nearby parking garage rather than overshooting and turning around.
Actually, CompactFlash is another formfactor for PCMCIA (not CardBus, mind you). In fact, it's not too far removed from PCMCIA, lacking only a couple of very infrequently used lines (a few upper address bits, battery voltage detects, +12V, +5V support). The missing upper address lines aren't a big deal, since linear flash cards are very rare (only Newton and Cisco used them, I believe).
Most PCMCIA cards were I/O cards, and need very few address lines, especially true of storage media. Most storage media follows the ATA standard, but PCMCIA mandated it as an interface, not true ATA. (Not too difficult, PCMCIA was basically a form of hot-swappable ISA, so a lot of I/O cards were merely ISA cards repackaged with ID information attached).
Sandisk (who invented CF) chopped all the unessential bits off PCMCIA to make the CF standard. In addition, they mandated all CF storage cards have "TrueIDE" mode in which they wouldn't wait to be enumerated by Card/Socket Services, but instead pretend to be an IDE disk. (You keep nOE grounded on powerup to force a card into this mode, otherwise it'll wait for enumeration). This one property of CF leads to the mistaken belief that CF == ATA. It's PCMCIA, and that's why CF-to-PCMCIA adapters consist of nothing more than two connectors and some wiring. Also there's a wide range of I/O devices avaialble, from network and wifi cards, serial/modem cards, GSM/GPRS cards, camera cards, etc. All natively supported. SDIO is a nasty hack by comparison.
By the way, other than SmartMedia/XD which are pure NAND storage devices, SD (and its variants), MMC (different from SD), Memory Stick all have onboard controllers as no flash device natively "speaks" those protocols. Even ones that are single chip solutions have a controller. The CF formfactor allows it to have wildiy large capacities first (8GB CF cards are easy to find, while 8GB cards for other standards are only announced/hard to find/etc).
Just how does an application know when it's running under a good emulator?
SoftICE isn't really an emulator - it's really an advanced debugger, and carefully written applications can detect that they're being run under a debugger (either by hooking the debug interrupt, scanning Windows memory, instruction timing, or even just making a few deft software calls which end up returning distinct results whether or not it's running on a debugger). A book called "Crackproof your Software" (No Starch Press) details some methods of detecting debuggers.
Now, it would be far harder of Skype was running under say, Bochs and being debugged at the same time since the debugger runs independently of the virtual processor. Timing attacks don't work since the performance registers can also be freely altered, and since there's no real hook that can be grabbed, special instruction sequences won't reveal the presence, either.
It's those damn annoying pirahna plants that are annoying! The only way to shut them off is to stand over their pipe-pot, otherwise they'll spew fireballs at you. When next year's exame comes out with more plants, it'll start being hard avoiding the floating red turtles, the bounching green turtles, the walking mushrooms. Oh yeah, and your score is partially based on the number of coins you have when you finally enter the castle...
At the end of the exam, the least Cisco could possibly do would be to offer some sort of treatment for those numb thumbs.
It's called "errata", and it's common for most processors to be released with pages and pages and pages of errata.
Of course, what happens is that the alpha/beta silicon ships to select customers without many errata (though internal testing often finds them too, and they ship with those). Then the manufacturer goes back, resolves a few, then the cycle repeats until everyone is happy with the bugs and it's released with a book of errata on them, and workarounds for the severe ones.
"No fix" errata are common. The most serious of those have workarounds. Fixed errata are for things where there can be no possible software workaround. But there's a large number of varying severity - from cache incoherences, lock failures (you try to lock something, and it either can't be unlocked the usual way, or it doesn't reliably indicate lock), to bus and spec violations.
I know a few professional photographers, and the thinking amongst them is to limit themselves to 1 gig compact flash drives. Anthing more dense is percieved as unstable.
Less that, and more of - if this card dies, so does my revenue. By artificially limiting yourself to smaller memory cards, you use more of them. So that if one dies, well, you've just lost 1/nth of your photos - a bit of a revenue hit, but not so much as losing *all* your photos in a session! For casual photographers, if you lost those vacation photos, no big loss, you have memories. For pros, lose the photos in a shoot, and there goes the earnings for the day (and additional earnings on selling you those photos). And some PO'd customers - how'd you like it if your only wedding photos were only available in 4x6's shot by your family using disposable cameras?
They'd like nothing more than to have one magic data dump where they can take a million photos without changing cards, but if that data dump fails just once, that can easily mean a loss in revenue. One of the first things they do as soon as they get a chance is to dump the memory card to a backup medium, but they still keep the card (redundancy). This can be a portable hard drive with CF reader, or they may wait until they get back, copy the photos, and burn a CD or DVD immediately. There's never enough backups...
I love my AudioTron (2nd gen, Ethernet-only). Like you said, the fact that it requires zero server software, other than well, a storage device that supports CIFS/Windows File Sharing/Samba. In fact, I recently acquired a really cheap SOHO NAS box, moved my MP3s to that, and reconfigured the AudioTron to use that (it scans the network by default, but with a million shares, it could take a while, so I restricted it to one share). Now I don't need my PC on to listen to MP3s.
And with the built-in webserver and self-generated content and HTTP API...
(BTW, if you're entirely curious, it's one of the few Windows CE-based devices that I really like (it runs CE 2.11). And that's how it manages to support CIFS out of the box as well as many other things.).
But yeah, it sucked that it was discontinued. I don't need to run anything new that isn't already running on my computer, or server.
Skillful commentors are able to insert their phrase-du-jour into the code at the right place.
Unfortunately, I'm not a skillful commentor - so I often fail to work in quotes that I have in my head, or thoughts, or characters into my comments. Would be nice since the code can then serve as a journal...
("I can't believe I liked the book then! Sheesh!")
I've bought a low-end Buffalo TeraStation box for home use that does a similar thing as well. Comes in 640GB, 1TB and 1.6TB sizes for (I think) $700, $1000, and don't know about the last one. Low end, cheap, runs Linux inside, so you have concat, raid1 and raid5 configuration of disks. Only thing is that the standard configuration doesn't have NFS (why, oh why?), just SMB and AppleShare. The GigE on it is useless, though. And there are plenty of hacks since the main "OS" part is really a tarball containing the binaries and scripts, so a "firmware" upgrade can be done quite readily. And there are 4 USB2.0 ports for either 1 printer or additional shared hard drive storage - not sure if they can also be RAIDed, but should be possible).
The most unfortunate thing is that Buffalo Technologies is *violating* the GPL (I can't see why they don't enclose the source in the special "utility" share they have that contains software, manuals, etc), since it is a rather nice box for home and small office.
Nice hackable PowerPC Linux box, really. Unsuitable for enterprise use, but for home storage or small business, it's not too bad, and it's cheap. Easily upgradable, too.
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I suppose the thing is that before Apple did it, there was no way of getting access to the sensor data. I have a laptop with tha hard drive sensor in it, but the sensor is claimed by the "ACPI motion sensor" driver. Instead, the Apple driver outputs a simple value accessible from userspace.
I know you can get accellerometer and other sensors for the PC easily, but they were usually external, and internal built in ones were usually hidden from software view. All it took was Apple to start making it easy to access the information...
The problem is that most QA guys are more interested in hitting their daily/weekly quotas instead of spending the time it takes to root out serious issues that need to be fixed. For example - I'm an artist, and I'm pretty sure I'm able to notice when something is misaligned or off by a few pixels - to me, QA would be a hell of a lot more useful if they would track down a bug on a screen that crashes 1 out of every 4 times as opposed to sending me 35 bugs that are the *exact same issue* but spread across several screens.
When you're paid minimum wage for 40 hours (if you're lucky), and expected to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week (during non-crunch) for that salary, and have to file a minimum of X bugs a day or you're fired, you can't expect much quality. Coupled with the fact that most QA testers aren't properly trained professionals, but more of high-school kids trying to have a "cool" job working for a game company, it gets worse. That, and running through the same part of a level day after day gets old, quick. (Of course, I should mention that it's number of bugs filed, not actual bugs reproducible, that count - if it was the latter, expect mass firings shortly).
Real bug reports take time to file - if it's a particularly complex bug, it can take a week or more to properly reproduce and document it.
I suppose, since you're an artist, if your job productivity was based solely on the number of textures you produce, or complete models (let's say, one model a day, or 20 textures a day), then the quality of your work would go down as well (though, we might end up with a large number of trees and other simple models to compensate for that main character model). Add to that many high school students clamoring to replace you...
QA for games suck because they're not allowed to do a good job (if I came across a bug that took me a day to properly report, I'd be down 34 bugs, and my coworker beside me just files 35 identical bugs in the morning and goofs off the rest of the day...).
Community Server is the largest PoS software around, unfortunately.
One of my favorite websites runs it (The Daily WTF), and there are continual complaints about it on practically every entry. One of the primary problems (improved, but still not completely fixed) is its mysterious ability to take a nicely formatted post, and end up automagically quoting all the < and > in the HTML view. End result is the preview looks OK, but the final post ends up a gobbledegook of HTML. Turns a nice post into an unreadable mess. It gets worse if people use different browsers.
(And some people complain it's a larger WTF than the WTF's that get posted!). It makes Slashcode look good.
On the upside, Community Server does look very nice. But the mangled posts tends to be a huge problem.
I don't know. But spammers make A LOT Of money - $1M is a tiny fraction of the amount he made ($55M), and his assets have to be sold to pay that $1M. So I don't feel one iota of guilt that this guy makes $55M by stealing from people, and now loses his house because he spent $55M on god-knows-what.
And yes, spammers steal - everytime they send an email, the recipient pays for it and all intermediaries that carry it. Even if it only costed 1 cent per spam in total costs (bandwidth, electricity, hardware - to handle spam requires more bandwidth, more electricity to power more servers and cooling) from the time the spammer starts his run to when it arrives in my inbox (10 or 11 copies of same), that penny suddenly becomse $10,000 stolen from all of us. And guess who pays? We all do - in increased service fees. And what does the spammer pay? Probably a few cents for the connection time, and 10 or 15 minutes crafting the email. An hour if they want to use graphics. It certainly doesn't cost $10,000 in *his* expenses.
And I'm not even going to talk about zombie'd computers.
Here's a likely scenario.
Busy business traveller/father is on a stop over/arriving/departing to return to family. Traveller is guilty for spending last few weeks away from kids, and maybe even missed birthday. Too busy to shop on the road, they want to buy something for them.
So they are rushing to their gate and see iPods for sale - and what better opportunity to take the 3 minutes to buy an iPod as a "make up" gift.
And for everyone else... the "Oh SH*T! I forgot my adapter!" works just fine too...
Another good use of rumble is notification.
I played the Uno demo on Xbox Live Arcade recently - to indicate that the system was waiting on you (it was your turn), it would rumble the controller. So if you were watching and got confused who the current player is (easy on fast Uno games), the rumble told you that yes, it was your turn.
OT: The only thing I wish Uno had was "Hot Death" mode.
I've seen about two or three that were good.
The best one yet is where the target link went to a website, and through some javascript, put an image over the URL bar! The image had the right URL in it, and if you moved the window around, the image moved too (though, because it was javascript, the image movement lagged a bit, so depending on how fast you moved the window, you could see the real URL, then the image jumped over it). The reason I spotted it? the image was off by several pixels either way - I thought the text was a few pixels too low in the addressbar (and it was too far left - it went over the icon left of the URL bar). (This was in IE. In Mozilla/Firefox, when I could get it to work, the image was in the completely wrong place). That was probably 1 in 1000, though.
The other smart ones actually do verify the information you give them, too. I suppose for those, signing up with false eBay accounts and using that is good. (Good way to get rid of negative feedback accounts).
The less-good ones had an image that was clickable. Discovered only because text that isn't normally clickable is.
The vast majority are very poorly crafted emails, though. Spelling errors, sending more than one to the same email address (If you receive 3 or 4 Paypal or eBay phishes, it kinda gives the whole game away). And they don't hide the URL at all - just plain old non-redirector links. Phishing has reached the realm of the idiots.
Luckily, eBay and Paypal have several characteristics I've noticed in their legit emails:
1) If you use a separate email account for eBay and Paypal from your regular email, well, that is clue #1 if you receive an eBay or Paypal email in an account that isn't what you use for eBay and Paypal.
2) eBay emails will *always* include your eBay username in the email, not the email address. Paypal emails will include your real name as registered. This detail is almost always impossible to get directly unless you've conducted business with the target through eBay or Paypal.
3) eBay and Paypal use specific From addresses - all eBay item questions do *not* come from aw-confirm (that's only used by the bid confirmation system).
4) For eBay specifically, if you get a phish for an item, the item description is always included, while phishes just give you the item number (because the item description will tell you "fake" immediately). In addition, all eBay messages appear in the "My eBay" message section. If unsure, log in to eBay and check there.
While I dislike NCAs, and posted earlier how they may not be seen by the courts favoriably, I've come across an article about how he defended Ubisoft's non-compete agreement when accused by EA for locking up employees by non-competes.
Funny how the shoe is on the other foot now.
The legality of non-compete clauses is largely regional. In the US alone, the degrees to which such clauses are valid varies from state to state. From country to country the differences are even greater.
IANAL, but I believe in Canada, the courts have to see the "reasonableness" of the non-compete - is it for a specific geographica area for a specific period of time, that sort of thing. And the courts in general, when it is an individual v. a group (company, association, etc) fighting a case where the individual is being barred from making a living doing something by the group, the courts have tended to side with the individual. The general feeling is that preventing someone from earning a rightful living infringes on their rights.
So if the non-compete is reasonable in scope (not too large an area) and duration, it most likely will be upheld (e.g., a specific city ("Vancouver"), and for a short period of time ("1 year")), but if it's unreasonable (e.g., a geographic area ("Greater Vancouver Regional District") or a period of time considered unreasonable (probalby anything more than a year)), then they would consider it a likely to infringe on their fundamental rights and disallow the clause.
I mean, arn't they fooling enough people in the status quo? Now, they have to pay people to act like they work for a bank, and have them on call 24/7.
The same stupid people are going to believe this (why would your bank email you asking you to call them?), so now the phishers will be losing money by paying actors, and not really getting enough extra to cover the cost.
I think the "Tragedy of the Commons" has struck the spam and phishing world. First, a few spams and you had a high return rate. Now that everyone's inbox is flooded, no one reads them anymore. So people turned to phishing, which made a lot of money. However, people realized that you know, the bank isn't going to send them alerts to *every* email account they have anymore (I get the same phish email in my home account (several copies), and my Gmail account), or as I mentioned in my anecdote, *several* copies. For the past week, Chase Online had a problem *EVERY SINGLE DAY*. The first time, maybe. The Nth time, well, it's obviously a scam.
Either that, or if one were to answer every phish, there would've been nothing left in the account beyond the first couple of phishers.
So now that everyone's into the phishing racket, all the low-hanging fruit is gone, since people get suspicious when the bank sends multiple emails on the same problem, or over the course of a week, or different problems with the same bank. It worked wonders when phishes were rare. Now that they happen daily, well.
Interesting how the Tragedy of the Commons can affect scams as well (which probably included a number of ways spam has evolved over the years).
But hey, calling a 1-800 number can be quite fun, since they're paying for the call. May be fun to do an automated calling thing that calls, presses random numbers, speaks sloooooooowwwwwwlllllly...
China is a good example of what happens to media production when piracy is rampant, the only content professionally created is content that the developer is guaranteed to be paid for. In the early 2000's (can't remember the year) I met a representative of a Chinese game company at the GDC. He said that their only hope for staying solvent was to find a US publisher to bring their games to the States because there was no money to be made in China under the traditional game development model. I beleive EA has said publicly that the only reason they release anything in the region (excluding Japan of course) is to "prime the market" for the day when piracy is no longer a problem there - build up the franchises now with subsidies from their successul regions because they were actually losing money with every title they shipped. Casual pirates should look to China to see what the logical end-result of their actions are: no money for new content development.
On the other hand, I would say content development over here in North America is almost nil as well. Sure there's lots of games, but they're really all rehashes of the same thing. Sure a few things get prettier here, and a few things changed there, but honestly, compared to the entire North American gaming market, unique content is quite hard to find. Or look at other content industries - is there any real new content there produced by those claiming negative losses? Or the movie industry? Same old plot rehashes, same old explosions and special effects...
Could it be that casual piracy is perhaps the result of the lack of interesting content? Could it be that piracy has different causes? Over in Asia, the relatively low wages of the general population means they can't spend $20 so casually on a DVD? And perhaps, you know, if they were to pay $40-60 on a game, that would basically kill their budget for a good few months, only really to find out it wasn't worth it? (Even in more affluent Asian countries, like Singapore, it took the effort of a local *re*publisher to get game costs down. They sought out licenses to republish games so they wouldn't have to be imported...).
Subscription games are huge outside of Asia - the rise in MMORPGs is evidence of that. In addition, the local culture can also have an influence in the types of games - teenagers in a lot of cultures (China, SE Asia) tend to spend a lot of time studying (mostly to get into the required universities...), and really don't have a lot of time sitting at the computer, so mobile games and games suited to more casual play would tend to take off.
Opera (full version) is available for Symbian UIQ and Symbian Series-60 devices... it's on their web page. (I believe the UIQ version is free for SonyEriccson phones).
This isn't a mini version, but a full blown one that renders locally. It shows how inadequate my phone is (16MB RAM, 146MHz CPU) for browsing the web - anything more than a few anigifs, javascripts, or full sized images and the phone slows to a crawl. Toss in Java applets and you've got a battery sucker as the CPU gets pegged at 100%.
(That said, it's one of the few that can view PNGs correctly...).
It's not just acronyms. It's mixed units. A METAR in North America (Canada, at least) will get you the temperature in degress Celsius, windspeeds in knots, visibility in statute miles, and cloud bases in feet. (We'll leave the altimeter setting as mmHg as a side issue.)
Of course, TAFs are worse. And lets not forget the shorthand for weather conditions (rain/showers/etc) comes from French.
are the AWFUL UMD load times! There is nothing more infuriating than the bloody load times in practically all the PSP games I have.
One of the reasons why I keep my PSP at 1.5 is to use UMD Emulator and Fastloader. Guess what? The PSP is MUCH MORE ENJOYABLE because loading off memory stick (or the hard drive accessory) is way faster. (Off memory stick, it's really quick. Hard drive is perhaps 2-4x slower, but UMD is probably 10x slower than the hard drive). Sony could make a killing if they made it possible to cache UMDs on memory sticks and have games load from there rather than the UMD itself.
Also, I do believe all the excuses are just that - excuses. Lack of buttons? Lack of analog sticks? Well, it means that one has to be a lot more intelligent in writing their games! Take Nintendo's Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time - you have 4 characters you have to control, each mapped to 1 button. That only leaves the shoulder buttons to do stuff with. It works, and is plenty fun for an RPG, and the trick to playing it is to realize that it's not what the buttons do, but combinations of characters and button pushing.
Actually, there's another reason all consoles have to have the serial number scanned - it's the warranty registration! That serial number goes to Nintendo (or Microsoft, or Sony), and it activates the warranty from the time it was scanned. If you later need service, all you have to do is call them up, give them the serial number, and they'll verify immediately if it needs service.
If they don't have the registration on file, then they'll ask for you to include your sales receipt to qualify warranty (and they'll register the remaining period in their systems).
My DS had a dud pixel, and the store I got it from didn't register it, so Nintendo took the original receipt, then created an extension on the replacement unit to the full year from the date I brought it in (not that it extended it much - just a week and a half).
When palm started out they were using those horribly underpowered Dragonball CPUs from Motorola. This was a cut-down 68K chip, with no MMU which ran at between 16 and 33MHz, giving a staggering 3MIPS. The lack of an MMU alone meant that they couldn't go with any Free POSIX-like OS available at the time. The lack of power made it even more certain. They could probably have licensed something like QNX, but then they would have been dependant on a third party for their OS.
Actually, PalmOS was designed to handle the "underpowered" DragonBall - despite only running at 16MHz, it still managed a respectable speed (instant on, extremely fast app-switching). Not only that, but by using a really underpowered CPU, they could squeeze a month's worth of battery life out of 2 AAA batteries (!). PalmOS was designed around its hardware limitations to offer acceptable to superior performance, compared to OSes with far superior processors (PocketPC was usable once it started using 133MHz and faster CPUs. They didn't tend to use regular batteries.).
And the main core kernel actually is licensed - they use the Kadak AMX kernel. Unfortunately, one of the problems with the kernel was although it was multithreaded (PalmOS *is* multithreaded), Palm could not expose any APIs that created any threads. Thus, you have your single-process multi-threaded OS (the original palmOS ran on 3 threads - the main application thread, a serial port thread, and one thread reserved for the Find operation. The serial port thread heandles all the serial communications (hotsync, modem, etc), while the find thread handles doing application searches.
No, nobody wants to see road signs two miles earlier (unless those signs warned them of traffic so they could get off at the next exit). But other applications do exist.
Seeing road signs far ahead might actually be a benefit - I'm sure practically everyone has had someone cut them off because they were in the wrong lane and needed to turn left/right (or better yet, turn from the middle lane. Double points for seeing someone turning in the middle lane while traffic around them could legally go straight or turn!). Or perhaps avoid the fender-bender caused by people slowing down excessively at an intersection to read the street names. Combine the two for SUPER JACKPOT points.
(I prefer to do the "right" thing and continue with traffic rather than try these stunts, but that's just a minority. Others seem willing to risk an accident by doing stunts like this. And the last thing one needs in the world is a somewhat newish or scared driver nearby when these stunts are attempted).
So seeing street signs 2 miles ahead (especially on busy highways and freeways) is a good idea - gives no excuse for people not having plenty of opportunity and time to get into the lane they need to. Especially somewhat tricky intersections and exits where the right lane isn't the most obvious one. Or heck, just seeing that where you want to stop has "no parking" signs down it, then you can turn into the nearby parking garage rather than overshooting and turning around.
Actually, CompactFlash is another formfactor for PCMCIA (not CardBus, mind you). In fact, it's not too far removed from PCMCIA, lacking only a couple of very infrequently used lines (a few upper address bits, battery voltage detects, +12V, +5V support). The missing upper address lines aren't a big deal, since linear flash cards are very rare (only Newton and Cisco used them, I believe).
Most PCMCIA cards were I/O cards, and need very few address lines, especially true of storage media. Most storage media follows the ATA standard, but PCMCIA mandated it as an interface, not true ATA. (Not too difficult, PCMCIA was basically a form of hot-swappable ISA, so a lot of I/O cards were merely ISA cards repackaged with ID information attached).
Sandisk (who invented CF) chopped all the unessential bits off PCMCIA to make the CF standard. In addition, they mandated all CF storage cards have "TrueIDE" mode in which they wouldn't wait to be enumerated by Card/Socket Services, but instead pretend to be an IDE disk. (You keep nOE grounded on powerup to force a card into this mode, otherwise it'll wait for enumeration). This one property of CF leads to the mistaken belief that CF == ATA. It's PCMCIA, and that's why CF-to-PCMCIA adapters consist of nothing more than two connectors and some wiring. Also there's a wide range of I/O devices avaialble, from network and wifi cards, serial/modem cards, GSM/GPRS cards, camera cards, etc. All natively supported. SDIO is a nasty hack by comparison.
By the way, other than SmartMedia/XD which are pure NAND storage devices, SD (and its variants), MMC (different from SD), Memory Stick all have onboard controllers as no flash device natively "speaks" those protocols. Even ones that are single chip solutions have a controller. The CF formfactor allows it to have wildiy large capacities first (8GB CF cards are easy to find, while 8GB cards for other standards are only announced/hard to find/etc).
Just how does an application know when it's running under a good emulator?
SoftICE isn't really an emulator - it's really an advanced debugger, and carefully written applications can detect that they're being run under a debugger (either by hooking the debug interrupt, scanning Windows memory, instruction timing, or even just making a few deft software calls which end up returning distinct results whether or not it's running on a debugger). A book called "Crackproof your Software" (No Starch Press) details some methods of detecting debuggers.
Now, it would be far harder of Skype was running under say, Bochs and being debugged at the same time since the debugger runs independently of the virtual processor. Timing attacks don't work since the performance registers can also be freely altered, and since there's no real hook that can be grabbed, special instruction sequences won't reveal the presence, either.
Moles? Pah.
It's those damn annoying pirahna plants that are annoying! The only way to shut them off is to stand over their pipe-pot, otherwise they'll spew fireballs at you. When next year's exame comes out with more plants, it'll start being hard avoiding the floating red turtles, the bounching green turtles, the walking mushrooms. Oh yeah, and your score is partially based on the number of coins you have when you finally enter the castle...
At the end of the exam, the least Cisco could possibly do would be to offer some sort of treatment for those numb thumbs.
It's called "errata", and it's common for most processors to be released with pages and pages and pages of errata.
Of course, what happens is that the alpha/beta silicon ships to select customers without many errata (though internal testing often finds them too, and they ship with those). Then the manufacturer goes back, resolves a few, then the cycle repeats until everyone is happy with the bugs and it's released with a book of errata on them, and workarounds for the severe ones.
"No fix" errata are common. The most serious of those have workarounds. Fixed errata are for things where there can be no possible software workaround. But there's a large number of varying severity - from cache incoherences, lock failures (you try to lock something, and it either can't be unlocked the usual way, or it doesn't reliably indicate lock), to bus and spec violations.
Nothing new here...
I know a few professional photographers, and the thinking amongst them is to limit themselves to 1 gig compact flash drives. Anthing more dense is percieved as unstable.
Less that, and more of - if this card dies, so does my revenue. By artificially limiting yourself to smaller memory cards, you use more of them. So that if one dies, well, you've just lost 1/nth of your photos - a bit of a revenue hit, but not so much as losing *all* your photos in a session! For casual photographers, if you lost those vacation photos, no big loss, you have memories. For pros, lose the photos in a shoot, and there goes the earnings for the day (and additional earnings on selling you those photos). And some PO'd customers - how'd you like it if your only wedding photos were only available in 4x6's shot by your family using disposable cameras?
They'd like nothing more than to have one magic data dump where they can take a million photos without changing cards, but if that data dump fails just once, that can easily mean a loss in revenue. One of the first things they do as soon as they get a chance is to dump the memory card to a backup medium, but they still keep the card (redundancy). This can be a portable hard drive with CF reader, or they may wait until they get back, copy the photos, and burn a CD or DVD immediately. There's never enough backups...
Ah, yes, another AudioTron owner!
I love my AudioTron (2nd gen, Ethernet-only). Like you said, the fact that it requires zero server software, other than well, a storage device that supports CIFS/Windows File Sharing/Samba. In fact, I recently acquired a really cheap SOHO NAS box, moved my MP3s to that, and reconfigured the AudioTron to use that (it scans the network by default, but with a million shares, it could take a while, so I restricted it to one share). Now I don't need my PC on to listen to MP3s.
And with the built-in webserver and self-generated content and HTTP API...
(BTW, if you're entirely curious, it's one of the few Windows CE-based devices that I really like (it runs CE 2.11). And that's how it manages to support CIFS out of the box as well as many other things.).
But yeah, it sucked that it was discontinued. I don't need to run anything new that isn't already running on my computer, or server.
Skillful commentors are able to insert their phrase-du-jour into the code at the right place.
Unfortunately, I'm not a skillful commentor - so I often fail to work in quotes that I have in my head, or thoughts, or characters into my comments. Would be nice since the code can then serve as a journal...
("I can't believe I liked the book then! Sheesh!")
I've bought a low-end Buffalo TeraStation box for home use that does a similar thing as well. Comes in 640GB, 1TB and 1.6TB sizes for (I think) $700, $1000, and don't know about the last one. Low end, cheap, runs Linux inside, so you have concat, raid1 and raid5 configuration of disks. Only thing is that the standard configuration doesn't have NFS (why, oh why?), just SMB and AppleShare. The GigE on it is useless, though. And there are plenty of hacks since the main "OS" part is really a tarball containing the binaries and scripts, so a "firmware" upgrade can be done quite readily. And there are 4 USB2.0 ports for either 1 printer or additional shared hard drive storage - not sure if they can also be RAIDed, but should be possible).
The most unfortunate thing is that Buffalo Technologies is *violating* the GPL (I can't see why they don't enclose the source in the special "utility" share they have that contains software, manuals, etc), since it is a rather nice box for home and small office.
Nice hackable PowerPC Linux box, really. Unsuitable for enterprise use, but for home storage or small business, it's not too bad, and it's cheap. Easily upgradable, too.