Or $20/mo for Netflix. You're behind on the "hip" TV shows by a season or two, but in return you don't have to fiddle with stuff. Can you operate a mailbox? Can you operate your DVD player? You're golden.
Works great. Until you realize your favorite TV show isn't on DVD! And I can name several shows I watch that aren't on DVD. (Damn you CBS. Release the damn DVDs already!).
A number of years ago, the local Fox affiliate posted online the content that was sent to the teleprompters during the news (not Fox News, the local Fox station's news program), raw. So if you missed something, you could just go online and read it yourself (there was a whole section on "Why the teleprmpter text is like so", too).
Too bad they stopped it a few years after that. It was fun though - they made a big fuss about it.
The default password was (for 50,000 employees) "1234".
Someone change the combination on my luggage!
How about "2444"? That way you don't have to remember it differently (one 2, three 4's - one two three four!)
Tired jokes aside, anyone know how many people actually use luggage combinations like that? And does the TSA try those combinations if you don't have a "TSA-compatible" lock? (For those who don't know - a TSA compatible lock is a luggage lock with a special access system for a master TSA key - such that TSA can open the lock without knowing the combination, then relock it. The alternative being that they cut the lock off and leave your luggage unlcoked).
Well, for those who have legally dumped their games onto memory sticks and played them, the speed increase is *wonderful*. A lot of games have very low load times now (and it seems a few have hard coded delays since they show the developer/publisher/etc splash screens with no UMD/memory stick activity.
UMD is slow. Pathetically slow. (Slow enough that the UMDs often have dummy data near the beginning to shove the real data to the end of the UMD, where it can be read much faster, as well as possibly to make it easier to seek around). It's also nice that I can store my games in two 512MB memory sticks (plus have space for a few homebrew emulators). Much smaller than carrying a few UMDs and cases. This will be good for those with larger collections to carry around.
Plus there are a few that use it as their iPod Video... holds a few more movies. Or a few more MP3s.
The loss of traditional TV ads might mean they have to actually focus on the quality of the programming... Of course, instead I will end up with commercials on my iPod.
In a way, advertisers have already coped with this. It's call "product placement ads" and it's been around since TV started. These days, you'll have strategically placed computers (noticed that most laptops tend to be shot so they're easily recognizable? They didn't take the shot of the computer screen with the Dell logo on the side as part of bad camera angles - they did it to get the logo in specifically for the shot. Same goes for PowerBooks (though, since they're really quite distinct, they're easy to take from any angle), MP3 players (Oakley thumps, anyone?), soda (main actor reaches for the distinctly red Coke can), cellphones, etc). Rather than try to advertise during the commercial break, they advertise in the show itself.
Of course, on a tiny iPod screen, it just means made-for-iPod TV filming just got more creative with camera angles and closeups.
Re:the future is the cell phone not PDA
on
The End of PalmOS?
·
· Score: 1
Before you get worked up about the CE threat. Ask yourself how many carry and phone and a PDA. If you had to choose one which would it be?
I carry both. I have a Symbian based Smartphone, and a PalmOS based PDA. My PDA is far faster at doing PDA-ish stuff (PIM and games), than my phone. My phone has a very nice web browser (Opera), but it's piddling 146MHz CPU means that on some pages, it's fully loaded. And that plays havoc with battery life (the CPU being pegged at 100% utilization will easily drain most batteries. Think of it - most smartphones, etc. will not be able to last a full day if by some reason the CPU gets pegged at 100% utilization. Those impressive battery life numbers come from the CPU being idle most of the time. Unfortunately, complex web pages, java ads (!), etc end up tying the CPU and if you don't close it, well, the phone gets mighty warm and you'll find you can't make it rhough an 8 hour day.
My PDA, while running faster, keeps a great battery life (though it's dying), and a much snappier response time - I click, it pops up, no waiting. If only it had Opera...
Oh, and given this, if my phone dies, I'd like to be able to still access my PIM...
I know you do, and that's why it will never happen. Who decides what is a reasonable period time? Or a price within the bounds of the general market? Congress, or you?
Reasonable time is can be defined easily. Make it the lifetime of the patent. And if a patent applies to more than one product, *all* said products must still be available by the time the patent expires. Oh, and said product must still be supported until the patent expires.
Reasonable price is much harder to define, but can be narrowed down by the amount of R&D work that went into the patent divided by the quantity of whatever is patented is expected to sell, plus some healthy margin (say 75% - most places will kill to be able to have 75% of a product's cost be pure profit). If said product sells more, the reasonable price scales down as costs are recouped (to keep people from declaring "we only will sell one"). The upper bounds shouldn't be too limiting, since normal market forces typically dictate that the price falls *much* faster. R&D costs can be easily determined by examining things like worker cost, the stuff they used in making said product, etc (after all, they *do* keep journals for that very reason!).
It also gives NASA plenty of rerun footage... like right now (1514UTC) they're replaying all the launch videos from all the cameras. Quite facinating, really.
Actually, digital sampling *isn't* perfect. There's a very legitimate reason why CDs can sound worse than vinyl, and why tube amps can sound better than transistor amps. (I say "can" - I can't hear the difference most of the time, but poorly mastered CDs and improperly connected amps can create some awful messes of noise).
For CDs, the answer is fairly simple. A digital system has an upper limit. Exceed the limit, and the signal is hard-clipped. The sound of clipping is *very* harsh and quite awful (to most people). Digital clipping especially since it's a "brick wall" style of clip. Vinyl, when pushed to clipping actually distorts the peaks first (until brought to a suitable amount of overload, in which case it's just banging against the limits). But a tiny amount of clipping doesn't really result in harsh noise. And given that today's CDs are LOUD LOUD AND MORE LOUD, really, they start bobbing around clipping. (CDs have a huge dynamic range. TOo bad it's used effectively.).
As for tube vs. transistor amps, the same is true near clipping as well. Transistors basically hard clip (can't really conduct more than full on). They're very linear devices, and they can clip fairly easily. Tubes, when you start overdriving them, enter a non-linear range that basically reshapes the peaks so the outputs don't quite slam against the power rails. Which is why guitar amps tend to prefer tube amps - drive them to distortion for some really neat sounds.
That's not to say that digital signal processing can't replicate the effects, but it would need some attenuation of the inputs, and a high-precisiou, high-accuracy ADCs and DACs (they need the headroom to handle the peaks, and the time they're not being driven to the "out of normal" range, they have to generate at least equivalent quality words.). But it would require that the devices are driven nowhere near their full range. And that has a lot of interesting implications.
And who remembers typing in all the arcane command line options to the only encoder that was generally available... l3enc and l3dec? This was if you didn't compile the ISO encoder...
Also, distributing pirated keys to WinPlay and l3enc/dec because both would only do 30 seconds otherwise?
The site got replaced by a domain harvesting site... I suppose that's one way to avoid a/.'ing. Just redirect your site to one of the many domain harvesters and let them bear the brunt while your site is down.
Because that would ruin the Gilette business model. Printer manufacturers are subsidizing the cost of the printer with the cost of the ink (more expensive than Dom). That's why they deliberately package half-tanks in with the printers.
Inkjet printing is a subscription business. You pay a small amount upfront ("printer cost", though if you get it on special, usually nil). Periodically, you "renew" your subscription by buying ink. Refilling used to be a problem, but with chips like these, well, it's not a simple 5-minute job anyone can do with a syringe anymore.
Same goes with most consoles and games. Razors and blades. Cable TV boxes. Cell phones. etc.
That doesn't mean there aren't options. Besides 3rd parties, there are companies that make modified ink tanks that draw their ink from external reservoirs (with half-liters of ink). Slightly big and unwieldy, but works for those poster-prints printer manufacturers always want you to do. (Do those ink cartridges contain enough ink to do a regular poster print without running out halfway through?).
> the good guys with Apples and the Bad guys > with what appeared to be Dell laptops
There certainly is some trend about it in most recent films. Last one I watched, Clive Cussler's Sahara, is a good example.
Actually, I've seen it in a lot of films in the 90's as well. Always seemed that Macs were used by the "good guys", while PCs were used by the "bad guys" (usually an IBM or Dell laptop - IBMs are easy to identify, dells less so). It's typically in the movies though.
TV shows are more interesting. I watched one where some guy was working at a computer, and had an XP-esque themed window open. A few minutes later, an OS X (Aqua) themed window opened, complete with the three buttons on the left. (And no, no Virtual PC here...). There was another one I saw where some guy was "hacking", and all he really did was use a Mac and typed in the Terminal window. Fun when they zoomed to it, and you see "Welcome to Darwin!" prominently displayed (and the commands he typed were of bash saying "bash: xxxx: No such file or directory").
To be fair, I did see *one* TV show (JAG, first season) where a Mac was used for evil purposes (commandeering a submarine). Fun - they dropped to the Finder one time (you knew it was a Mac - color screen, powerbook 520c/540c with the logo covered by black tape), and realized they probably used some writer's laptop as the main plot on it!
You could try using a different port, since traffic shaping looks for activity targeted a specific ports only. If you're using the default Bittorent port you'll likely be slowed, but pick a port that's commonly used for something else that they don't throttle. (snip)
Nope. Shaw uses Ellacoya based traffic shapers. These units work very close to the application layer, and thus recognize BT traffic, no matter what port you use. They aren't your simple port-based throttlers most ISPs use. Of course, it would be very expensive to scan every packet, so I'm fairly certain it scans only TCP connections, and like a stateful firewall, ignores or shapes traffic.
Of course, Shaw's also got some interesting "usage" scenarios... the "average" user consumes 2-3 GB of traffic a month (they have a 20-30GB soft limit for the standard package). I used to do that when I was on dialup... The unfortunate reality is that our DSL provider (Telus) has a 10GB cap...
All radios failing simultaneously isn't very common, but when it does happen, it's usually never a simultaneous fault in the radios. There's a good likelihood that the pilot forgot to turn on the alternator (or generator)! Sure it's difficult to miss the "VOLT" annunciator is lit, but people still do. And the airplane battery lasts for around 20 minutes before it all goes dark, on emergency load - much less on full load (dual nav/comms, GPS, ADF, transponder, full lighting, etc.) So after a few minutes, the radios start to shut down and you're left with a dark panel. Luckily these days, you don't *need* a radio most of the time (you do if you have restrictions on your medical), and towers usually have phone numbers so if you've lost the radios, or don't have one, you can use a cellphone to call the tower.
(And I've had it nearly happen to me - the alternator control cut out the alternator on takeoff. Luckily I spotted the annunciator and recycled the alternator master, which reset the control unit and brought the alternator online again.).
Instead of random text to fool Bayesian filters, it had hidden recent news article summaries (bracketed by html comment tags) that would be similar to what you might post to a friend.
The simple solution is to have your baysian filter ignore comments. Thus the news article disappears, and any broken words get magically reformed into one word and evaluated as a whole. If your email program won't render it in the final output, neither should the filter. The majority of people's email clients out there will refuse to render comments, and since most people won't look to the HTML comments, well...
(In fact, in the interest of size in emails, there is no reason for comments... ).
Yes, why can't they list them by numeric country code as used for telephone calls, where the USA is 1? In fact we should just rename all countries to numbers instead, for example Nigeria would be 234 (not 419, sadly).
Ah, but then Canada would come first (yay!), since its country code *also* happens to be 1 (the only differentiator is area code...). And since logically most lists which have the same value in a list get sub-sorted alphabetically.
Dead pixels ARE a common problem in all LCD displays. Why is this written like Sony is the only company saying this?
Not really.
Firstly, the common ISO thresholds for dead pixels typically range about 1 to 3 full pixels, and up to 7 subpixels on a typical 17" (1280x1024) display (note: cheaper brands may go with lesser quality panels - BenQ, will allow up to 7 full pixels and 17 subpixels(!) before considering replacement). Going for the worst (3 dead pixels == 9 dead subpixels) - there are 1280x1024x3 subpixels on a 17" panel or 3,932,160. If 9 of them are bad before returns, that's ~0.0000023 dead subpixels, or one dead subpixel for every 436,906 subpixels.
The PSP has a nice 480x270 LCD, or 388,800 subpixels. There should be no dead pixels at all on a screen this small!
In a more anecdotal sense, I remember when color TFTs came out and it was really difficult to get 640x480 screens with zero dead pixels (this was over a decade ago). Fast forward a few years, and the incidence of dead pixels dropped quite significantly, and these days, getting a monitor with dead pixels and laptops with dead pixels tend to be a rarity. It does happen, but rarely (unless you just happen to be really unlucky).
I'm pretty sure people don't complain of dead pixels on PDA screens (QVGA and higher, including oddball 320x320 and Half VGA, to full VGA) - and the incidence of dead pixels on these screens is extremely low.
On screens that are VGA or lower resolution, dead pixels are such a rarity that honestly, it shouldn't be tolerated.
There's always 24445 as a valid combination that can be spoken as 1-2-3-4-5... (One 2, Three 4s, 5).
People always seem to stumble on that when they ask for my combination and I tell them that. Then I show them the correct combination and a light dawns on their heads...
On a modern Unix/Unix-like system, you often have Perl. Save yourself the effort of compiling:
perl -e 'while(1){fork()}'
One thing I always liked to do was run this for about 1 minute, hit Ctrl-C, and see how long until the kernel finally manages to reap all the child processes and the system returns back to normal. Usually can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes before the system becomes responsive again.
(It *is* a great way to get impressive loadaverages of 500+ though!).
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, as far as I can tell there is no way to flip the screen...
Sure there is. If the xserver supports XRandR extensions (and it should, even the old framebuffer xserver did), well, man xrandr(1).
Or $20/mo for Netflix. You're behind on the "hip" TV shows by a season or two, but in return you don't have to fiddle with stuff. Can you operate a mailbox? Can you operate your DVD player? You're golden.
Works great. Until you realize your favorite TV show isn't on DVD! And I can name several shows I watch that aren't on DVD. (Damn you CBS. Release the damn DVDs already!).
A number of years ago, the local Fox affiliate posted online the content that was sent to the teleprompters during the news (not Fox News, the local Fox station's news program), raw. So if you missed something, you could just go online and read it yourself (there was a whole section on "Why the teleprmpter text is like so", too).
Too bad they stopped it a few years after that. It was fun though - they made a big fuss about it.
The default password was (for 50,000 employees) "1234".
Someone change the combination on my luggage!
How about "2444"? That way you don't have to remember it differently (one 2, three 4's - one two three four!)
Tired jokes aside, anyone know how many people actually use luggage combinations like that? And does the TSA try those combinations if you don't have a "TSA-compatible" lock? (For those who don't know - a TSA compatible lock is a luggage lock with a special access system for a master TSA key - such that TSA can open the lock without knowing the combination, then relock it. The alternative being that they cut the lock off and leave your luggage unlcoked).
Well, for those who have legally dumped their games onto memory sticks and played them, the speed increase is *wonderful*. A lot of games have very low load times now (and it seems a few have hard coded delays since they show the developer/publisher/etc splash screens with no UMD/memory stick activity.
UMD is slow. Pathetically slow. (Slow enough that the UMDs often have dummy data near the beginning to shove the real data to the end of the UMD, where it can be read much faster, as well as possibly to make it easier to seek around). It's also nice that I can store my games in two 512MB memory sticks (plus have space for a few homebrew emulators). Much smaller than carrying a few UMDs and cases. This will be good for those with larger collections to carry around.
Plus there are a few that use it as their iPod Video... holds a few more movies. Or a few more MP3s.
The loss of traditional TV ads might mean they have to actually focus on the quality of the programming... Of course, instead I will end up with commercials on my iPod.
In a way, advertisers have already coped with this. It's call "product placement ads" and it's been around since TV started. These days, you'll have strategically placed computers (noticed that most laptops tend to be shot so they're easily recognizable? They didn't take the shot of the computer screen with the Dell logo on the side as part of bad camera angles - they did it to get the logo in specifically for the shot. Same goes for PowerBooks (though, since they're really quite distinct, they're easy to take from any angle), MP3 players (Oakley thumps, anyone?), soda (main actor reaches for the distinctly red Coke can), cellphones, etc). Rather than try to advertise during the commercial break, they advertise in the show itself.
Of course, on a tiny iPod screen, it just means made-for-iPod TV filming just got more creative with camera angles and closeups.
Before you get worked up about the CE threat. Ask yourself how many carry and phone and a PDA. If you had to choose one which would it be?
I carry both. I have a Symbian based Smartphone, and a PalmOS based PDA. My PDA is far faster at doing PDA-ish stuff (PIM and games), than my phone. My phone has a very nice web browser (Opera), but it's piddling 146MHz CPU means that on some pages, it's fully loaded. And that plays havoc with battery life (the CPU being pegged at 100% utilization will easily drain most batteries. Think of it - most smartphones, etc. will not be able to last a full day if by some reason the CPU gets pegged at 100% utilization. Those impressive battery life numbers come from the CPU being idle most of the time. Unfortunately, complex web pages, java ads (!), etc end up tying the CPU and if you don't close it, well, the phone gets mighty warm and you'll find you can't make it rhough an 8 hour day.
My PDA, while running faster, keeps a great battery life (though it's dying), and a much snappier response time - I click, it pops up, no waiting. If only it had Opera...
Oh, and given this, if my phone dies, I'd like to be able to still access my PIM...
I know you do, and that's why it will never happen. Who decides what is a reasonable period time? Or a price within the bounds of the general market? Congress, or you?
Reasonable time is can be defined easily. Make it the lifetime of the patent. And if a patent applies to more than one product, *all* said products must still be available by the time the patent expires. Oh, and said product must still be supported until the patent expires.
Reasonable price is much harder to define, but can be narrowed down by the amount of R&D work that went into the patent divided by the quantity of whatever is patented is expected to sell, plus some healthy margin (say 75% - most places will kill to be able to have 75% of a product's cost be pure profit). If said product sells more, the reasonable price scales down as costs are recouped (to keep people from declaring "we only will sell one"). The upper bounds shouldn't be too limiting, since normal market forces typically dictate that the price falls *much* faster. R&D costs can be easily determined by examining things like worker cost, the stuff they used in making said product, etc (after all, they *do* keep journals for that very reason!).
It also gives NASA plenty of rerun footage... like right now (1514UTC) they're replaying all the launch videos from all the cameras. Quite facinating, really.
By loading up X-Plane and flying the Space Shuttle to a nice successful landing.
Pity X-Plane won't simulate the launch... or the ISS, but oh well.
Actually, digital sampling *isn't* perfect. There's a very legitimate reason why CDs can sound worse than vinyl, and why tube amps can sound better than transistor amps. (I say "can" - I can't hear the difference most of the time, but poorly mastered CDs and improperly connected amps can create some awful messes of noise).
For CDs, the answer is fairly simple. A digital system has an upper limit. Exceed the limit, and the signal is hard-clipped. The sound of clipping is *very* harsh and quite awful (to most people). Digital clipping especially since it's a "brick wall" style of clip. Vinyl, when pushed to clipping actually distorts the peaks first (until brought to a suitable amount of overload, in which case it's just banging against the limits). But a tiny amount of clipping doesn't really result in harsh noise. And given that today's CDs are LOUD LOUD AND MORE LOUD, really, they start bobbing around clipping. (CDs have a huge dynamic range. TOo bad it's used effectively.).
As for tube vs. transistor amps, the same is true near clipping as well. Transistors basically hard clip (can't really conduct more than full on). They're very linear devices, and they can clip fairly easily. Tubes, when you start overdriving them, enter a non-linear range that basically reshapes the peaks so the outputs don't quite slam against the power rails. Which is why guitar amps tend to prefer tube amps - drive them to distortion for some really neat sounds.
That's not to say that digital signal processing can't replicate the effects, but it would need some attenuation of the inputs, and a high-precisiou, high-accuracy ADCs and DACs (they need the headroom to handle the peaks, and the time they're not being driven to the "out of normal" range, they have to generate at least equivalent quality words.). But it would require that the devices are driven nowhere near their full range. And that has a lot of interesting implications.
And who remembers typing in all the arcane command line options to the only encoder that was generally available... l3enc and l3dec? This was if you didn't compile the ISO encoder...
Also, distributing pirated keys to WinPlay and l3enc/dec because both would only do 30 seconds otherwise?
The site got replaced by a domain harvesting site... I suppose that's one way to avoid a /.'ing. Just redirect your site to one of the many domain harvesters and let them bear the brunt while your site is down.
Has Firesomething been updated yet? I loved it, but FF 1.0 broke it permanently... and I do recall it never working since.
Because that would ruin the Gilette business model. Printer manufacturers are subsidizing the cost of the printer with the cost of the ink (more expensive than Dom). That's why they deliberately package half-tanks in with the printers.
Inkjet printing is a subscription business. You pay a small amount upfront ("printer cost", though if you get it on special, usually nil). Periodically, you "renew" your subscription by buying ink. Refilling used to be a problem, but with chips like these, well, it's not a simple 5-minute job anyone can do with a syringe anymore.
Same goes with most consoles and games. Razors and blades. Cable TV boxes. Cell phones. etc.
That doesn't mean there aren't options. Besides 3rd parties, there are companies that make modified ink tanks that draw their ink from external reservoirs (with half-liters of ink). Slightly big and unwieldy, but works for those poster-prints printer manufacturers always want you to do. (Do those ink cartridges contain enough ink to do a regular poster print without running out halfway through?).
> the good guys with Apples and the Bad guys
> with what appeared to be Dell laptops
There certainly is some trend about it in most recent films. Last one I watched, Clive Cussler's Sahara, is a good example.
Actually, I've seen it in a lot of films in the 90's as well. Always seemed that Macs were used by the "good guys", while PCs were used by the "bad guys" (usually an IBM or Dell laptop - IBMs are easy to identify, dells less so). It's typically in the movies though.
TV shows are more interesting. I watched one where some guy was working at a computer, and had an XP-esque themed window open. A few minutes later, an OS X (Aqua) themed window opened, complete with the three buttons on the left. (And no, no Virtual PC here...). There was another one I saw where some guy was "hacking", and all he really did was use a Mac and typed in the Terminal window. Fun when they zoomed to it, and you see "Welcome to Darwin!" prominently displayed (and the commands he typed were of bash saying "bash: xxxx: No such file or directory").
To be fair, I did see *one* TV show (JAG, first season) where a Mac was used for evil purposes (commandeering a submarine). Fun - they dropped to the Finder one time (you knew it was a Mac - color screen, powerbook 520c/540c with the logo covered by black tape), and realized they probably used some writer's laptop as the main plot on it!
You could try using a different port, since traffic shaping looks for activity targeted a specific ports only. If you're using the default Bittorent port you'll likely be slowed, but pick a port that's commonly used for something else that they don't throttle. (snip)
Nope. Shaw uses Ellacoya based traffic shapers. These units work very close to the application layer, and thus recognize BT traffic, no matter what port you use. They aren't your simple port-based throttlers most ISPs use. Of course, it would be very expensive to scan every packet, so I'm fairly certain it scans only TCP connections, and like a stateful firewall, ignores or shapes traffic.
Of course, Shaw's also got some interesting "usage" scenarios... the "average" user consumes 2-3 GB of traffic a month (they have a 20-30GB soft limit for the standard package). I used to do that when I was on dialup... The unfortunate reality is that our DSL provider (Telus) has a 10GB cap...
/i>
All radios failing simultaneously isn't very common, but when it does happen, it's usually never a simultaneous fault in the radios. There's a good likelihood that the pilot forgot to turn on the alternator (or generator)! Sure it's difficult to miss the "VOLT" annunciator is lit, but people still do. And the airplane battery lasts for around 20 minutes before it all goes dark, on emergency load - much less on full load (dual nav/comms, GPS, ADF, transponder, full lighting, etc.) So after a few minutes, the radios start to shut down and you're left with a dark panel. Luckily these days, you don't *need* a radio most of the time (you do if you have restrictions on your medical), and towers usually have phone numbers so if you've lost the radios, or don't have one, you can use a cellphone to call the tower.
(And I've had it nearly happen to me - the alternator control cut out the alternator on takeoff. Luckily I spotted the annunciator and recycled the alternator master, which reset the control unit and brought the alternator online again.).
Instead of random text to fool Bayesian filters, it had hidden recent news article summaries (bracketed by html comment tags) that would be similar to what you might post to a friend.
The simple solution is to have your baysian filter ignore comments. Thus the news article disappears, and any broken words get magically reformed into one word and evaluated as a whole. If your email program won't render it in the final output, neither should the filter. The majority of people's email clients out there will refuse to render comments, and since most people won't look to the HTML comments, well...
(In fact, in the interest of size in emails, there is no reason for comments... ).
I must say, these April Fool's ones are getting really subtle!
Back to the subject, there is a game out there that teamed up with Pizza Hut to really allow one to order while in the game... what was it...?
Would this be the beginning of SKYNET?
Yes, why can't they list them by numeric country code as used for telephone calls, where the USA is 1? In fact we should just rename all countries to numbers instead, for example Nigeria would be 234 (not 419, sadly).
Ah, but then Canada would come first (yay!), since its country code *also* happens to be 1 (the only differentiator is area code...). And since logically most lists which have the same value in a list get sub-sorted alphabetically.
Dead pixels ARE a common problem in all LCD displays. Why is this written like Sony is the only company saying this?
Not really.
Firstly, the common ISO thresholds for dead pixels typically range about 1 to 3 full pixels, and up to 7 subpixels on a typical 17" (1280x1024) display (note: cheaper brands may go with lesser quality panels - BenQ, will allow up to 7 full pixels and 17 subpixels(!) before considering replacement). Going for the worst (3 dead pixels == 9 dead subpixels) - there are 1280x1024x3 subpixels on a 17" panel or 3,932,160. If 9 of them are bad before returns, that's ~0.0000023 dead subpixels, or one dead subpixel for every 436,906 subpixels.
The PSP has a nice 480x270 LCD, or 388,800 subpixels. There should be no dead pixels at all on a screen this small!
In a more anecdotal sense, I remember when color TFTs came out and it was really difficult to get 640x480 screens with zero dead pixels (this was over a decade ago). Fast forward a few years, and the incidence of dead pixels dropped quite significantly, and these days, getting a monitor with dead pixels and laptops with dead pixels tend to be a rarity. It does happen, but rarely (unless you just happen to be really unlucky).
I'm pretty sure people don't complain of dead pixels on PDA screens (QVGA and higher, including oddball 320x320 and Half VGA, to full VGA) - and the incidence of dead pixels on these screens is extremely low.
On screens that are VGA or lower resolution, dead pixels are such a rarity that honestly, it shouldn't be tolerated.
There's always 24445 as a valid combination that can be spoken as 1-2-3-4-5... (One 2, Three 4s, 5).
People always seem to stumble on that when they ask for my combination and I tell them that. Then I show them the correct combination and a light dawns on their heads...
int main() { ;
;
while(1)
fork()
return 0
}
On a modern Unix/Unix-like system, you often have Perl. Save yourself the effort of compiling:
perl -e 'while(1){fork()}'
One thing I always liked to do was run this for about 1 minute, hit Ctrl-C, and see how long until the kernel finally manages to reap all the child processes and the system returns back to normal. Usually can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes before the system becomes responsive again.
(It *is* a great way to get impressive loadaverages of 500+ though!).