Also, Google is a search engine. The moment someone clicks on a link from Google Kids, they're back onto the big wide internet. Sure, Google Kids could put up a link to Nickelodean.com. But it's a short hop from Nickelodean.com to AboutAds.com to the regular Google / Yahoo / Bing / etc sites.
Also, keep in mind that websites have can limits to what passwords you can use (up to x characters, no symbols, etc...)
This one drives me absolutely nuts. You create a system that you memorize to generate random-sounding passwords from a key phrase and the name of the website, then the website goes and screws it up through arbitrary restrictions. No underscores, Must have Underscores, no numbers, Must have Numbers, Letters only, Must have Symbols... I actually had a login the other day where the username was required to contain a number and a unique character, and the password had to be plain lowercase alphanumeric. I could remember the password just fine, but the username was impossible.
This is getting ridiculous. We need to standardize on min 8 / max 32k characters, arbitrary unicode, automatically rejecting dictionary words. There is no reason why any of the above should be a technological problem these days, and it should be flexible enough for future expansion.
Does anyone know of an iphone or android app that automatically uploads video to a remote server while it is being taken? Therefore things like smashing a phone would be useless, as it would already be publicly available.
The problem with Microsoft is that it has grown big enough and entrenched enough that it is slow to respond to changes. There is a maintenence and creativity cost-per-feature, and MS's software has been feature-ing for years now. They don't generally create light and usable tools like Dropbox, BackpackIt, etc because as a company they entrench teams on fighting for expansion of specific parts of larger applications. They're just not setup to compete with small teams doing strange offshoot things.
That's not to say it is an insurmountable issue. But MS needs to re-examine how it structures teams if it wants to directly compete with nimbler, younger companies.
Lame, but what can you do? Their 4G definition would be nice, but it is impractical to have the next network naming standard be for a technology that is years off, and with at least one level of interim network speed technology between them.
That's what I mean by security theater. Because of the awkwardness of typing on a QWERTY layout keyboard with your thumbs, it was far faster to type on the TI-82. When you spend 4 years of math with a keyboard layout, there isn't much you can't do on it. You'll note that certain people can type faster than 60 WPM on cellphones.
Most US airlines are terrible compared to non-US airlines. That's a big reason why international carriers are banned from the domestic market: If US Airways had to compete with British Airways or All Nippon Airlines, US Airways would just cease to be. Even Virgin, which slipped in through a separate subsidiary, has been around for all of five years and has come to be a major player in the hearts and minds of US air travelers. I know lots of travelers that will pay a $100 premium to fly Virgin.
Sadly, this has prevented the market from taking full advantage of scale and knowledge transfers. We need international airlines domestically. Like the car industry, the longer we ignore the international competition, the more inbred and unable to compete our domestic market will become.
In high-school I wrote an arbitrary problem approximating algorithm for the TI-82 in its horribly broken calculator basic. Also, we wrote applications to play solitare, reversi, tetris, and a really crappy overhead shooter without resorting to assembly.
If you have ANY ability to program your calculator exposed, you have zero test integrity. Anything less than that is delusional. Whether that's Ti-Calculator Basic or a more modern programming language doesn't really matter.
As another example, the TI-92 I had in College was banned from the SAT's for having a QWERTY keyboard, yet the TI-89's shared the same internals without a keyboard and were OK. The difference? You had to press the "Function" key to type with a QWERTY equivalent. It's security theater.
For that matter, if you care about memory usage, you only care about memory usage in low-memory environments. In large-memory environments, usage will be different. I would hope that while few applications are running and there is lots memory free, the operating system would just cache everything it ever thought about loading from any drive or network. Similarly, it might be more speed efficient to allocate large blocks of memory for certain tasks, so as to keep RAM access contiguous.
So if you really want to see which is the best desktop for memory efficiency, you've got to pull out memory first. How much program memory is available at 1GB total? 500MB? 128MB? Dip it, and see where things start breaking down.
He actually absconded with the passwords for administrating, not the ones for data. So the money spent was spent, essentially, trying to break into their own admin system, not network itself. It's reassuring that they couldn't.
Presuming they brought in some solid guns being paid $200 an hour, that's 7,500 hours of work, or 750 work days. With 12 physical days with which to make this happen, that's 60+ people.
He was guilty of being a prick, and not releasing passwords when asked. It's pretty thin to call that "network tampering" through inaction, though it's definitely at minimum contract violation.
But they're explicitly billing him for money the city spent searching the network for any vulnerabilities they were afraid he may have added when he left. Not back doors that he did add, but things they were afraid he might have added because they parted on bad circumstances. That's not a precedent I'd like set. If you're afraid an employee might have done something, and they didn't, that should be your fiscal responsibility.
Being guilty of something isn't the same as being guilty of everything.
Watch a movie double blind in the same brand, same size of 60 vs 120. I guarantee you won't be able to see the difference in the straight 24 -> 120 as you would in the 2/3 pulldown to go from 24 -> 60.
The technical reason is there. But in practice, as you're still talking about framerates higher than movie displays and higher than the eye can see, it doesn't actually do anything noticeable.
Vajiralongkorn is one heart attack away from the throne. People may love this king (and with reasonably good reason, from what I've seen), but there is no way they're going to worship Vajiralongkorn without a gun pointed at them.
Unless Sirindhorn somehow gets voted into skipping past Vajiralongkorn, The moment Bhumibol catches a cold Thailand is in deep trouble.
There are actually laws in the US to help prevent US citizens from falling prey to UK libel laws. The UK really needs to get its act together about libel. If the US is looking at you saying "you need to get your books in order man," then things have gotten pretty bad.
And the idea of issuing a gag order for "Twitter" is amusing. Twitter Incorporated doesn't actually post anything. They might as well have thrown a gag order at British Telcom to prevent people from talking about it on their phones. If they wanted a filtering order, that might be different. I don't know that they have the authority to require a company to implement a filtering system. But a classic gag order on a common carrier is meaningless.
Most of what gets sold in high-end home video is BS these days.
120 and 240 FPS are invisible to the human eye. More importantly, the source material is either at 20, 24, 29.97, or 60 FPS, so either you have the extra frames showing the same frames again (thus being useless), or you generate extra frames which didn't previously exist and which look a bit plasticky and odd. In test after test, the "Motion Plus" and other BS upframing is rated as adding noise, because that's all it does to the signal.
For that matter, basically any sort of image processing done on the image is either so heavy handed that people rate it as noise, or too simple to be noticed. Either way, it helps push your audio and video further out of sync.
Contrast Ratios have been fantasy numbers for years. These compare the brightness of the brightest white to the brightness of black when turned off. No help there.
Computer attachment "play movies from an attached thumb drive" are out-of-date before you even get it. No matter how much they promise to release current drivers for Xvid, etc, they won't.
Also notice that Best Buy tends to give video feeds to their expensive sets through HDMI cables, and their cheaper sets through the older and noiser Co-Ax. This alone accounts for pretty much all of the visual difference you see between sets.
The problem screen makers are facing is the simple fact that modern TV screens are pretty darned good. An LG 1080p60 in a 42" screen will run you $500 or so, and is as crisp and gorgeous as you can notice. Really, the only step up from there are the 6 foot screens, and those are basically expensive for their size. Everything else is just trying to milk more money from you.
Square in the 90's was responsible for some very un-square like classics, such as Einhander, Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve, Super Mario RPG, Bushido Blade, Tobal, All-Star Pro Wrestling, etc.
They need to get back to pushing into smaller, lower-cost, more experimental titles. Ridiculous production values will only get you so far. And always making the same games will burn out the creativity of your teams faster than any hamfisted merger might.
A few months back I had photographed a subway fire here in Boston, and tweeted it. It showed up on a few news organization's websites, with proper attribution. It didn't occur to me to be outraged about it or anything, as it was a newsworthy photo. And if you're putting something up on Twitter it's not like you're intending to horde it. They used it well, in context of the story, and actually attributed it. Good on them.
The thing is, by partnering with certain organizations (aka getting paid), this implies that Twitpic now plans to stop others from doing this. I.E. by posting to Twitter via Twitpic, they now plan on stopping the dissemination of the photographs to people who don't pay. They're reducing the possible distribution of newsworthy images. Which to me, reduces my value of uploading it. Further, it adds situations where things aren't attributed, or are used entirely out of context (photos of my children being used to sell Viagra would be totally legal).
It's strange. This takes things from basically the situation an end user would want... Things intended to be disseminated get disseminated, while bad uses can be sued to be stopped... into one where the good uses are cut back and the bad uses are suddenly AOK.
Does anyone know which twitter clients use twitpic for hosting?
I wish it weren't this way, but when you give any information to anyone online, there is a very good chance that information is owned by hackers. Nobody is as secure as they should be. And even if they were, it's very difficult to secure large, ripe targets from intrusion. With the physical card scams out there, even swiping your card is pretty iffy these days. I once worked for a mid-sized nationwide retailer that printed full credit card numbers and expiration dates on each recipt. And card swiping is easier than ever.
Really, until we expand the available credit card number space to include single-retailer repeating use numbers, the security your private data has is in odd spending check algorithms, eyes on spending systems, and good old fashioned not being a big enough target.
But when it comes right down to it, our primary payment system is just horribly outdated for the security environment it finds itself in. And while Sony should be darned ashamed for this breach, it's not like this is a weird one-off that never happens.
To be fair, OSX is rather pleasant to self-manage. There are about 5 strips of 5 control panels, each of which is relatively clear in what it does. Compare that to the 48 on a vanilla Windows 7 install, where there is usage overlap and strange complexities and functions you can only reach through help menus or command lines, and OSX really is easier. You can organize folders however you like without breaking anything, whereas the Windows file system is a bit of a sewer. Heck, Windows is up to no fewer than 3 different file server formats, with different permissions on 2 of them. If it weren't for the way it handles menus, and the remarkably stupid Home / End behavior on OSX, I'd say it was pretty close to spot on.
If you install Linux, on the other hand, you're installing a server operating system. Linux desktop has had a lot of polish on it these last few years, but it's still clearly a Mac truck. It's built to haul a trailer: driving it will never be as nice. But then again, it's a server OS.
I'm not saying OSX is perfect. But Microsoft has had years to fix the baseline usability problems with Windows. Instead of taking major bold steps towards a simpler, more usable environment, they've added that godawful ribbon. Now Microsoft is competing with iOS, Android, and Chrome. All of these are winning users by being simple tools to get stuff done. Hopefully this will light a fire under MS's butt to seriously re-examine what the needs of an operating system are, and find ways of simplifying all of our lives.
Yea, and if you have even the slightest clue about the retail world, you'll know that when you put your shit in someones store, they take a cut. 30% is pretty much THE standard amount.
Also, in the retail world, there is a legally enforced single store. If you attempt to sell through any other black-market stores, the main store will ban you for life. When you sell stuff in the real world through a store, that store doesn't provide any of the item stocking, and you have to pay for your own delivery truck to ship goods directly to the consumer. In fact, in this case the main store is really just selling catalogs. Anything the catalog sells to the consumer has to give the main store a 30% cut. And blanket minimum price-match clauses, effectively banning discounts in any other country, are totally enforcible in the real world.
It could also be that "Captured Light" is a group of contracted photographers... their website doesn't list any photographers by name. 10 of them doing 1 month of work each over the course of a year isn't unheard of for promotion purposes. Also, they're probably sending out their juniors who are going underused. Photographers everywhere have been hurting as of late. They could batch up the retouching and printing (or ship that overseas), and reduce the overall cost of the promotion.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, Google is a search engine. The moment someone clicks on a link from Google Kids, they're back onto the big wide internet. Sure, Google Kids could put up a link to Nickelodean.com. But it's a short hop from Nickelodean.com to AboutAds.com to the regular Google / Yahoo / Bing / etc sites.
Also, keep in mind that websites have can limits to what passwords you can use (up to x characters, no symbols, etc...)
This one drives me absolutely nuts. You create a system that you memorize to generate random-sounding passwords from a key phrase and the name of the website, then the website goes and screws it up through arbitrary restrictions. No underscores, Must have Underscores, no numbers, Must have Numbers, Letters only, Must have Symbols... I actually had a login the other day where the username was required to contain a number and a unique character, and the password had to be plain lowercase alphanumeric. I could remember the password just fine, but the username was impossible.
This is getting ridiculous. We need to standardize on min 8 / max 32k characters, arbitrary unicode, automatically rejecting dictionary words. There is no reason why any of the above should be a technological problem these days, and it should be flexible enough for future expansion.
There actually are several states where it is explicitly illegal to film police officers, as ruled by courts in those states.
http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns
http://www.pixiq.com/contributors/248
Does anyone know of an iphone or android app that automatically uploads video to a remote server while it is being taken? Therefore things like smashing a phone would be useless, as it would already be publicly available.
The problem with Microsoft is that it has grown big enough and entrenched enough that it is slow to respond to changes. There is a maintenence and creativity cost-per-feature, and MS's software has been feature-ing for years now. They don't generally create light and usable tools like Dropbox, BackpackIt, etc because as a company they entrench teams on fighting for expansion of specific parts of larger applications. They're just not setup to compete with small teams doing strange offshoot things.
That's not to say it is an insurmountable issue. But MS needs to re-examine how it structures teams if it wants to directly compete with nimbler, younger companies.
The Das Keyboard comes in a "silent" version. It's not really silent, so much as less really loud. It also comes highly recommended.
ITU relented. LTE is now officially 4G, according to them.
Lame, but what can you do? Their 4G definition would be nice, but it is impractical to have the next network naming standard be for a technology that is years off, and with at least one level of interim network speed technology between them.
That's what I mean by security theater. Because of the awkwardness of typing on a QWERTY layout keyboard with your thumbs, it was far faster to type on the TI-82. When you spend 4 years of math with a keyboard layout, there isn't much you can't do on it. You'll note that certain people can type faster than 60 WPM on cellphones.
The QWERTY restriction is arbitrary.
Most US airlines are terrible compared to non-US airlines. That's a big reason why international carriers are banned from the domestic market: If US Airways had to compete with British Airways or All Nippon Airlines, US Airways would just cease to be. Even Virgin, which slipped in through a separate subsidiary, has been around for all of five years and has come to be a major player in the hearts and minds of US air travelers. I know lots of travelers that will pay a $100 premium to fly Virgin.
Sadly, this has prevented the market from taking full advantage of scale and knowledge transfers. We need international airlines domestically. Like the car industry, the longer we ignore the international competition, the more inbred and unable to compete our domestic market will become.
You also can't take the TI-92 into exams.
In high-school I wrote an arbitrary problem approximating algorithm for the TI-82 in its horribly broken calculator basic. Also, we wrote applications to play solitare, reversi, tetris, and a really crappy overhead shooter without resorting to assembly.
If you have ANY ability to program your calculator exposed, you have zero test integrity. Anything less than that is delusional. Whether that's Ti-Calculator Basic or a more modern programming language doesn't really matter.
As another example, the TI-92 I had in College was banned from the SAT's for having a QWERTY keyboard, yet the TI-89's shared the same internals without a keyboard and were OK. The difference? You had to press the "Function" key to type with a QWERTY equivalent. It's security theater.
For that matter, if you care about memory usage, you only care about memory usage in low-memory environments. In large-memory environments, usage will be different. I would hope that while few applications are running and there is lots memory free, the operating system would just cache everything it ever thought about loading from any drive or network. Similarly, it might be more speed efficient to allocate large blocks of memory for certain tasks, so as to keep RAM access contiguous.
So if you really want to see which is the best desktop for memory efficiency, you've got to pull out memory first. How much program memory is available at 1GB total? 500MB? 128MB? Dip it, and see where things start breaking down.
He actually absconded with the passwords for administrating, not the ones for data. So the money spent was spent, essentially, trying to break into their own admin system, not network itself. It's reassuring that they couldn't.
Presuming they brought in some solid guns being paid $200 an hour, that's 7,500 hours of work, or 750 work days. With 12 physical days with which to make this happen, that's 60+ people.
He was guilty of being a prick, and not releasing passwords when asked. It's pretty thin to call that "network tampering" through inaction, though it's definitely at minimum contract violation.
But they're explicitly billing him for money the city spent searching the network for any vulnerabilities they were afraid he may have added when he left. Not back doors that he did add, but things they were afraid he might have added because they parted on bad circumstances. That's not a precedent I'd like set. If you're afraid an employee might have done something, and they didn't, that should be your fiscal responsibility.
Being guilty of something isn't the same as being guilty of everything.
Watch a movie double blind in the same brand, same size of 60 vs 120. I guarantee you won't be able to see the difference in the straight 24 -> 120 as you would in the 2/3 pulldown to go from 24 -> 60.
The technical reason is there. But in practice, as you're still talking about framerates higher than movie displays and higher than the eye can see, it doesn't actually do anything noticeable.
Vajiralongkorn is one heart attack away from the throne. People may love this king (and with reasonably good reason, from what I've seen), but there is no way they're going to worship Vajiralongkorn without a gun pointed at them.
Unless Sirindhorn somehow gets voted into skipping past Vajiralongkorn, The moment Bhumibol catches a cold Thailand is in deep trouble.
There are actually laws in the US to help prevent US citizens from falling prey to UK libel laws. The UK really needs to get its act together about libel. If the US is looking at you saying "you need to get your books in order man," then things have gotten pretty bad.
And the idea of issuing a gag order for "Twitter" is amusing. Twitter Incorporated doesn't actually post anything. They might as well have thrown a gag order at British Telcom to prevent people from talking about it on their phones. If they wanted a filtering order, that might be different. I don't know that they have the authority to require a company to implement a filtering system. But a classic gag order on a common carrier is meaningless.
Most of what gets sold in high-end home video is BS these days.
120 and 240 FPS are invisible to the human eye. More importantly, the source material is either at 20, 24, 29.97, or 60 FPS, so either you have the extra frames showing the same frames again (thus being useless), or you generate extra frames which didn't previously exist and which look a bit plasticky and odd. In test after test, the "Motion Plus" and other BS upframing is rated as adding noise, because that's all it does to the signal.
For that matter, basically any sort of image processing done on the image is either so heavy handed that people rate it as noise, or too simple to be noticed. Either way, it helps push your audio and video further out of sync.
Contrast Ratios have been fantasy numbers for years. These compare the brightness of the brightest white to the brightness of black when turned off. No help there.
Computer attachment "play movies from an attached thumb drive" are out-of-date before you even get it. No matter how much they promise to release current drivers for Xvid, etc, they won't.
Also notice that Best Buy tends to give video feeds to their expensive sets through HDMI cables, and their cheaper sets through the older and noiser Co-Ax. This alone accounts for pretty much all of the visual difference you see between sets.
The problem screen makers are facing is the simple fact that modern TV screens are pretty darned good. An LG 1080p60 in a 42" screen will run you $500 or so, and is as crisp and gorgeous as you can notice. Really, the only step up from there are the 6 foot screens, and those are basically expensive for their size. Everything else is just trying to milk more money from you.
Square in the 90's was responsible for some very un-square like classics, such as Einhander, Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve, Super Mario RPG, Bushido Blade, Tobal, All-Star Pro Wrestling, etc.
They need to get back to pushing into smaller, lower-cost, more experimental titles. Ridiculous production values will only get you so far. And always making the same games will burn out the creativity of your teams faster than any hamfisted merger might.
A few months back I had photographed a subway fire here in Boston, and tweeted it. It showed up on a few news organization's websites, with proper attribution. It didn't occur to me to be outraged about it or anything, as it was a newsworthy photo. And if you're putting something up on Twitter it's not like you're intending to horde it. They used it well, in context of the story, and actually attributed it. Good on them.
The thing is, by partnering with certain organizations (aka getting paid), this implies that Twitpic now plans to stop others from doing this. I.E. by posting to Twitter via Twitpic, they now plan on stopping the dissemination of the photographs to people who don't pay. They're reducing the possible distribution of newsworthy images. Which to me, reduces my value of uploading it. Further, it adds situations where things aren't attributed, or are used entirely out of context (photos of my children being used to sell Viagra would be totally legal).
It's strange. This takes things from basically the situation an end user would want... Things intended to be disseminated get disseminated, while bad uses can be sued to be stopped... into one where the good uses are cut back and the bad uses are suddenly AOK.
Does anyone know which twitter clients use twitpic for hosting?
I wish it weren't this way, but when you give any information to anyone online, there is a very good chance that information is owned by hackers. Nobody is as secure as they should be. And even if they were, it's very difficult to secure large, ripe targets from intrusion. With the physical card scams out there, even swiping your card is pretty iffy these days. I once worked for a mid-sized nationwide retailer that printed full credit card numbers and expiration dates on each recipt. And card swiping is easier than ever.
Really, until we expand the available credit card number space to include single-retailer repeating use numbers, the security your private data has is in odd spending check algorithms, eyes on spending systems, and good old fashioned not being a big enough target.
But when it comes right down to it, our primary payment system is just horribly outdated for the security environment it finds itself in. And while Sony should be darned ashamed for this breach, it's not like this is a weird one-off that never happens.
To be fair, OSX is rather pleasant to self-manage. There are about 5 strips of 5 control panels, each of which is relatively clear in what it does. Compare that to the 48 on a vanilla Windows 7 install, where there is usage overlap and strange complexities and functions you can only reach through help menus or command lines, and OSX really is easier. You can organize folders however you like without breaking anything, whereas the Windows file system is a bit of a sewer. Heck, Windows is up to no fewer than 3 different file server formats, with different permissions on 2 of them. If it weren't for the way it handles menus, and the remarkably stupid Home / End behavior on OSX, I'd say it was pretty close to spot on.
If you install Linux, on the other hand, you're installing a server operating system. Linux desktop has had a lot of polish on it these last few years, but it's still clearly a Mac truck. It's built to haul a trailer: driving it will never be as nice. But then again, it's a server OS.
I'm not saying OSX is perfect. But Microsoft has had years to fix the baseline usability problems with Windows. Instead of taking major bold steps towards a simpler, more usable environment, they've added that godawful ribbon. Now Microsoft is competing with iOS, Android, and Chrome. All of these are winning users by being simple tools to get stuff done. Hopefully this will light a fire under MS's butt to seriously re-examine what the needs of an operating system are, and find ways of simplifying all of our lives.
Yea, and if you have even the slightest clue about the retail world, you'll know that when you put your shit in someones store, they take a cut. 30% is pretty much THE standard amount.
Also, in the retail world, there is a legally enforced single store. If you attempt to sell through any other black-market stores, the main store will ban you for life. When you sell stuff in the real world through a store, that store doesn't provide any of the item stocking, and you have to pay for your own delivery truck to ship goods directly to the consumer. In fact, in this case the main store is really just selling catalogs. Anything the catalog sells to the consumer has to give the main store a 30% cut. And blanket minimum price-match clauses, effectively banning discounts in any other country, are totally enforcible in the real world.
Good analogy.
Color me Naieve, but when did Apple charge software developers in the 80's and 90's for Mac development?
It could also be that "Captured Light" is a group of contracted photographers... their website doesn't list any photographers by name. 10 of them doing 1 month of work each over the course of a year isn't unheard of for promotion purposes. Also, they're probably sending out their juniors who are going underused. Photographers everywhere have been hurting as of late. They could batch up the retouching and printing (or ship that overseas), and reduce the overall cost of the promotion.
It really depends on how big Captured Light is.