If I walk alone down the sidewalk in a really bad part of town, thumbing through my wallet counting my 20's and get mugged. Yes, you got it right. Blame The Victim.
In a perfect society we could trust every member of the public to "do the right thing". (whatever that is, since everyone's perception of that is at least a little different) But we don't live in Eutopia. There will always be at least a few people out there looking to either take advantage of you or entertain themselves at your expense. Not taking at least minor, reasonable precautions and making yourself a very easy target is not entirely, but at least to some degree, your own fault. There's even laws for that if you look around. Google "attractive nuisance".
Same way, f you don't lock your car door and leave the keys in the ignition, parked in the lot at the mall while you shop, and it gets stolen, you can't blame the car thief 100%. Some of the responsibility rests on you for your carelessness.
Our public utility gives you a discount if you install a remote that allows them to kick down your AC in the summer during the day when their power demand is high. I don't participate in it but I don't see anything wrong with it. It's set to actually turn off the compressor but leave the fan going iirc. It cycles it, so that the compressor only works a certain percentage of the time.
an entertaining prank to be sure, and a surprise that no one's tried it before on this scale. There's no excuse for there not to be black electrical tape over every IR receiver on that set of displays.
If you leave something THAT open to pranking at a public or semi-public event, it's going to happen. That's like leaving LAN jacks open all over the place at the conference and having an unsecured credit card processing machine on the same network. You deserve what you get for that level of carelessness.
On a completely different take, this is not possible with every remote. For example, all Apple remotes have the ability to "pair" with a computer, to prevent a computer from responding to any remote besides its own This is not rocket science, and it's not new. Pairing of remotes to equipment has been going on for years and won't cost them a nickel more to add to the chip. It involves each remote having and transmitting its serial number along with the command, and the computer can simply be told to only listen to commands from one (or a small group of) serial numbers. The only thing they will have to deal with is the occasional tech call from a customer that's managed to pair a different remote to their unit.
I for one would like to see this happen several more times until the manufactures get their heads out of the sand. This is unfortunately what it takes to motivate them. They won't lift a finger until it starts to cost them.
Additionally, it's sometimes hard to find where on a set the IR receiver is at. On the Apple's it's behind the big apple on the front of the unit or the black dot near the latch on the laptops. On some sets, where they have a large black border, it can be hard to locate. Also, the prankster should have been very easy to spot for anyone educated in such things. Most digital cameras are VERY senstitive to IR light, and to anyone with a digital camera looking at the LCD preview screen, or to anyone with a web cam pointed into the audience, that remote would go off like a strobe. It should have taken them less than 20 seconds to find this joker.
The article mentions "Einstein Ring" but that's just the visual effect. The actual gravitational lens pair is a "Solan Lens", and was found by a group looking for the single lensing pair variety. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0511453 . Looks like they've found quite a few of the regular ones so far. I suppose you'd call this find a "double Solan Lens"?
for this to occur requires four galaxies to be very close to being colinear, and we have to be in one of the endpoints. Looking at the picture though there are several galaxies visible so I suppose they have quite a few to look at for this. I wonder just how rare it is? As in, is this the first one discovered? I'd asume if there were any other known double E rings it would have been mentioned in TFA. Hard to say how rare something is when you only have one of them to go by.
... of people looking at what individuals whom they are responsible for a portion of the day do during that time when I am not responsible for them. That would be like my boss firing me from my job because he heard from a coworker that he saw me shoplift a pack of gum at the kwik-e-mart last Saturday.
This just smacks of a control freak that wants to be able to dictate what others do 100% of the time, rather than that 20% or 40% of the time that they are actually responsible for them.
Reprimanding someone for what they do in their "personal time", their time away from your control, is just not right. There's no real difference between my shoplifting and my doing anything else. It doesn't have to be illegal or against anyone's rules but the controller. Maybe I bought a porno mag instead of shoplifting gum. What if he has a problem with that? Should he be allowed to fire me? That's just retarted.
No fun dealing with a boss on a power trip, and that's exactly what's going on here.
I seem to recall that a sterling engine was one of the most efficient ways to convert solar energy to do work. How does this compare with a sterling engine?
Well you read the article, "with perfect lighting conditions, it's possible to squeeze a 60-in. screen out of the projector."
I'm sure by "perfect lighting conditions" they mean the room is pitch black, the viewers are 15" from the image, and all of them have spent the last 10 minutes acclimating to total darkness.
It's not like this was a SURPRISE to them. They SELL the units, the have absolute control over how many units are sold. If your netgame people say the current network can support 80,000 users, you DON'T SELL 200,000 UNITS until you have upgraded your network. (numbers fabricated but you get the idea)
This was entirely their responsibility, and I cannot believe they did not see this coming. What it came down to is they wanted to do a money grab for the holidays so they made as many units as they possibly could, to hell with the network until we get past christmas then we'll divert resources from production to upgrade the net so they can USE the product.
Not saying it's unexpected, just shameful is all. Nothing new there in business.
it rather sounds like Intel used their partnership with OLPC to get their foot in the door in a market that was one of OLPC's exclusive targets. Good business partners do not try to make inroads into the bread and butter of their other business partners. It'd be the same if OLPC started assembling a team to create their own custom processors for OLPC. It'd be a slap to the face.
I recall reading something about what amounted to a flying aircraft carrier. A zeppeline-like airship that launched biplanes.
The USS Akron (ZRS-4) based in Lakehurst, NJ and the USS Macon (ZRS-5) based in Sunnyvale, CA were helium filled rigid airships developed by the Goodyear-Zepplin Company (a joint venture of the Zepplin Company of Germany and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company) for the United States Navy. The airships were designed for coastal patrol and had the ability to carry and launch five small biplanes.
In reviewing the Notable Changes document, it seems the company focused on improving reliability & performance in really specific scenarios
"Among many numerous optimizatings, the speed of multiplying numbers by 1 has been improved by 28%. Expect further optimizations (such as when multiplying by 0) in SP2..."
The military requires PHYSICAL separation between their systems and the internet. Routers count as a phyiscal connection, no matter what the firewall they are running. The idea is that no equipment failure or compromise can lead to a remote intrusion, no matter how severe. If you want to jack into a military computer from home, someone's going to have to move an ethernet cable for you.
If as previously suggested, the "no smoking sign" is connected to my in flight TV remote or anything I have physical access to, then they have some serious rewiring to do on that plane.
Though it would really not surprise me if the airplane has say, one common network link and uses separate subnets or encapsulation to save on wiring, since weight is a big thing on a plane. Of course doing this would be introducing a serious risk in the name of saving a buck, so there's no chance of that happening I'm sure.
That raises the question of whether a patent is to protect an idea or an implementation of an idea.
My personal take on it is that a patent should be to protect an implementation of an idea. If you patent the widget, you should patent YOUR widget, not the idea of widgets. That leaves me free to "build a better widget" in a different way. It's still a widget, (in that it still accomplishes whatever a widget is made to do for the consumer) but it's MY widget, and is creatively and innovatively different than yours, and I should be able to make that to compete with your different or inferior implementation of the idea of widget.
I suppose the problem comes up of where to draw the line. People write patents as general as possible to get them through the patent office. If I were trying to patent a keyboard I could describe my invention as "a piece of computer hardware with multiple switches representing symbols, numbers, and letters". That covers a lot of ground, and prevents anyone from making a better keyboard than you did if allowed. That would be patenting an idea rather than an implementation.
I don't consider ideas patentable, only implementations.
Also, ideas are much easier to describe in generality than are implementations, aggrivating the problem of very general patents.
It's a "chain of trust" aka "chain of DRM" issue. When sending high def video to a display, there's a flag on the HDMI signal that tells it whether or not copying is allowed. This flag must be propgated down the stream all the way to the display. If the flag can't make it all the way to the display, then the source refuses to send video at high resolution.
The idea is that if you say, slip a DVD recorder, inline between the computer and the display, the computer will know there's a non DRM device down the like and will kill the resolution or refuse to play it. This requires cooperation from the display.
In this case it sounds like the display isn't communicating with the DRM, (isn't bouncing the flag back, signing it, whatever, to tell the computer that the signal made it to the display without passing through an unapproved device) and so when the DRM'd player tries to send the video, it's too high a resolution to send on an "insecure channel" and is refusing to play it. Buying a lower resolution display would fix the problem of it not playing by causing the DRM to not care if the lower resolution was insecurely transmitted, which is not really a fix. Sort of like improving the safety of a pothole filled road by limiting all the cars to driving at 5mph instead of fixing the potholes.
someone puts it in a laptop? That would make for an interesting board meeting, to put up a powerpoint in the whiteboard, at the point where someone realizes there's no projector in the board room.
6 years ago no one would have believed it was possible, let alone practical, and certainly not affordable, to have a camera in their laptop lid. Now look what we have - around 50% of the laptops sold today have built-in web-cams. That makes a projector the next logical step.
Get one of those bluetooth mice that logitec makes, the really small ones with the thumb operated trackball and built-in laser pointer and usual mouse buttons, and toss that in, and you have the ideal portable presentation system. (beats the "gather round the laptop screen" scenario)
It says "BSOD" in several places in the article. Unless you are writing bad drivers, (which I'd admit may have been an issue, seeing as they are interacting with hardware, the fireworks squibbs) software or data problems should not be able to cause an OS crash unless your OS sucks. (though the squibb board was likely USB controlled)
Speculating wildly, it appears to be a case of where windows just randomly corrupts something on the HD and this time it just happened to nail something the OS needed, and was only discovered when they ran it live.
Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance. Fireworks shows should have a fully functional computer system that runs completely to the end live, tested. The squibb board should have LEDs, one for each squibb, that light up as the computer fires them, so you can dry run it as many times as you like, watching the LED board to make sure everything goes off as planned. A security key on the board provides power to the squibbs themselves, so you can do a complete live run through the entire computer controlled show as many times as needed before the showmaster inserts and turns the key to heat up the squibbs and they just press the "do it again" button on the computer. There is no excuse for this.
But can't say for sure that even THAT would have helped matters in this case. Windows is known to spontaneously corrupt its OS files, and this could have very easily happened during their final test at 11:40 pm. But for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes. Put it on two machines. The squibb board was likely serial or usb anyway so you could even drag your laptop from home as a backup because the computer has no special hardware installed. Again there is no excuse for this failure, unless your squibb board catches on fire or something like that which you can't double up on.
Anyone quoting me for a big show that tried to tell me they were providing a single (windows or otherwise) computer the whole thing hinged on and there was no hot spare, would be promptly shown the DOOR.
I think what would make a nice system if they wanted to go electronic is some method by which the voting resuls were electronically transmitted to a central counting location, and that every voter had a "confirmation number" of sorts receipt on their ballot, that they could take home and punch in on a web page along with say, their ssn, that hashes to their ballot, allowing them to look up and verify their ballot. This would allow people to verify that their votes were counted, which is not something the current system allows. Technically, this could be taken a step further with auditors making random additional votes (that would be removed from the tally because they would be identifiable by their hash) which would help insure all votes were counted.
But then I assume this is one of those things that they won't consider because it would make too much sense and be hard for anyone to abuse.
one has to consider the possibilities as to which way to go. There are two possible truths, and two possible reactions.
1) It's authentic (or at least, authentic enough, it may have been a prop double or spare instead of the "hero" prop, and that may count enough), and they refund the money
2) it's authentic and they don't refund
3) it's fake and they refund
4) it's fake and they don't refund
Case 1 shuts up the buyer and may limit the bad press a bit, and 6 grand is not a big hit to take, but leaves other buyers questioning the autheniticity of other items Case 2 puts slightly more credibility in the auction house at the expense of more bad press and litigation Case 3 REALLY is no different than case 1 Case 4 sets them up for a double fall, selling bad goods AND trying to get away with it
Right now they are probably trying for case 2, and really if you compare them, is the best possible outcome. It's quite likely that the visor was a prop double, and was not the actual one Spiner used on the set when they made the take. It could easily have been one worn during rehearsal or an alternate previous take, or during a cut additional scene we didn't see. This would make it pretty close to as authentic as described. Things like that they have more than one of, who knows, brent could have dropped it on the floor walking up to the set for a second take and scratched the visor, and so the prop master quickly handed him another one. Which is the "real" one? Most fanatics would be interested in the actual one he wore in the shot they watched, but both were brent's props and were bot worn by him during that episode. It's also possible due to the multiple takes for the scene that he wore two or even three of them during all the shots taken, and brent may only be considering the last one he wore, the one he took back to the trailer and later sold, to be the "real" one.
If you REALLY wanna get dirty, you could say that brent realized the value of the prop later after forgetting it on the set, (or just plain wanted to keep it at the time) and picked up another one in the prop room after being unable to find the one he just took off and left on the set, and sold that as the original.
There's a reason why there are more refurb dells available than refurb macs.
From previous experience. That would be because when a Mac goes, it really goes.
I think that applies to a great degree to most laptops. There's the logic board, and then there are 1/2 dozen other little nicknack parts. Optical drives, batteries, power packs, wireless cards, speakers, etc. OK LCD we'd have to count as a major part also although with far fewer failure options. But really, with a laptop, it's either logic board / LCD, or "anything else", which includes the nicknacks that are easy to replace and not terribly expensive. I don't think any make/model of laptop can be said to "fail gracefully" or cheaply if it does not involve one of these minor parts. Nowadays, laptops are about as modular as they are ever likely to get, so I doubt this will change anytime soon.
Right now the size of most laptops is dictacted by the size of the logic board. Parts and design are always shrinking this, and there may come a time when there is enough space in the case to justify a logic board that is made of several modules. When this happens it will really improve repairability of these units. I for one would like to see the entire run of ports be a module, as an extension of the "magsafe" power adapter on the mac laptops. My macbook had a problem with the headphone port and that was a "left I/O board" replacement, a part that if not under warranty would have cost about $80. The left io board covered ALL the ports on the left side of the computer. MOST laptops nowadays have all the ports attached directly to the logic board which in my opinion is a major problem.
Macbooks are not so modular yet though which is unfortunate. Even though the magsafe idea only covers the power port, in my experience it acounts for about 80% of the port failures on mac laptops, which is a heck of an improvement over having to replace the whole logic board because your cat yanked out the power cord sideways. (magsafe conectors are both easy to replace and cheap) If they could get more modularity that would be a plus, but looking at the other logic board failures, it's usualy as you pointed out, a "catastrophic" failure where it doesn't function at all. I don't think modularity would help in many of those cases because it's not going to be something that's easy to troubleshoot if the only symptom you have is "it doesn't do anything". It's not reasonable to expect a repair facility to keep a stock of major (expensive) internal components onhand (which vary from model to model) to find problems based purely on swap-out.
Several PC laptops have separate video cards which appear on the outside to be a good idea, but I can't really say I've seen a lot of discrete video failures on mac laptops. The PC tech here has had to replace a few video cards in laptops but it appears to be pretty rare even with the PCs. I'd like to see changeable processors, but for marketing reasons that's not likely to happen with the macs, and again that's not a problem we see a lot with the PC laptops either. On a totally uneducated guess I'd say these "doesn't even turn on" failures we see are related to bus / northbridge / southbridge type problems, and I don't think that's a part you can really make separately replaceable, for reasons of performance and just electronic design. Sound cards do from time to time also show up in PC laptops but again that's rarely a system that discretely fails in laptops, PC or Mac, so again probably a waste of manufacturing cost to modularlize that part.
All of the above applies pretty exclusively to laptops. Desktop and laptop design are almost polarly opposite, so almost all of this does not apply to desktops. With desktops, size is not so much of an issue so modularity becomes a more reasonable idea without impacting design or cost heavily. Even with them though, we don't see a great deal of modularity with them even though it's a better option. Motherboards with onboard USB, onboard video, onboard sound, etc etc. Fortunately with slots you get the ability to plug in a new video card if the onboard tanks, and that's definitely an advantage of the standard PC over say, the iMac.
Scenario: you go to your fav registrar, regme.com, and test for bluetulipsandmore.com and it's available. regme.com locks it and sits on it for a few days. They see another query for it on their site 2 days later, probably from you as a followup test. This taste moves bluetulipsandmore.com to a second list they are keeping. They sell this second list to some scum they do business with, including bluetulipsandmore.com and about 8,000 other addresses that have been "tasted" in the last few weeks. The scum looks over the list of interesting unregistered (but reserved) domains, and cherry picks 100 of them to actually register, including your beloved bluetulipsandmore.com. Now you go to register it and poof, it's already registered. You go to that site and find it's been parked and has a convenient link to email gimmebackmydomain@gmail.com where you can purchase the domain after they do a background check on you to find out how much they can squeeze out of you. Instead of registering the link for $7 or so, you fork over $200 for it since you don't have any other choice. regme.com sees a $20 cut of that a month later.
THIS is one of the things they are trying to prevent.
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If I walk alone down the sidewalk in a really bad part of town, thumbing through my wallet counting my 20's and get mugged. Yes, you got it right. Blame The Victim.
In a perfect society we could trust every member of the public to "do the right thing". (whatever that is, since everyone's perception of that is at least a little different) But we don't live in Eutopia. There will always be at least a few people out there looking to either take advantage of you or entertain themselves at your expense. Not taking at least minor, reasonable precautions and making yourself a very easy target is not entirely, but at least to some degree, your own fault. There's even laws for that if you look around. Google "attractive nuisance".
Same way, f you don't lock your car door and leave the keys in the ignition, parked in the lot at the mall while you shop, and it gets stolen, you can't blame the car thief 100%. Some of the responsibility rests on you for your carelessness.
Our public utility gives you a discount if you install a remote that allows them to kick down your AC in the summer during the day when their power demand is high. I don't participate in it but I don't see anything wrong with it. It's set to actually turn off the compressor but leave the fan going iirc. It cycles it, so that the compressor only works a certain percentage of the time.
an entertaining prank to be sure, and a surprise that no one's tried it before on this scale. There's no excuse for there not to be black electrical tape over every IR receiver on that set of displays.
If you leave something THAT open to pranking at a public or semi-public event, it's going to happen. That's like leaving LAN jacks open all over the place at the conference and having an unsecured credit card processing machine on the same network. You deserve what you get for that level of carelessness.
On a completely different take, this is not possible with every remote. For example, all Apple remotes have the ability to "pair" with a computer, to prevent a computer from responding to any remote besides its own This is not rocket science, and it's not new. Pairing of remotes to equipment has been going on for years and won't cost them a nickel more to add to the chip. It involves each remote having and transmitting its serial number along with the command, and the computer can simply be told to only listen to commands from one (or a small group of) serial numbers. The only thing they will have to deal with is the occasional tech call from a customer that's managed to pair a different remote to their unit.
I for one would like to see this happen several more times until the manufactures get their heads out of the sand. This is unfortunately what it takes to motivate them. They won't lift a finger until it starts to cost them.
Additionally, it's sometimes hard to find where on a set the IR receiver is at. On the Apple's it's behind the big apple on the front of the unit or the black dot near the latch on the laptops. On some sets, where they have a large black border, it can be hard to locate. Also, the prankster should have been very easy to spot for anyone educated in such things. Most digital cameras are VERY senstitive to IR light, and to anyone with a digital camera looking at the LCD preview screen, or to anyone with a web cam pointed into the audience, that remote would go off like a strobe. It should have taken them less than 20 seconds to find this joker.
The article mentions "Einstein Ring" but that's just the visual effect. The actual gravitational lens pair is a "Solan Lens", and was found by a group looking for the single lensing pair variety. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0511453 . Looks like they've found quite a few of the regular ones so far. I suppose you'd call this find a "double Solan Lens"?
for this to occur requires four galaxies to be very close to being colinear, and we have to be in one of the endpoints. Looking at the picture though there are several galaxies visible so I suppose they have quite a few to look at for this. I wonder just how rare it is? As in, is this the first one discovered? I'd asume if there were any other known double E rings it would have been mentioned in TFA. Hard to say how rare something is when you only have one of them to go by.
... of people looking at what individuals whom they are responsible for a portion of the day do during that time when I am not responsible for them. That would be like my boss firing me from my job because he heard from a coworker that he saw me shoplift a pack of gum at the kwik-e-mart last Saturday.
This just smacks of a control freak that wants to be able to dictate what others do 100% of the time, rather than that 20% or 40% of the time that they are actually responsible for them.
Reprimanding someone for what they do in their "personal time", their time away from your control, is just not right. There's no real difference between my shoplifting and my doing anything else. It doesn't have to be illegal or against anyone's rules but the controller. Maybe I bought a porno mag instead of shoplifting gum. What if he has a problem with that? Should he be allowed to fire me? That's just retarted.
No fun dealing with a boss on a power trip, and that's exactly what's going on here.
I seem to recall that a sterling engine was one of the most efficient ways to convert solar energy to do work. How does this compare with a sterling engine?
Well you read the article, "with perfect lighting conditions, it's possible to squeeze a 60-in. screen out of the projector."
I'm sure by "perfect lighting conditions" they mean the room is pitch black, the viewers are 15" from the image, and all of them have spent the last 10 minutes acclimating to total darkness.
It's not like this was a SURPRISE to them. They SELL the units, the have absolute control over how many units are sold. If your netgame people say the current network can support 80,000 users, you DON'T SELL 200,000 UNITS until you have upgraded your network. (numbers fabricated but you get the idea)
This was entirely their responsibility, and I cannot believe they did not see this coming. What it came down to is they wanted to do a money grab for the holidays so they made as many units as they possibly could, to hell with the network until we get past christmas then we'll divert resources from production to upgrade the net so they can USE the product.
Not saying it's unexpected, just shameful is all. Nothing new there in business.
it rather sounds like Intel used their partnership with OLPC to get their foot in the door in a market that was one of OLPC's exclusive targets. Good business partners do not try to make inroads into the bread and butter of their other business partners. It'd be the same if OLPC started assembling a team to create their own custom processors for OLPC. It'd be a slap to the face.
I recall reading something about what amounted to a flying aircraft carrier. A zeppeline-like airship that launched biplanes.
The USS Akron (ZRS-4) based in Lakehurst, NJ and the USS Macon (ZRS-5) based in Sunnyvale, CA were helium filled rigid airships developed by the Goodyear-Zepplin Company (a joint venture of the Zepplin Company of Germany and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company) for the United States Navy. The airships were designed for coastal patrol and had the ability to carry and launch five small biplanes.
More info here
In reviewing the Notable Changes document, it seems the company focused on improving reliability & performance in really specific scenarios
"Among many numerous optimizatings, the speed of multiplying numbers by 1 has been improved by 28%. Expect further optimizations (such as when multiplying by 0) in SP2..."
The military requires PHYSICAL separation between their systems and the internet. Routers count as a phyiscal connection, no matter what the firewall they are running. The idea is that no equipment failure or compromise can lead to a remote intrusion, no matter how severe. If you want to jack into a military computer from home, someone's going to have to move an ethernet cable for you.
If as previously suggested, the "no smoking sign" is connected to my in flight TV remote or anything I have physical access to, then they have some serious rewiring to do on that plane.
Though it would really not surprise me if the airplane has say, one common network link and uses separate subnets or encapsulation to save on wiring, since weight is a big thing on a plane. Of course doing this would be introducing a serious risk in the name of saving a buck, so there's no chance of that happening I'm sure.
But then your disk would turn green and get angry if you scratchd it.
That raises the question of whether a patent is to protect an idea or an implementation of an idea.
My personal take on it is that a patent should be to protect an implementation of an idea. If you patent the widget, you should patent YOUR widget, not the idea of widgets. That leaves me free to "build a better widget" in a different way. It's still a widget, (in that it still accomplishes whatever a widget is made to do for the consumer) but it's MY widget, and is creatively and innovatively different than yours, and I should be able to make that to compete with your different or inferior implementation of the idea of widget.
I suppose the problem comes up of where to draw the line. People write patents as general as possible to get them through the patent office. If I were trying to patent a keyboard I could describe my invention as "a piece of computer hardware with multiple switches representing symbols, numbers, and letters". That covers a lot of ground, and prevents anyone from making a better keyboard than you did if allowed. That would be patenting an idea rather than an implementation.
I don't consider ideas patentable, only implementations.
Also, ideas are much easier to describe in generality than are implementations, aggrivating the problem of very general patents.
It's a "chain of trust" aka "chain of DRM" issue. When sending high def video to a display, there's a flag on the HDMI signal that tells it whether or not copying is allowed. This flag must be propgated down the stream all the way to the display. If the flag can't make it all the way to the display, then the source refuses to send video at high resolution.
The idea is that if you say, slip a DVD recorder, inline between the computer and the display, the computer will know there's a non DRM device down the like and will kill the resolution or refuse to play it. This requires cooperation from the display.
In this case it sounds like the display isn't communicating with the DRM, (isn't bouncing the flag back, signing it, whatever, to tell the computer that the signal made it to the display without passing through an unapproved device) and so when the DRM'd player tries to send the video, it's too high a resolution to send on an "insecure channel" and is refusing to play it. Buying a lower resolution display would fix the problem of it not playing by causing the DRM to not care if the lower resolution was insecurely transmitted, which is not really a fix. Sort of like improving the safety of a pothole filled road by limiting all the cars to driving at 5mph instead of fixing the potholes.
someone puts it in a laptop? That would make for an interesting board meeting, to put up a powerpoint in the whiteboard, at the point where someone realizes there's no projector in the board room.
6 years ago no one would have believed it was possible, let alone practical, and certainly not affordable, to have a camera in their laptop lid. Now look what we have - around 50% of the laptops sold today have built-in web-cams. That makes a projector the next logical step.
Get one of those bluetooth mice that logitec makes, the really small ones with the thumb operated trackball and built-in laser pointer and usual mouse buttons, and toss that in, and you have the ideal portable presentation system. (beats the "gather round the laptop screen" scenario)
It says "BSOD" in several places in the article. Unless you are writing bad drivers, (which I'd admit may have been an issue, seeing as they are interacting with hardware, the fireworks squibbs) software or data problems should not be able to cause an OS crash unless your OS sucks. (though the squibb board was likely USB controlled)
Speculating wildly, it appears to be a case of where windows just randomly corrupts something on the HD and this time it just happened to nail something the OS needed, and was only discovered when they ran it live.
Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance. Fireworks shows should have a fully functional computer system that runs completely to the end live, tested. The squibb board should have LEDs, one for each squibb, that light up as the computer fires them, so you can dry run it as many times as you like, watching the LED board to make sure everything goes off as planned. A security key on the board provides power to the squibbs themselves, so you can do a complete live run through the entire computer controlled show as many times as needed before the showmaster inserts and turns the key to heat up the squibbs and they just press the "do it again" button on the computer. There is no excuse for this.
But can't say for sure that even THAT would have helped matters in this case. Windows is known to spontaneously corrupt its OS files, and this could have very easily happened during their final test at 11:40 pm. But for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes. Put it on two machines. The squibb board was likely serial or usb anyway so you could even drag your laptop from home as a backup because the computer has no special hardware installed. Again there is no excuse for this failure, unless your squibb board catches on fire or something like that which you can't double up on.
Anyone quoting me for a big show that tried to tell me they were providing a single (windows or otherwise) computer the whole thing hinged on and there was no hot spare, would be promptly shown the DOOR.
with something like GNU Barcode software and a template of printed out tickets, one might be able to take some nice vacations.
you terrorist scum!
I think what would make a nice system if they wanted to go electronic is some method by which the voting resuls were electronically transmitted to a central counting location, and that every voter had a "confirmation number" of sorts receipt on their ballot, that they could take home and punch in on a web page along with say, their ssn, that hashes to their ballot, allowing them to look up and verify their ballot. This would allow people to verify that their votes were counted, which is not something the current system allows. Technically, this could be taken a step further with auditors making random additional votes (that would be removed from the tally because they would be identifiable by their hash) which would help insure all votes were counted.
But then I assume this is one of those things that they won't consider because it would make too much sense and be hard for anyone to abuse.
one has to consider the possibilities as to which way to go. There are two possible truths, and two possible reactions.
1) It's authentic (or at least, authentic enough, it may have been a prop double or spare instead of the "hero" prop, and that may count enough), and they refund the money
2) it's authentic and they don't refund
3) it's fake and they refund
4) it's fake and they don't refund
Case 1 shuts up the buyer and may limit the bad press a bit, and 6 grand is not a big hit to take, but leaves other buyers questioning the autheniticity of other items
Case 2 puts slightly more credibility in the auction house at the expense of more bad press and litigation
Case 3 REALLY is no different than case 1
Case 4 sets them up for a double fall, selling bad goods AND trying to get away with it
Right now they are probably trying for case 2, and really if you compare them, is the best possible outcome. It's quite likely that the visor was a prop double, and was not the actual one Spiner used on the set when they made the take. It could easily have been one worn during rehearsal or an alternate previous take, or during a cut additional scene we didn't see. This would make it pretty close to as authentic as described. Things like that they have more than one of, who knows, brent could have dropped it on the floor walking up to the set for a second take and scratched the visor, and so the prop master quickly handed him another one. Which is the "real" one? Most fanatics would be interested in the actual one he wore in the shot they watched, but both were brent's props and were bot worn by him during that episode. It's also possible due to the multiple takes for the scene that he wore two or even three of them during all the shots taken, and brent may only be considering the last one he wore, the one he took back to the trailer and later sold, to be the "real" one.
If you REALLY wanna get dirty, you could say that brent realized the value of the prop later after forgetting it on the set, (or just plain wanted to keep it at the time) and picked up another one in the prop room after being unable to find the one he just took off and left on the set, and sold that as the original.
Easy to come by. charging them however, can prove problematic.
Right now the size of most laptops is dictacted by the size of the logic board. Parts and design are always shrinking this, and there may come a time when there is enough space in the case to justify a logic board that is made of several modules. When this happens it will really improve repairability of these units. I for one would like to see the entire run of ports be a module, as an extension of the "magsafe" power adapter on the mac laptops. My macbook had a problem with the headphone port and that was a "left I/O board" replacement, a part that if not under warranty would have cost about $80. The left io board covered ALL the ports on the left side of the computer. MOST laptops nowadays have all the ports attached directly to the logic board which in my opinion is a major problem.
Macbooks are not so modular yet though which is unfortunate. Even though the magsafe idea only covers the power port, in my experience it acounts for about 80% of the port failures on mac laptops, which is a heck of an improvement over having to replace the whole logic board because your cat yanked out the power cord sideways. (magsafe conectors are both easy to replace and cheap) If they could get more modularity that would be a plus, but looking at the other logic board failures, it's usualy as you pointed out, a "catastrophic" failure where it doesn't function at all. I don't think modularity would help in many of those cases because it's not going to be something that's easy to troubleshoot if the only symptom you have is "it doesn't do anything". It's not reasonable to expect a repair facility to keep a stock of major (expensive) internal components onhand (which vary from model to model) to find problems based purely on swap-out.
Several PC laptops have separate video cards which appear on the outside to be a good idea, but I can't really say I've seen a lot of discrete video failures on mac laptops. The PC tech here has had to replace a few video cards in laptops but it appears to be pretty rare even with the PCs. I'd like to see changeable processors, but for marketing reasons that's not likely to happen with the macs, and again that's not a problem we see a lot with the PC laptops either. On a totally uneducated guess I'd say these "doesn't even turn on" failures we see are related to bus / northbridge / southbridge type problems, and I don't think that's a part you can really make separately replaceable, for reasons of performance and just electronic design. Sound cards do from time to time also show up in PC laptops but again that's rarely a system that discretely fails in laptops, PC or Mac, so again probably a waste of manufacturing cost to modularlize that part.
All of the above applies pretty exclusively to laptops. Desktop and laptop design are almost polarly opposite, so almost all of this does not apply to desktops. With desktops, size is not so much of an issue so modularity becomes a more reasonable idea without impacting design or cost heavily. Even with them though, we don't see a great deal of modularity with them even though it's a better option. Motherboards with onboard USB, onboard video, onboard sound, etc etc. Fortunately with slots you get the ability to plug in a new video card if the onboard tanks, and that's definitely an advantage of the standard PC over say, the iMac.
ascendence:~ v1$ echo "somedomain.tld" | openssl md5
677dc006c18d616786918cf931579fd4
or am I doing it wrong?
Scenario: you go to your fav registrar, regme.com, and test for bluetulipsandmore.com and it's available. regme.com locks it and sits on it for a few days. They see another query for it on their site 2 days later, probably from you as a followup test. This taste moves bluetulipsandmore.com to a second list they are keeping. They sell this second list to some scum they do business with, including bluetulipsandmore.com and about 8,000 other addresses that have been "tasted" in the last few weeks. The scum looks over the list of interesting unregistered (but reserved) domains, and cherry picks 100 of them to actually register, including your beloved bluetulipsandmore.com. Now you go to register it and poof, it's already registered. You go to that site and find it's been parked and has a convenient link to email gimmebackmydomain@gmail.com where you can purchase the domain after they do a background check on you to find out how much they can squeeze out of you. Instead of registering the link for $7 or so, you fork over $200 for it since you don't have any other choice. regme.com sees a $20 cut of that a month later.
THIS is one of the things they are trying to prevent.