most new laptops come equipped with accelerometers
So how do I determine if my laptop has one? And if it does, how can I get access to it by software? Even if the is one or more accelerometers in there for protection of the hard drive, it will require a presence in the I/O address space, I assume, for it to be used by this or any other software. Apparently this exists, or the software would be as useful as Duke Nuken Forever, but I have not found any insight in the articles on how accelerometers can be accessed. Can anyone provide some technical details? I would like to use this for other applications, but would gladly share any earthquake data that the system captured while it was idle if I had the hardware.
I no longer have the links handy, but in my case it was documents that the company I worked for had filed as part of an IPO (initial public offering, the process of taking a privately held corporation public). There was a lot of information that I had been searching for for months, all nicely laid out in a public document, and all still completely invisible to Google. But from what I could determine at the time (about 14 years ago), the practice of flagging such documents on.gov websites to keep them from being indexed was far more extensive than just these IPO postings.
There is actually a lot of public information "on-line", but it is rendered almost useless because many.gov websites ban spiders from crawling through them and Google (and I assume others) obey this ban. I have actually found some information that was very valuable to me, but only because I found and followed the right links. These pages on a public website under the.gov tld were never indexed and could not be found easily as a result.
I would suggest that the law require that spiders not be banned from open public sites, otherwise it is a sham. I would also suggest that Google considers who really owns the information on.gov sites and considers programming its spiders to not obey such a bogus instruction.
I just uninstalled AVG 8.x yesterday. I just want an virus scan software that I can keep on my system, and either manually scan a selected file on demand or occasionally scan a partition or the entire computer. I certainly don't want software that is running all of the time and using resources to snoop on my e-mail or scan every download. I supposedly have all of that extra snooping disabled in AVG. Yet I was appalled by all of the AVG processes that were running in the background, and further disgusted that they couldn't even be terminated in Task Manager (when I did try to terminate then it seemed two more started for every one that I tried to kill).
So this is an interesting thread, I would sure like to find something that can be run on demand but otherwise doesn't waste cpu and memory resources when not needed. So far have not found it yet, and it is depressing that this topic isn't leading to any good choices.
Really? Can you explain where this normally unreadable/unwritable areas is? Can you provide references? Does handbreak decrypt the DVD before making its "copy"? I was under the impression (maybe incorrect) that it did not.
I understand that DVDs include encryption, so programs like DeCSS are needed to extract watchable video from a DVD. But what is the technical problem keeping people from just copying DVDs to writable media to make copies? Is there some technical issue about the formatting of a video DVD that keeps normal copying software from copying DVDs on a block by block basis? And if there is, how did Real get past any limitations of consumer grade writers?
I got pretty excited about OLED TV when I first heard of it. Almost bought into it. Then I learned how short of a life expectancy OLEDs have, enough that one can expect failing pixels in just a few thousand hours of operation, and rapidly declining after that.
When I put the money asked for into a large screen TV, I want it to last, not be expected to fail in a few thousand hours of operation. This is a technology currently suited to phones and other devices that have a known, limited, expected life of service. It is not well suited for home appliances that are costly and one might hope will last for well over a decade, maybe longer.
Not only is it a crappy drawing, with some bad information in it, but it is tilted several degrees from the proper orientation, making it pretty worthless for large format printing, and then packed into a pdf to make it harder to correct.
Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.
That would be great, if that was what wifi was used for. But it is not. If the connection was limited to a single room, ethernet cables could be used, which would give even better security. Far more wifi systems are set up to get the network connection between rooms, even between floors of a house, than for networks in windowless rooms.
Besides, everyone already knows that a computer room without Windows is more secure than one with Windows.
Actually, let me correct myself on this. The site goes into a lot of stuff about making sure that the two cameras are in sync while taking still shots. It is not certain that the cameras would be in as precise of sync when doing 3D work. And depending on how your 3D video is displayed you might not even want them in sync (if doing alternate frames for LCD 3D shutter glasses you might want them completely out of sync, but if doing alternate forms of 3D viewing you might want them in sync).
So a lot of this seems to depend on the target 3D display system. And that may be true for the $12,000 camera also. One thing for sure, if I want to experiment with this, at least before 3D TV is a well established technology with very well defined specs, I'll do it with the much less expensive home brew system.
The site is focusing on still 3D, but the cameras will do video as well and there is nothing to stop you from taking the two stereo videos and putting together a 3D video, it's not much different than combining 3D still pictures. Pick a supported Canon camera that does HD video any you can get 3D HD (or go cheap for 3D standard video).
In fact, that the Panasonic uses two separate SDHC memory cards rather tham on card makes me suspect that the Panasonic system is doing pretty much what this much less expensive system is doing; recording each camera to a different card and then putting the 3D images back together later in software.
The hype claims "While it's far cheaper than building your own 3D rig, the SRP of US$21,000... ", but that is far from accurate. You can build your own quite decent 3D system with two inexpensive (around $100 bucks each) Canon cameras, some free open source software, and very simple hardware. See http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/sdm/index.htm for details.
Plus, adding insult to injury, the article raves about this $12,000 camera working with two inexpensive SDHC memory cards rather than more expensive P2 memory cards. Doesn't the $12,000 price tag rather defeat any savings in memory cards?
I certainly wouldn't like being in the position of having to wear on of the red shirts. Does a real number on your choice of wardrobe too. Here is my suggestion: before the pronouncement comes down, get the help desk (and maybe even everyone in the IT department) an inexpensive lab coat. These can be purchased cheaply from most uniform supply companies. Add a company logo if you wish and there is a budget for it. People can continue to dress as they see fit, and wear their lab coat over their choice of clothing when doing help desk stuff. It can even be very handy if help desk stuff includes crawling around under desks looking for that lost cable and such or working on a computer with a fresh litter of dust bunnies. But your staff can still take the lab coats off and go to lunch without looking like some geek squad rejects.
They sure do. Look at the Canon ink tanks, that plug into separate somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices, but still cost big bucks for the little plastic tanks. And even more for the somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices when the nozzles finally clog up and have to be replaced, if you can find them at all. And Epson has for years been mounting their somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices right in the printer in a way that they can't even be replaced by the consumer, and them selling them just a very expensive and very tiny tank of ink. And I've seen other manfacturers recently, even HP (who in the past at least sold you new nozzles with each tank of ink,) go the Cannon route, much cheaper for them, much worse for the consumer.
For many uses, consider using a Live CD or DVD such as the recent Knoppix 6.2 release. It will let you have web access, and greatly reduce any chance that you might pick up an infection on an untrusted network. Of course, you should still use more secure https connections when accessing an e-mail or banking site.
I would also remove anything that you don't feel that you need or will use on the trip from the laptop, and put any information that you really need to keep private on a small flash drive that you can connect only when you desire to, so as not to expose it during all connections.
If you are really feeling paranoid, you could also carry a Live CD or DVD that gives you an Onion router connection.
I suggest using Crossloop for the remote screen control. It is like VNC, in fact it is based on VNC, but it uses it's own code and Crossloop server to bypass any problems of getting past NAT routers, which often present a problem for novice users to configure properly and safely for VNC services.
Crossloop offers no voice connection, so also use a high quality audio link like Google Talk, or just keep them on the phone.
In trying to figure out a way to become profitable, Crossloop has taken to marketing it's members "services" to others, but they have (IMHO) gone over to the dark side by putting themselves in league with PayPal (who are in turned owned by an electronic fencing organization). But users don't have to participate in this, it's still available for free private use.
and external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste.... So what would you recommend?"
I would recommend that if you consider USB flash devices too "fragile" then you likely don't have enough good backups. There might be other reasons for not using a flash drive, and there might be other ways to address your need, but if you are concerned that USB drives are too fragile then I suspect that you are setting yourself up for disaster when something other than flash drive failure compromises your data.
Why would they want to sell more 360s? Don't they still lose money on each one? My understanding was that they did, but made it up on the games and such. Buying an extra 360 isn't going to cause a user to buy more copies of the game, so why would they be trying to encourage more 360 sales that cut into their bottom line?
Sure there is intellectual Property on the hardware. Just has every AMD cpu based system that you buy contains AMD ip, but that is not a reason to stop one from using it for something other than the original designer intended. He bought the hardware, he is entitled to use it for whatever he wants, and is in no way required to go to that huge on-line fencing operation to get rid of it.
Perhaps just the opposite attitude would be more appropriate. Since Tivo basically cheated the intent of the GPL by taking their software and building a system that avoided giving back to the community, even to the point of deliberately making their hardware difficult to re-purpose after it reaches its normal end of life, I think the smart thing for an on-line community rich in open source tradition would be to change its slogan from "Don't cheat Tivo" to "They cheated us, go ahead and cheat Tivo if you can keep it legal".
No, they did not.Borrow is the completely wrong word here. Maybe they stole the code, but they certainly didn't borrow it.
It hardly matters though. It is perfectly OK when Microsoft does this, as seen from a long lime of past actions. When you copy their code it is a felony, but when they take something that they want it's just business as usual.
It is absurd to blame the computer (or worse, all computers) for what is bad programming. Computers can store a 1/10 of a second perfectly accurately, as long as it is stored in a variable that counts tenths of seconds rather than seconds. It can easily be stored as an integer that way, avoiding any floating point rounding errors.
There certainly are cases of bad math in computers, particularly Intel computers. But this isn't such an example. This is just a lazy and stupid programmer who didn't understand what he was really doing who should take the blame for the failure that killed people, not the computer.
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most new laptops come equipped with accelerometers
So how do I determine if my laptop has one? And if it does, how can I get access to it by software? Even if the is one or more accelerometers in there for protection of the hard drive, it will require a presence in the I/O address space, I assume, for it to be used by this or any other software. Apparently this exists, or the software would be as useful as Duke Nuken Forever, but I have not found any insight in the articles on how accelerometers can be accessed. Can anyone provide some technical details? I would like to use this for other applications, but would gladly share any earthquake data that the system captured while it was idle if I had the hardware.
I no longer have the links handy, but in my case it was documents that the company I worked for had filed as part of an IPO (initial public offering, the process of taking a privately held corporation public). There was a lot of information that I had been searching for for months, all nicely laid out in a public document, and all still completely invisible to Google. But from what I could determine at the time (about 14 years ago), the practice of flagging such documents on .gov websites to keep them from being indexed was far more extensive than just these IPO postings.
By the way, the company never did go public.
There is actually a lot of public information "on-line", but it is rendered almost useless because many .gov websites ban spiders from crawling through them and Google (and I assume others) obey this ban. I have actually found some information that was very valuable to me, but only because I found and followed the right links. These pages on a public website under the .gov tld were never indexed and could not be found easily as a result.
I would suggest that the law require that spiders not be banned from open public sites, otherwise it is a sham. I would also suggest that Google considers who really owns the information on .gov sites and considers programming its spiders to not obey such a bogus instruction.
I just uninstalled AVG 8.x yesterday. I just want an virus scan software that I can keep on my system, and either manually scan a selected file on demand or occasionally scan a partition or the entire computer. I certainly don't want software that is running all of the time and using resources to snoop on my e-mail or scan every download. I supposedly have all of that extra snooping disabled in AVG. Yet I was appalled by all of the AVG processes that were running in the background, and further disgusted that they couldn't even be terminated in Task Manager (when I did try to terminate then it seemed two more started for every one that I tried to kill).
So this is an interesting thread, I would sure like to find something that can be run on demand but otherwise doesn't waste cpu and memory resources when not needed. So far have not found it yet, and it is depressing that this topic isn't leading to any good choices.
one day we could scan a book or magazine in seconds using a smartphone
Really? Can you explain where this normally unreadable/unwritable areas is? Can you provide references? Does handbreak decrypt the DVD before making its "copy"? I was under the impression (maybe incorrect) that it did not.
I understand that DVDs include encryption, so programs like DeCSS are needed to extract watchable video from a DVD. But what is the technical problem keeping people from just copying DVDs to writable media to make copies? Is there some technical issue about the formatting of a video DVD that keeps normal copying software from copying DVDs on a block by block basis? And if there is, how did Real get past any limitations of consumer grade writers?
If she really tweeted her abortion I would be very impressed, but I suspect that she really tweeted her child's abortion.
I got pretty excited about OLED TV when I first heard of it. Almost bought into it. Then I learned how short of a life expectancy OLEDs have, enough that one can expect failing pixels in just a few thousand hours of operation, and rapidly declining after that.
When I put the money asked for into a large screen TV, I want it to last, not be expected to fail in a few thousand hours of operation. This is a technology currently suited to phones and other devices that have a known, limited, expected life of service. It is not well suited for home appliances that are costly and one might hope will last for well over a decade, maybe longer.
Not only is it a crappy drawing, with some bad information in it, but it is tilted several degrees from the proper orientation, making it pretty worthless for large format printing, and then packed into a pdf to make it harder to correct.
Light, in a room without windows, will not escape the room, improving security.
That would be great, if that was what wifi was used for. But it is not. If the connection was limited to a single room, ethernet cables could be used, which would give even better security. Far more wifi systems are set up to get the network connection between rooms, even between floors of a house, than for networks in windowless rooms.
Besides, everyone already knows that a computer room without Windows is more secure than one with Windows.
Actually, let me correct myself on this. The site goes into a lot of stuff about making sure that the two cameras are in sync while taking still shots. It is not certain that the cameras would be in as precise of sync when doing 3D work. And depending on how your 3D video is displayed you might not even want them in sync (if doing alternate frames for LCD 3D shutter glasses you might want them completely out of sync, but if doing alternate forms of 3D viewing you might want them in sync).
So a lot of this seems to depend on the target 3D display system. And that may be true for the $12,000 camera also. One thing for sure, if I want to experiment with this, at least before 3D TV is a well established technology with very well defined specs, I'll do it with the much less expensive home brew system.
The site is focusing on still 3D, but the cameras will do video as well and there is nothing to stop you from taking the two stereo videos and putting together a 3D video, it's not much different than combining 3D still pictures. Pick a supported Canon camera that does HD video any you can get 3D HD (or go cheap for 3D standard video).
In fact, that the Panasonic uses two separate SDHC memory cards rather tham on card makes me suspect that the Panasonic system is doing pretty much what this much less expensive system is doing; recording each camera to a different card and then putting the 3D images back together later in software.
The hype claims "While it's far cheaper than building your own 3D rig, the SRP of US$21,000... ", but that is far from accurate. You can build your own quite decent 3D system with two inexpensive (around $100 bucks each) Canon cameras, some free open source software, and very simple hardware. See http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/sdm/index.htm for details.
Plus, adding insult to injury, the article raves about this $12,000 camera working with two inexpensive SDHC memory cards rather than more expensive P2 memory cards. Doesn't the $12,000 price tag rather defeat any savings in memory cards?
I certainly wouldn't like being in the position of having to wear on of the red shirts. Does a real number on your choice of wardrobe too. Here is my suggestion: before the pronouncement comes down, get the help desk (and maybe even everyone in the IT department) an inexpensive lab coat. These can be purchased cheaply from most uniform supply companies. Add a company logo if you wish and there is a budget for it. People can continue to dress as they see fit, and wear their lab coat over their choice of clothing when doing help desk stuff. It can even be very handy if help desk stuff includes crawling around under desks looking for that lost cable and such or working on a computer with a fresh litter of dust bunnies. But your staff can still take the lab coats off and go to lunch without looking like some geek squad rejects.
They sure do. Look at the Canon ink tanks, that plug into separate somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices, but still cost big bucks for the little plastic tanks. And even more for the somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices when the nozzles finally clog up and have to be replaced, if you can find them at all. And Epson has for years been mounting their somewhat sophisticated microfluidic devices right in the printer in a way that they can't even be replaced by the consumer, and them selling them just a very expensive and very tiny tank of ink. And I've seen other manfacturers recently, even HP (who in the past at least sold you new nozzles with each tank of ink,) go the Cannon route, much cheaper for them, much worse for the consumer.
For many uses, consider using a Live CD or DVD such as the recent Knoppix 6.2 release. It will let you have web access, and greatly reduce any chance that you might pick up an infection on an untrusted network. Of course, you should still use more secure https connections when accessing an e-mail or banking site.
I would also remove anything that you don't feel that you need or will use on the trip from the laptop, and put any information that you really need to keep private on a small flash drive that you can connect only when you desire to, so as not to expose it during all connections.
If you are really feeling paranoid, you could also carry a Live CD or DVD that gives you an Onion router connection.
I suggest using Crossloop for the remote screen control. It is like VNC, in fact it is based on VNC, but it uses it's own code and Crossloop server to bypass any problems of getting past NAT routers, which often present a problem for novice users to configure properly and safely for VNC services. Crossloop offers no voice connection, so also use a high quality audio link like Google Talk, or just keep them on the phone. In trying to figure out a way to become profitable, Crossloop has taken to marketing it's members "services" to others, but they have (IMHO) gone over to the dark side by putting themselves in league with PayPal (who are in turned owned by an electronic fencing organization). But users don't have to participate in this, it's still available for free private use.
So glad to hear it. Pay no attention to the mutated Tamiflu resistant versions that were reported in both Norway and North Carolina just yesterday.
Finally, they added the weight of 287,524 viruses
When they make a statement like this, when no weight can be assigned to a computer virus, they pretty much completely discredit themselves.
and external media like USB sticks are a bit too fragile according to my taste. ... So what would you recommend?"
I would recommend that if you consider USB flash devices too "fragile" then you likely don't have enough good backups. There might be other reasons for not using a flash drive, and there might be other ways to address your need, but if you are concerned that USB drives are too fragile then I suspect that you are setting yourself up for disaster when something other than flash drive failure compromises your data.
Why would they want to sell more 360s? Don't they still lose money on each one? My understanding was that they did, but made it up on the games and such. Buying an extra 360 isn't going to cause a user to buy more copies of the game, so why would they be trying to encourage more 360 sales that cut into their bottom line?
Sure there is intellectual Property on the hardware. Just has every AMD cpu based system that you buy contains AMD ip, but that is not a reason to stop one from using it for something other than the original designer intended. He bought the hardware, he is entitled to use it for whatever he wants, and is in no way required to go to that huge on-line fencing operation to get rid of it.
Perhaps just the opposite attitude would be more appropriate. Since Tivo basically cheated the intent of the GPL by taking their software and building a system that avoided giving back to the community, even to the point of deliberately making their hardware difficult to re-purpose after it reaches its normal end of life, I think the smart thing for an on-line community rich in open source tradition would be to change its slogan from "Don't cheat Tivo" to "They cheated us, go ahead and cheat Tivo if you can keep it legal".
No, they did not. Borrow is the completely wrong word here. Maybe they stole the code, but they certainly didn't borrow it.
It hardly matters though. It is perfectly OK when Microsoft does this, as seen from a long lime of past actions. When you copy their code it is a felony, but when they take something that they want it's just business as usual.
There certainly are cases of bad math in computers, particularly Intel computers. But this isn't such an example. This is just a lazy and stupid programmer who didn't understand what he was really doing who should take the blame for the failure that killed people, not the computer.