Someone who thinks they can code is far more dangerous than someone who realizes they can't and defers to experts. Pity the devs who'll have to suffer a bad manager going worse because of this!
I'm going to go out on a glass-half-empty limb here and say that means encrypted, not salted and hashed. "Cryptographically Scrambled" is too obviously ambiguous. I hope I'm wrong!
A properly calibrated LCD may be able to match the colors of a properly calibrated CRT, but not the black level. High end LCDs can get quite acceptably close, but most aren't that great.
I'd prefer monitors that can work without a hugely contrasting image.
Take a game like Quake. It plays perfectly, in all its dark, murky, brown palette, on CRTs. Throw it on an LCD without boosting the game's brightness and it can be quite difficult to pick out the details. Reacting to this, mappers seemed to go between one of two paths
The first option, they'll make a game nearly fullbright, then add shadows in for contrast. Dark colors other than shadows are delegated for things you shouldn't be paying attention to -- mainly extraneous paths.
The second option is that the mapper significantly increases the brightness setting in the game, designing a level that is actually quite dark and very difficult to see at a normal brightness level on a calibrated monitor.
Agreed. If you've got clients visiting and for some reason they might see you, then dress up a little. Otherwise wear what you want. It's not like being choked by a tie will make you perform any better.
My Nexus 7 arrived on Tuesday, and I opened it just fine. The tape used to keep the box closed was a little interesting, looked almost like it had been melted on, but nothing anyone with a pair of scissors or box cutters should have trouble with.
Proper thermal paste usage can mean the difference between silence and a loud fan at load. Your CPU will probably be fine either way, but thermal paste is definitely nice if you like to keep a quiet PC.
I'm mainly curious to see what kind of thermal material they used. If they compared it with that gummy pad or cheap paste that typically comes on CPUs, it doesn't mean much. That stuff will keep your CPU from overheating, but it can't hold a candle to one of the aftermarket brands like Arctic Silver. Beat that, and I'll be very interested.
Here's the problem. Why should I pay money to make my OS worse?
I bumped my head the day the Windows 8 RC was released, and installed it on my non-touchscreen work laptop. I've been using it for development every day since. To be clear -- I used the developer beta briefly and really disliked the experience, but hey, this is the future, might as well jump on the train early and figure it out, if only to head off future questions that'll be bubbled up to IT.
Overall my experience has still been very close to that of Windows 7. Once you're on the desktop, the start screen stays out of your way until you ask for it and apps work as usual. It's not nearly what screenshots make it out to be. The tablet apps look like they'll be great on a tablet, but they suck for desktop use. It's easy to avoid them. The new start screen, however, is growing on me.
I put several live tiles there so I can hit winkey and get a quick glance at everything. Once I'm done scanning them I hit winkey again to go back to desktop. It's really very useful, and completely fluid without ever touching the mouse. You can put icons for desktop apps on the start screen as well, and I occasionally use it to launch them. For the bulk of it, though, the "winkey + typing" trick still works to launch apps just like it does in Windows 7.
As far as development goes, Windows 8 does have some compelling new APIs. WinRT has asynchronous APIs for many things that would have blocked in Windows 7. This can be an instant user experience win for any app that can use them. There's also Registered I/O, which is a fully asynchronous and zero-copy sockets API designed for applications needing low latency and super high performance. Server applications with many concurrent connections and perhaps even games will benefit from this.
Is it worth the $40 upgrade cost? Sure, I'll tell people I know to grab it. Especially since that will preserve Media Center capabilities.
Not necessarily an idiot, but ignorantly uneducated and aliterate. Ignorance != stupidity.
My younger brother (19 years old) leaves out apostrophes whenever he types anything informal -- be it in an email or a text. One day I jokingly brought this up to him, and he came back vehemently against their use -- quite seriously that he believed anyone who needed apostrophes was an idiot for not being able to infer the true meaning.
I think that's the only time I've ever facepalmed. What meaningful reply could you give to that?
This from a avid reader, an AP student who's in college for aerospace engineering.
It sounds like they're able to provide a fix without GPS, which would give it an entirely different function from AGPS.
AGPS tells a GPS receiver where satellites are supposed to be at a certain time, to help it initially lock on to their signal. It does not provide a higher-precision location, or one at all in places where GPS cannot penetrate.
The unfortunate truth is that sound in most theaters, while clear enough to understand, is usually not making the most of the existing 7.1 format.
This new format won't help a thing without strict rules for room setup. The current THX and Dolby certifications mean nothing. We need something new. Anyone who frequents ArcLight or other premium theaters can tell you it's night & day when it's set up right.
So long as Samsung continues to be the sole producer of phones with SuperAMOLED+ screens, they've got my dollar secured. I'd much rather have those deep blacks than a Retina screen.
Of course if I was an Android user, I may be worried about Samsung creating their own fork which is almost guaranteed to be worse than vanilla. They may end up driving more users away with this than they'd gain.
The PowerVR GPUs integrated into Intel's Atoms are great -- in theory. The drivers are so terrible they can't even run Windows 7's aero at acceptable FPS, let alone a game. They also don't bother to support 64-bit, or any x86 Linux other than 32-bit MeeGo.
I don't know if it's PowerVR or Intel, but someone needs to get their drivers in order before they'll have a chance of encroaching on any of the existing players.
I've had a Samsung Focus since launch day. I have three beefs with this OS. The first is that Microsoft needs to integrate a standard virtualized endless list.
With any app that pulls data from the web and presents it in a never-ending list, it's a crapshoot. Some scroll perfectly fluid, just like the built-in apps. Others behave erratically or perform work on the main UI thread and lower render FPS (and thus, responsiveness).
For all the work they did to provide common controls and layout to make every app have a similar functionality, they've completely failed on this one and it's a very glaring issue.
My second issue is that they don't allow any native code. Yes,.NET works—and works very well—for an overwhelming majority of apps. There are still some areas where native code would provide a huge benefit. I'm hoping that Windows 8's new heterogeneous ecosystem of native/.NET/Javascript apps that all look and feel correct and have access to the same features will influence the future of Windows Phone.
My third issue is with access to the graphics hardware. Handicapping developers with the limited subset available in XNA 100% guarantees that this OS will not compete with iOS or Android when it comes to high-end games. Most of the current phones are on ~5 year old hardware, so it's pretty clear that they understand this as well.
From an audiophile with stupidly expensive headphones, DACs, and amps to power them, and no $50 cables:
The Superlux HD668b have the most impressive bang for your buck I've ever seen. At $50 ($30-40 if you look around), they easily match other cans $200-300 in quality. They are super analytical monitors—you won't get that V-shaped response that most people find pleasing. If it happens you like that type of response (many people requesting a flat response don't actually realize how accustomed they've become to non-flat), they'll still keep up with an EQ-ed source like a champ.
SHA-1, like MD5, is broken for digital signatures. When someone finds a way to reverse a hash back into a password, then it will be broken for passwords.
The only real argument against SHA-1 for passwords is that you can brute-force them rather quickly, but SHA-2 has the same problem. If this is an issue for you, use PBKDF2 or some similar algorithm.
Algorithms designed to burn CPU, like PBKDF2 recommended in the article, are great if used correctly.
The important thing to remember is that you want to make the client burn CPU, NOT the server. If you let the client trivially initiate 10 http requests that cause a server's CPU to peg for 1 second each, you've created a nice DoS vector.
Are there any existing Javascript crypto libraries that safely offload this work to the client?
And remember, Apple exerts almost zero (the exception being the so-called "most favored nation" clause) control over book prices.
Though the result is that consumers got screwed because of it, this is my understanding of it as well.
What I remember is that Amazon basically had the publishers by the balls, dictating somewhat more reasonable prices for ebooks. When Apple came to the market, they specifically worked with the publishers saying "hey, we'll let YOU set the price, so long as you always offer us the best one". The end result is that prices skyrocketed overnight, and today are still far higher than they once were.
It is far easier to apply a dynamic compressor plugin than it is to undo studio-mastered dynamic compression.
The cool thing is, a lot of TVs, audio equipment, and software have already had something like this built in for years. Usually they call it a user-friendly name like "night mode", so it can be a little difficult to find, but at least it's there. Why audio can't take the same path is beyond me.
A lot of people will see a graph of PCM and think up-sampling will help make the stair-stepping be finer, less noticeable, and thus improve quality. Unscrupulous audio companies love to take advantage of this belief with up-sampling tech.
That belief is, of course, complete bullshit—the stair-stepping of PCM is merely a digital encoding which DACs use this to reproduce a full, fluid signal. There's literally nothing for up-sampling to do that could add any quality! The only thing it will do is introduce even more errors.
In some cases DACs have even behaved worse at higher sample rates—meaning in that case you'd not only have more errors from upsampling, but also more errors from the DAC.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll go get my cats-and-dogs umbrella.
Someone who thinks they can code is far more dangerous than someone who realizes they can't and defers to experts. Pity the devs who'll have to suffer a bad manager going worse because of this!
I'm going to go out on a glass-half-empty limb here and say that means encrypted, not salted and hashed. "Cryptographically Scrambled" is too obviously ambiguous. I hope I'm wrong!
A properly calibrated LCD may be able to match the colors of a properly calibrated CRT, but not the black level. High end LCDs can get quite acceptably close, but most aren't that great.
I'd prefer monitors that can work without a hugely contrasting image.
Take a game like Quake. It plays perfectly, in all its dark, murky, brown palette, on CRTs. Throw it on an LCD without boosting the game's brightness and it can be quite difficult to pick out the details. Reacting to this, mappers seemed to go between one of two paths
The first option, they'll make a game nearly fullbright, then add shadows in for contrast. Dark colors other than shadows are delegated for things you shouldn't be paying attention to -- mainly extraneous paths.
The second option is that the mapper significantly increases the brightness setting in the game, designing a level that is actually quite dark and very difficult to see at a normal brightness level on a calibrated monitor.
Agreed. If you've got clients visiting and for some reason they might see you, then dress up a little. Otherwise wear what you want. It's not like being choked by a tie will make you perform any better.
My Nexus 7 arrived on Tuesday, and I opened it just fine. The tape used to keep the box closed was a little interesting, looked almost like it had been melted on, but nothing anyone with a pair of scissors or box cutters should have trouble with.
Proper thermal paste usage can mean the difference between silence and a loud fan at load. Your CPU will probably be fine either way, but thermal paste is definitely nice if you like to keep a quiet PC.
I'm mainly curious to see what kind of thermal material they used. If they compared it with that gummy pad or cheap paste that typically comes on CPUs, it doesn't mean much. That stuff will keep your CPU from overheating, but it can't hold a candle to one of the aftermarket brands like Arctic Silver. Beat that, and I'll be very interested.
Here's the problem. Why should I pay money to make my OS worse?
I bumped my head the day the Windows 8 RC was released, and installed it on my non-touchscreen work laptop. I've been using it for development every day since. To be clear -- I used the developer beta briefly and really disliked the experience, but hey, this is the future, might as well jump on the train early and figure it out, if only to head off future questions that'll be bubbled up to IT.
Overall my experience has still been very close to that of Windows 7. Once you're on the desktop, the start screen stays out of your way until you ask for it and apps work as usual. It's not nearly what screenshots make it out to be. The tablet apps look like they'll be great on a tablet, but they suck for desktop use. It's easy to avoid them. The new start screen, however, is growing on me.
I put several live tiles there so I can hit winkey and get a quick glance at everything. Once I'm done scanning them I hit winkey again to go back to desktop. It's really very useful, and completely fluid without ever touching the mouse. You can put icons for desktop apps on the start screen as well, and I occasionally use it to launch them. For the bulk of it, though, the "winkey + typing" trick still works to launch apps just like it does in Windows 7.
As far as development goes, Windows 8 does have some compelling new APIs. WinRT has asynchronous APIs for many things that would have blocked in Windows 7. This can be an instant user experience win for any app that can use them. There's also Registered I/O, which is a fully asynchronous and zero-copy sockets API designed for applications needing low latency and super high performance. Server applications with many concurrent connections and perhaps even games will benefit from this.
Is it worth the $40 upgrade cost? Sure, I'll tell people I know to grab it. Especially since that will preserve Media Center capabilities.
Not necessarily an idiot, but ignorantly uneducated and aliterate. Ignorance != stupidity.
My younger brother (19 years old) leaves out apostrophes whenever he types anything informal -- be it in an email or a text. One day I jokingly brought this up to him, and he came back vehemently against their use -- quite seriously that he believed anyone who needed apostrophes was an idiot for not being able to infer the true meaning.
I think that's the only time I've ever facepalmed. What meaningful reply could you give to that?
This from a avid reader, an AP student who's in college for aerospace engineering.
It sounds like they're able to provide a fix without GPS, which would give it an entirely different function from AGPS.
AGPS tells a GPS receiver where satellites are supposed to be at a certain time, to help it initially lock on to their signal. It does not provide a higher-precision location, or one at all in places where GPS cannot penetrate.
The unfortunate truth is that sound in most theaters, while clear enough to understand, is usually not making the most of the existing 7.1 format.
This new format won't help a thing without strict rules for room setup. The current THX and Dolby certifications mean nothing. We need something new. Anyone who frequents ArcLight or other premium theaters can tell you it's night & day when it's set up right.
FOIA, apparently. WTFV.
SuperAMOLED+ (note the +) and SuperAMOLED HD+ screens are true RGB, not Pentile.
So long as Samsung continues to be the sole producer of phones with SuperAMOLED+ screens, they've got my dollar secured. I'd much rather have those deep blacks than a Retina screen.
Of course if I was an Android user, I may be worried about Samsung creating their own fork which is almost guaranteed to be worse than vanilla. They may end up driving more users away with this than they'd gain.
The PowerVR GPUs integrated into Intel's Atoms are great -- in theory. The drivers are so terrible they can't even run Windows 7's aero at acceptable FPS, let alone a game. They also don't bother to support 64-bit, or any x86 Linux other than 32-bit MeeGo.
I don't know if it's PowerVR or Intel, but someone needs to get their drivers in order before they'll have a chance of encroaching on any of the existing players.
I've had a Samsung Focus since launch day. I have three beefs with this OS. The first is that Microsoft needs to integrate a standard virtualized endless list.
With any app that pulls data from the web and presents it in a never-ending list, it's a crapshoot. Some scroll perfectly fluid, just like the built-in apps. Others behave erratically or perform work on the main UI thread and lower render FPS (and thus, responsiveness).
For all the work they did to provide common controls and layout to make every app have a similar functionality, they've completely failed on this one and it's a very glaring issue.
My second issue is that they don't allow any native code. Yes, .NET works—and works very well—for an overwhelming majority of apps. There are still some areas where native code would provide a huge benefit. I'm hoping that Windows 8's new heterogeneous ecosystem of native/.NET/Javascript apps that all look and feel correct and have access to the same features will influence the future of Windows Phone.
My third issue is with access to the graphics hardware. Handicapping developers with the limited subset available in XNA 100% guarantees that this OS will not compete with iOS or Android when it comes to high-end games. Most of the current phones are on ~5 year old hardware, so it's pretty clear that they understand this as well.
From an audiophile with stupidly expensive headphones, DACs, and amps to power them, and no $50 cables:
The Superlux HD668b have the most impressive bang for your buck I've ever seen. At $50 ($30-40 if you look around), they easily match other cans $200-300 in quality. They are super analytical monitors—you won't get that V-shaped response that most people find pleasing. If it happens you like that type of response (many people requesting a flat response don't actually realize how accustomed they've become to non-flat), they'll still keep up with an EQ-ed source like a champ.
SHA-1, like MD5, is broken for digital signatures. When someone finds a way to reverse a hash back into a password, then it will be broken for passwords.
The only real argument against SHA-1 for passwords is that you can brute-force them rather quickly, but SHA-2 has the same problem. If this is an issue for you, use PBKDF2 or some similar algorithm.
Algorithms designed to burn CPU, like PBKDF2 recommended in the article, are great if used correctly.
The important thing to remember is that you want to make the client burn CPU, NOT the server. If you let the client trivially initiate 10 http requests that cause a server's CPU to peg for 1 second each, you've created a nice DoS vector.
Are there any existing Javascript crypto libraries that safely offload this work to the client?
Including the scores in FLAC is awesome. More games need to do this.
If you ever wanted the best-of-the-best indie games, this bundle is full of them and well worth paying for.
this is exactly what i thought. "free web hosting that displays banners, welcome to the 90s!"
And remember, Apple exerts almost zero (the exception being the so-called "most favored nation" clause) control over book prices.
Though the result is that consumers got screwed because of it, this is my understanding of it as well.
What I remember is that Amazon basically had the publishers by the balls, dictating somewhat more reasonable prices for ebooks. When Apple came to the market, they specifically worked with the publishers saying "hey, we'll let YOU set the price, so long as you always offer us the best one". The end result is that prices skyrocketed overnight, and today are still far higher than they once were.
It is far easier to apply a dynamic compressor plugin than it is to undo studio-mastered dynamic compression.
The cool thing is, a lot of TVs, audio equipment, and software have already had something like this built in for years. Usually they call it a user-friendly name like "night mode", so it can be a little difficult to find, but at least it's there. Why audio can't take the same path is beyond me.
Mod parent up!
A lot of people will see a graph of PCM and think up-sampling will help make the stair-stepping be finer, less noticeable, and thus improve quality. Unscrupulous audio companies love to take advantage of this belief with up-sampling tech.
That belief is, of course, complete bullshit—the stair-stepping of PCM is merely a digital encoding which DACs use this to reproduce a full, fluid signal. There's literally nothing for up-sampling to do that could add any quality! The only thing it will do is introduce even more errors.
In some cases DACs have even behaved worse at higher sample rates—meaning in that case you'd not only have more errors from upsampling, but also more errors from the DAC.