You put in the name you commonly go by. If you ask people who Lady Gaga is, they're a damn sight more likely to know that name rather than the one on her birth certificate.
Nickel foam is already used in NiMH batteries to improve storage capacity, it's just expensive, so most often used in high-density NiMH car batteries. They already produce a low-nickel variant of this foam that's cheaper and simpler to produce, called celmet, that's comparable in performance to more expensive production methods - Sumitomo are not a fly-by-night company, this is part of their bread-and-butter business.
They've now applied the same foam technique to creating aluminium foam instead of nickel foam, so it can be used in Lithium batteries instead of NiMH. Given their focus, I imagine it's going to be more suitable to larger Li-ion batteries for EV purposes rather than smaller consumer electronics, but there's no fundamental reason it won't work for Li-ion batteries. After all, all you're doing is increasing the surface area of the electrode with a foam-type material; the trick is making it cheaply enough while maintaining mechanical strength. That appears to be the problem they have solved for aluminium, using their existing technique.
They want meticulous control over how they communicate and with whom they communicate
Which is precisely how circles work. You add people to circles, and a) you see their public posts in your stream and b) they can see stuff you post that you deliberately select their circle to see.
(If you don't add someone to a circle, but they're sharing stuff with you, it just goes into the 'incoming' circle, but not your main stream - you can hide bits, block them entirely, or add them to the appropriate circle)
Everything bar your name is selectable for privacy, so you can choose which circles, if any, see what, or you can make it public if you like, and it's all optional - blank by default, and you're prompted to choose secure settings when you select who to share with.
That you can remove your circle of followers/friends from view is a feature, not a fault. Having your 'social graph' visible makes it easier for friends to find you, as you probably share mutual friends and it uses that to show how many people you have in common when it makes recommendations. You can make some circles visible but not others (the circle itself they're in is not shown) or just hide them all. I have limited mine to just one group, while we're all finding each other.
I loathe facebook, the way they make it as hard as possible to make sure your settings are really, truly set to friends only, and have a nasty habit of changing it back to open without telling you. That, and the relationship with zygna, a truly scummy company.
Google cocked up with Buzz and privacy; they really seem to have learned from that with google+. I already have 100 odd co-circled people (mostly friends from a common forum) and am loving it. Google may not be a saint of a company, but they've demonstrated so far they've got a helluva bigger clue when it comes to managing who sees what than facebook have ever demonstrated. Well, that and hangouts are just really cleverly done.
Isn't the more logical interpretation that google saw that java already had a history in the mobile space, and rather than re-invent the wheel decided it would be cheaper and simpler to use a java VM, and went to sun to licence the patents needed to do that. That failed, so they said 'alrighty then' and wrote the clean-room dalvik VM which differs from java in a lot of key design decisions. Isn't that how the patent system is supposed to work?
If they'd tried to licence the java patents AFTER they'd written dalvik, that'd be a lot more damning.
What you don’t have control over are the circles you are placed into by everyone else.
The flip side of this is you have total control over what circles you put other people in - which then follows naturally as that then allows you very fine-grained control as to what you want to share with who. It is a far better way of managing what other people see about you than the;one giant circle of equals' that facebook defaults to.
I think google can do a hell of a lot more behavioural profiling if they choose to on you - especially if you use google mail, google docs, google calendar et al. Either you trust google to be a reasonable custodian of your data and abide by their privacy policy, or you don't. It's not like they can be a much worse guardian of it than facebook or zynga...
Presumably the problem was spooling up new storage and moving the system over to it in the time it went from 90% to 100% - by the sounds of it, they hit max capacity much faster than they expected. Which is the point of the limited public beta trial, after all - to road-test the systems with a small group of willing laymen (more than they've got working at google itself) so they can avoid these sorts of problems when they switch to a much more open beta, and final eventually.
Even so, twitter still regularly shows the fail whale, long after it went mass-market, and that hasn't seemed to dent its popularity much. Hell, facebook still has plenty of outages, and they've been running for years now. Google+ has been in invite-only field trial for what, a couple of weeks?
Of course they will need to load it up with a bunch of useless games to attract the masses over from FB.
I really hope they don't, in fact, do that. Frankly, I hope the people that like get bent-over by zygna stay on facebook, and we can start fresh on google+. The absolutely worst thing about facebook is the utter drivel posted by people you used to know, but can't unfriend because it'll hurt their feelings.
Except that the primary purpose of posting on someone else's wall is to publicly embarrass them in front of all their friends. This is not possible in Google+. One might argue that is a good thing.
Precisely. If someone wants to post something to me, they can do so, by sending it directly or putting me in their circle and posting it to that circle. If they want to comment on something I've written publicly, they can comment on it like everyone else, and of course, I tailor what I post to the appropriate circle.
People in my close-friends circle can't post stuff that my work circle can see, and vice-versa. And that's how it should be, instead of 'everyone in one giant friend circle whether you've vaguely met them once online, or they're your boss, or your dad' that facebook seems to design their system around.
What is holding Opera back from the mainstream? They have been around for eons and have innovated a lot of features (or at the very least implemented said features well before their competitors). Still, Opera seems to remain a niche web browser.
No proper adblock plugin*. That has been the killer feature for EVERY normal user I've switched from IE to firefox over the years. That, and firefox is big enough that it gets tested these days, along with IE. Some small yet critical for some user website breaks in opera, based upon some crappy flash based feature; they don't blame the website (it USED to work just fine before you fiddled with it); they blame me, and/or opera.
* No, privoxy, or modified hosts file doesn't count. They don't catch all ads, and they leave great big chunks of pagespace where the ad used to be. Adblock plus + element hider is truly awesome at ad-zapping mainstream websites**.
** And yes, yes, it's stealing to view a website without viewing the ads. When adverts don't 1) take up half the page with all the bouncing and the colours and the sounds and memememememepayattentiontoMENOW for crap I have zero interest in 2) use up large chunks of limited, metered bandwidth 3) provide a massive vector for drive-by malware and 4) make the page load grind to a halt while it waits for the bloody ad server or google analytics or whatever to kick in, feel free to get back to me. For my own use, I do whitelist some sites I care about that don't give separately give me an option to disable ads.
Sysmark is supposed to measure overall systems performance, not just be a CPU benchmark.
"SYSmark® 2012 is the latest version of the premier performance metric that measures and compares PC performance based on real world applications."
Real world software uses the GPU; Aero, flash, Chrome, IE, Firefox, photoshop, just off the top of my head. Intel is moving into the combined CPU/GPU market too, though in a slightly different way, with sandy bridge. GPU acceleration of applications is here to stay, and ever more important to the overall performance benchmark of a system. Using old versions of software that don't test that at all makes sysmark a BAD TEST of real world performance, and AMD have been complaining for some time that disproportionate weight is given to the OCR and compression sections for overall score.
Nvidia and VIA have dropped their endorsement too, so sysmark is an intel only party now. Not exactly great for what is supposedly a neutral party system test.
He already donated a million dollars to alzheimer's research, and has been an ambassador for various programs looking into the disease. Unfortunately, he's been told by a number of doctors that any breakthroughs that do come won't come soon enough to help him personally. So in addition to his work helping research on the disease, he's also now arguing, and has been for a while, that people in the UK should have a right to a medically-assisted death by professionals when they are terminally or seriously degeneratively ill.
It's legal to commit (or attempt) suicide in the UK, and has been since 1961. It is illegal to materially assist someone else to commit suicide.
The other term for 'helping' someone to die is murder, so you can see where they're coming from in the making of the law. "But officer, I didn't smother him with that pillow because I'm fed up of caring for him and want his inheritance; I did it because he wanted me to! Assisted suicide!"
Now, we can certainly argue against the inhumanity of the law that prevents terminally ill people properly and formally asking for medical help to go to their deaths quietly and with dignity a little early, rather than have to live through ever last inch of their dragged out death; but you have to respect the other point of view, and ensure that the vulnerable in society are not put at risk from those who would do them harm either.
Why is this also-ran attracting the same media attention as if Queen Elizabeth and the reanimated corpse of Michael Jackson and Xenu toured East Coast tourist spots?
Because she was the official candidate for VP last time round, and was specifically chosen to appeal to those of the GOP base that McCain didn't? That just under 60 million americans were happy to vote for McCain, knowing that that put Palin one heart-attack away from the presidency? (and presumably, at least some of them were hoping for precisely that) That only 10 million more voted for the other guys?
The thing that always amuses me about cancer panic regarding non-ionizing radiation from cell phones and now wifi, is that we're literally living in a sea of non-ionizing radiation, and have been for 70 years. If you look at the energy/m^2, radio and television broadcast radiation are significantly higher that cellphones, and WAY higher than wifi. TV and radio sit firmly in the 'radio band' at frequencies lower than 1GHz, while mobile phones straddle the border with the microwave band, at between 0.9GHz and 1.8Ghz or so. The top end of the microwave band is 300GHz, and the UV band doesn't start until 750Thz or so; phones, wifi, radio, tv all sit will below the visible spectrum, and thus simply do not have enough energy per quantum to ionize atoms or molecules—that is, to 'knock off' an electron from an atom or molecule. It is this that causes damage to cells in the body that can cause cancer, or unregulated growth of cells. If this wasn't true, we'd all have cancer already from our lifetime exposure to TV radiation.
UV sunlight, x-rays, cosmic and gamma rays (i.e. nuclear radiation) lie in the frequency range above visible light, and DO have enough energy to ionize atoms. This is ionizing radiation, and is why we must be careful of our exposure to man-made x-rays, exposure to too much UV light, exposure to cosmic radiation when we fly too much etc because they can and do cause cancer.
Microwaves like TV and mobile phones? They do not, and cannot cause cancer because they simply are not the type of radiation that can. Heating? Well, they do cause heating of course - we exploit that fact in microwave ovens - at 800W or so. A cellphone that emits power in the milliwatt range is not going to cause much heating, which is why we have the SAR ratings - they measure how much heating they would cause in the most sensitive tissue in the brain to that. All current phones, even high power smartphones, lie well below the guidelines for safe operation.
Note, standing in front of a high power TV transmitter is still dangerous for your health, as is being literally right in front of a tower mounted high power cell phone transmitter, because the level of heating starts to go up, and can damage tissue through heating - especially the eyes. IIRC, this is how the idea of microwave ovens came about - high power radar dishes (which operate in the microwave spectrum) were literally cooking birds to death that roosted in front of the dishes - and they roosted there because the air was nice and warm...
Google voice and video chat is pretty solid and multiplatform option. You need to keep a gmail or igoogle tab open in the browser (with the plugin installed) to be online, but other than that it's pretty decent. Android support is currently in 2.3.4 (the Nexus S only yet officially IIRC) but it is going to be rolled out to older versions shortly. It's not yet on iOS but its rumoured to be in the works.
The problem is that ISPs and router makers have been dragging their feet over IPv6 for years - there was just no ROI in the short term for them. Rolling your own solution is doable, but doing it properly without ISP or router support is still quite tricky.
Now of course, as IPv4 running out becomes a concrete problem, it's cheaper and simpler to focus on deploying carrier grade NAT - i.e. multiple end-users sharing a single globally routable IPv4 address.
I do have IPv6 on my home network; I've got a dlink 825 flashed with openWRT as my primary router (linked to cheapie DSL modem with PPPoE) specifically so I could run the AICCU client for sixxs.net for my IPv6 tunnel on it. RADVD handles advertising the tunnel prefix to the home LAN, so all my PCs, VMs, laptops etc have IPv6 addresses using one/64 out of my allocated/48. I had to do it this way as I have a dynamic IPv4 address, and the handful of expensive routers that do support proper 6in4 tunnels generally only work if you have a fixed real IPv4 address.
I have a similar setup at work, but there it's just a linux box with the main fixed IP router forwarding the 6in4 packets to it.
The main use for this for me is to be able to connect direct over IPv6 to any of my machines at home (mostly my NAS or VMs), using SSH or RDP etc - I've just put the static IPv6 addresses into my external DNS for my own domain. Very handy if I want to test how one of our hosted services looks from outside the work network, or to queue up a download so it's ready when I get home. I even use it at home to connect to work; since the IPv6 takes a different (shorter) route, it's quite a bit lower latency than connecting to the same machine via IPv4 and VPN (my firewall allows such connections from and to work, but not the general outside world)
So it has its uses for a techie like me; but for the average home user? It's way way beyond their ability to setup. Even setting up a single machine with a dynamic IPv6 tunnel is too complex, and certainly using 6to4 or toredo or the like relies too much on having a nearby translation gateway, and they're still pretty thin on the ground leading to a pretty rubbish IPv6 connection.
I honestly think we're going to see a lot more carrier-grade NAT from ISPs - it's already happening for mobile devices - than we see major IPv6 rollouts in the near future. Of course, that will break even more than it already is P2P apps like skype, bittorrent, IM file transfer etc etc, and of course running your own IPv6 tunnel will be that much harder behind a double NAT firewall.
There's nothing wrong with QoS and putting some traffic at the front of the router queue. It just means light, latency important packets don't get drowned in a torrent of bulk traffic that doesn't really care what order the packets arrive in. But you still have the same amount of capacity for traffic at the start as the end, you're just determining which app gets to use it first, and which app you're prepared to throw away packets for first if necessary at heavy load.
The article is not about that, but bucket throttling. I.e. each user is throttled to a certain throughput, but have a small 'margin' where they can go faster. This makes the service feel snappier when browsing the 'net or other irregular small bursty traffic, but makes it much slower when doing bulk file transfers or streaming. And of course, the size of the bucket, and the rate at which it gets filled are adjustable based upon how congested the network is - and even based upon your usage pattern.
This isn't traffic shaping in the good sense. This is traffic shaping as in throttling individual users when they're using more bandwidth than you can afford them to shaping. Even the latter is acceptable on a small network with limited bandwidth so it's at least minimally usable - but needing it is a clear demonstration that you don't have enough throughput for all your users. When you're supposed to be in the business of selling bandwidth, that's bad.
Actually, that's not true. Thunderbolt provides a significant win over USB 3 in nearly every way. The author just doesn't get it.
Well, one thing USB 3.0 has going for it over thunderbolt is that you can plug USB1.1 and USB2.0 devices into it. There's an *awful* lot of those. USB 3.0 is slowly replacing USB 2.0, just as USB 2.0 replaced USB 1.1. I still have a couple of pci USB 2.0 cards I got when USB 2.0 was still a fairly rare beastie on motherboards. Give it another couple of years, and the majority, if not all motherboard rear USB ports will be USB 3.0 spec. Especially once intel finally roll out integrated support.
That all said, I agree entirely that thunderbolt is a superior design that does things that you just can't with USB. I just don't think thunderbolt is going to replace USB at all, it's either going to be a niche product for specialists, much as firewire ended up as, or it will take over the unified display cable for displayport+extras as you say and be huge (as opposed to vanilla displayport ruling the roost instead)
USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA
It offers one, and one only. It doesn't crash my fucking machines when I hotplug the thing. The marvell chipset that seems to be in EVERY SINGLE esata implementation absolutely SUCKS for hotplug. It generally does one of three things
1) hardlock. Way too damn common. 2) nothing at all. Drive not detected until reboot. 3) It works. Once. Then you need to reboot for it be detected again.
For that reason, and that reason alone, I've switched my external drive caddies to USB 3.0. Even intel sata hotplug is pretty flaky.
we have fuel tax, road tax, "tv licensing", income tax, VAT, land tax, house-buying tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, corporation tax, national insurance contributions, gambling tax, air passenger tax, insurance premium tax, inheritance tax, council tax, and a million others,
The reason for all these is not revenue generation per se, but attempts to socially engineer the public. You put high 'sin' taxes on alcohol, tobacco, petrol, flying etc to encourage people to not smoke, not drink and take the bus. You give benefits to the low paid and families with children so that even a shit job is liveable if you don't have other income, and make it so raising children is affordable.
Council tax is based upon how much your house is worth and pays for local services; so it's a form of asset tax - VAT and other sales taxes disproportionately affect the poorest as they spend everything they earn; the wealthy squirrel most of their past income into stocks, property etc and then live off the proceeds, without spending most of it on VAT attracting stuff. If you only have an income and sales tax, the wealthy end up paying pretty much no tax at all without asset taxes, such as the council tax and capital gains tax.
Now, whether the system is broken, in that the middle classes get royally screwed with higher taxes and little child benefit; in that fuel duty just punishes workers who have no choice but to drive if they don't live inside the london orbital; that corporations use the dutch sandwich trick etc etc to pay virtually no tax; that CEOs and bankers get to set their own remuneration how they like, and such have *massively* increased their take from company profits compared to the average worker over the last 50 years; that VAT and all it's exemptions is a complex kludgy mess - I'm not going to disagree with any of that.
But to simplify the tax system, you need the politicians to take their hands off the social engineering levers they love to play with first. And getting them to do that in the tax code, let alone the health service, education or transport is a tall order indeed.
Two, there is no way to easily turn off these activities on a phone that you otherwise want to use for casual traffic on an unsecured network.
Well, going to 'settings' -> 'accounts & sync' and turning off 'background data' would do it. Then nothing in the accounts and sync page (google calendar, contacts, facebook, exchange etc etc) will be silent syncing in the background on your untrusted network. A lot of third party apps also follow that setting, so it should pretty much kill off all unsolicited background connections unless individually requested in a given app.
If you want to only kill off specific services, and have those require a manual sync, just change the settings for those options under the same acccount & sync page.
unrar is by rarlab, the same company that makes winrar and is run by Alexander Roshal - and licences the format from Eugene Roshal, who invented it. It's shareware, and can only decompress files, not create them. Rar and winrar, that can create archives, are closed source.
This one is open source, and thus can be incorporated more easily into other open source apps for extraction of the current v3 of rar files; previously, unrarlib could do v1 and v2, but not v3.
Except that it just means the 'unapproved' tablet makers will continue using 2.2 and 2.3 as the basis for their tablets, which is a worse tablet experience than honeycomb - I tried out an archos 101, and despite loving my rooted gingerbread galaxy S to death, froyo really doesn't scale well to a 10" touchscreen.
If they want android to get a reputation as a shitty ipad knock-off in the tablet arena, they're doing a fairly good job of it by stopping honeycomb seeing wider release. I personally think gingerbread is significantly better than iOS on a smartphone, but I have to admit that iOS is whupping our arse in usability when it comes to the iPad.
Did you even look at the photos? The galaxy S is only superficially similar to the iphone. The icons are very different (square rather than rounded, totally different symbols). The 'bar' at the bottom has different icons, different functions, different positions and looks different. The bar at the top with the 3G symbol etc is different, in a different place. The galaxy S has a 4" screen, at 480 x 800 pixels; it's direct competitor when it came out was the iphone 3gs, with a 3.5" 320 x 480 pixel display. The samsung galaxy S has a great big 'samsung' on the front, and three buttons, not one. It's a direct follow-on in look and feel from the galaxy i900 two years earlier.
A grid layout for touchscreen icons on phones predates the iphone 1 by a looong way (see, for example, the palm devices). It's a direct follow-on from the desktop metaphor of icons for apps in a grid layout, so it's hardly innovative to do the same on a phone.
If you're arguing the case design (black with silver trim) is similar, well, there's the LG prada which was announced a full year before the iphone 1, or samsung's own f700 which was announced virtually at the same time. Black with silver-trim in a candy bar phone with a touch screen was nothing new.
It is beneath Samsung, or should be at least, and perhaps this lawsuit will slap some sense into them.
Well, that assumes that the galaxy line of phones and tablets are a rip-off of apple's designs, as opposed to the natural evolution of many, many phones, including samsung's own, that were available in european and asian markets with similar look-n-feel long before the iphone. The iphone was a huge success in the US when it came out because at the time you weren't getting the great phones released elsewhere in the world, where it took a lot longer to get traction against similarly (or better) spec'd competition.
Seriously, pick up a galaxy S and an iphone 3GS or even iphone 4 (I own the former, I help many users of the latter). They look, feel and operate quite differently.
Well, they're arguing that a) samsung galaxy hardware look too much like the iphone/ipad. Cos, it's rectangular with rounded corners. And black, both high original apple features that only they did first. b) samsung's 'touchwiz' user interface (as opposed to the standard android one) looks too much like iOS. Cos the 'app drawer' shows all installed apps in a rectangular grid. Which no-one would ever have thought of until apple did it.
Given samsung supplies apple with their screens and cpu's, it seems they want to stop their supplier well, using their own stuff and stay just as a parts supplier, not a competitor. That they have to use laughably generic look-n-feel patents to do it shows how baseless the accusation is.
This is the default galaxy S i9000 homescreen vs the apple home screen. Absolutely identical, aren't they. If you picked one up, you'd never be able to tell them apart, they're *that* similar.
I hear they're going to sue nokia next because they sell 'phones', which is a trademark infringement of apple's unique name, iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
You put in the name you commonly go by. If you ask people who Lady Gaga is, they're a damn sight more likely to know that name rather than the one on her birth certificate.
There is a separate ipad app, it's still awaiting approval by apple
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Nickel foam is already used in NiMH batteries to improve storage capacity, it's just expensive, so most often used in high-density NiMH car batteries. They already produce a low-nickel variant of this foam that's cheaper and simpler to produce, called celmet, that's comparable in performance to more expensive production methods - Sumitomo are not a fly-by-night company, this is part of their bread-and-butter business.
They've now applied the same foam technique to creating aluminium foam instead of nickel foam, so it can be used in Lithium batteries instead of NiMH. Given their focus, I imagine it's going to be more suitable to larger Li-ion batteries for EV purposes rather than smaller consumer electronics, but there's no fundamental reason it won't work for Li-ion batteries. After all, all you're doing is increasing the surface area of the electrode with a foam-type material; the trick is making it cheaply enough while maintaining mechanical strength. That appears to be the problem they have solved for aluminium, using their existing technique.
They want meticulous control over how they communicate and with whom they communicate
Which is precisely how circles work. You add people to circles, and a) you see their public posts in your stream and b) they can see stuff you post that you deliberately select their circle to see.
(If you don't add someone to a circle, but they're sharing stuff with you, it just goes into the 'incoming' circle, but not your main stream - you can hide bits, block them entirely, or add them to the appropriate circle)
Everything bar your name is selectable for privacy, so you can choose which circles, if any, see what, or you can make it public if you like, and it's all optional - blank by default, and you're prompted to choose secure settings when you select who to share with.
That you can remove your circle of followers/friends from view is a feature, not a fault. Having your 'social graph' visible makes it easier for friends to find you, as you probably share mutual friends and it uses that to show how many people you have in common when it makes recommendations. You can make some circles visible but not others (the circle itself they're in is not shown) or just hide them all. I have limited mine to just one group, while we're all finding each other.
I loathe facebook, the way they make it as hard as possible to make sure your settings are really, truly set to friends only, and have a nasty habit of changing it back to open without telling you. That, and the relationship with zygna, a truly scummy company.
Google cocked up with Buzz and privacy; they really seem to have learned from that with google+. I already have 100 odd co-circled people (mostly friends from a common forum) and am loving it. Google may not be a saint of a company, but they've demonstrated so far they've got a helluva bigger clue when it comes to managing who sees what than facebook have ever demonstrated. Well, that and hangouts are just really cleverly done.
Isn't the more logical interpretation that google saw that java already had a history in the mobile space, and rather than re-invent the wheel decided it would be cheaper and simpler to use a java VM, and went to sun to licence the patents needed to do that. That failed, so they said 'alrighty then' and wrote the clean-room dalvik VM which differs from java in a lot of key design decisions. Isn't that how the patent system is supposed to work?
If they'd tried to licence the java patents AFTER they'd written dalvik, that'd be a lot more damning.
What you don’t have control over are the circles you are placed into by everyone else.
The flip side of this is you have total control over what circles you put other people in - which then follows naturally as that then allows you very fine-grained control as to what you want to share with who. It is a far better way of managing what other people see about you than the ;one giant circle of equals' that facebook defaults to.
I think google can do a hell of a lot more behavioural profiling if they choose to on you - especially if you use google mail, google docs, google calendar et al. Either you trust google to be a reasonable custodian of your data and abide by their privacy policy, or you don't. It's not like they can be a much worse guardian of it than facebook or zynga...
Presumably the problem was spooling up new storage and moving the system over to it in the time it went from 90% to 100% - by the sounds of it, they hit max capacity much faster than they expected. Which is the point of the limited public beta trial, after all - to road-test the systems with a small group of willing laymen (more than they've got working at google itself) so they can avoid these sorts of problems when they switch to a much more open beta, and final eventually.
Even so, twitter still regularly shows the fail whale, long after it went mass-market, and that hasn't seemed to dent its popularity much. Hell, facebook still has plenty of outages, and they've been running for years now. Google+ has been in invite-only field trial for what, a couple of weeks?
Of course they will need to load it up with a bunch of useless games to attract the masses over from FB.
I really hope they don't, in fact, do that. Frankly, I hope the people that like get bent-over by zygna stay on facebook, and we can start fresh on google+. The absolutely worst thing about facebook is the utter drivel posted by people you used to know, but can't unfriend because it'll hurt their feelings.
Except that the primary purpose of posting on someone else's wall is to publicly embarrass them in front of all their friends. This is not possible in Google+. One might argue that is a good thing.
Precisely. If someone wants to post something to me, they can do so, by sending it directly or putting me in their circle and posting it to that circle. If they want to comment on something I've written publicly, they can comment on it like everyone else, and of course, I tailor what I post to the appropriate circle.
People in my close-friends circle can't post stuff that my work circle can see, and vice-versa. And that's how it should be, instead of 'everyone in one giant friend circle whether you've vaguely met them once online, or they're your boss, or your dad' that facebook seems to design their system around.
What is holding Opera back from the mainstream? They have been around for eons and have innovated a lot of features (or at the very least implemented said features well before their competitors). Still, Opera seems to remain a niche web browser.
No proper adblock plugin*. That has been the killer feature for EVERY normal user I've switched from IE to firefox over the years. That, and firefox is big enough that it gets tested these days, along with IE. Some small yet critical for some user website breaks in opera, based upon some crappy flash based feature; they don't blame the website (it USED to work just fine before you fiddled with it); they blame me, and/or opera.
* No, privoxy, or modified hosts file doesn't count. They don't catch all ads, and they leave great big chunks of pagespace where the ad used to be. Adblock plus + element hider is truly awesome at ad-zapping mainstream websites**.
** And yes, yes, it's stealing to view a website without viewing the ads. When adverts don't 1) take up half the page with all the bouncing and the colours and the sounds and memememememepayattentiontoMENOW for crap I have zero interest in 2) use up large chunks of limited, metered bandwidth 3) provide a massive vector for drive-by malware and 4) make the page load grind to a halt while it waits for the bloody ad server or google analytics or whatever to kick in, feel free to get back to me. For my own use, I do whitelist some sites I care about that don't give separately give me an option to disable ads.
Sysmark is supposed to measure overall systems performance, not just be a CPU benchmark.
"SYSmark® 2012 is the latest version of the premier performance metric that measures and compares PC performance based on real world applications."
Real world software uses the GPU; Aero, flash, Chrome, IE, Firefox, photoshop, just off the top of my head. Intel is moving into the combined CPU/GPU market too, though in a slightly different way, with sandy bridge. GPU acceleration of applications is here to stay, and ever more important to the overall performance benchmark of a system. Using old versions of software that don't test that at all makes sysmark a BAD TEST of real world performance, and AMD have been complaining for some time that disproportionate weight is given to the OCR and compression sections for overall score.
Nvidia and VIA have dropped their endorsement too, so sysmark is an intel only party now. Not exactly great for what is supposedly a neutral party system test.
He already donated a million dollars to alzheimer's research, and has been an ambassador for various programs looking into the disease. Unfortunately, he's been told by a number of doctors that any breakthroughs that do come won't come soon enough to help him personally. So in addition to his work helping research on the disease, he's also now arguing, and has been for a while, that people in the UK should have a right to a medically-assisted death by professionals when they are terminally or seriously degeneratively ill.
It's legal to commit (or attempt) suicide in the UK, and has been since 1961. It is illegal to materially assist someone else to commit suicide.
The other term for 'helping' someone to die is murder, so you can see where they're coming from in the making of the law. "But officer, I didn't smother him with that pillow because I'm fed up of caring for him and want his inheritance; I did it because he wanted me to! Assisted suicide!"
Now, we can certainly argue against the inhumanity of the law that prevents terminally ill people properly and formally asking for medical help to go to their deaths quietly and with dignity a little early, rather than have to live through ever last inch of their dragged out death; but you have to respect the other point of view, and ensure that the vulnerable in society are not put at risk from those who would do them harm either.
Why is this also-ran attracting the same media attention as if Queen Elizabeth and the reanimated corpse of Michael Jackson and Xenu toured East Coast tourist spots?
Because she was the official candidate for VP last time round, and was specifically chosen to appeal to those of the GOP base that McCain didn't? That just under 60 million americans were happy to vote for McCain, knowing that that put Palin one heart-attack away from the presidency? (and presumably, at least some of them were hoping for precisely that) That only 10 million more voted for the other guys?
Unlike say, Giuliani, Romney, Paul or Cain.
The thing that always amuses me about cancer panic regarding non-ionizing radiation from cell phones and now wifi, is that we're literally living in a sea of non-ionizing radiation, and have been for 70 years. If you look at the energy/m^2, radio and television broadcast radiation are significantly higher that cellphones, and WAY higher than wifi. TV and radio sit firmly in the 'radio band' at frequencies lower than 1GHz, while mobile phones straddle the border with the microwave band, at between 0.9GHz and 1.8Ghz or so. The top end of the microwave band is 300GHz, and the UV band doesn't start until 750Thz or so; phones, wifi, radio, tv all sit will below the visible spectrum, and thus simply do not have enough energy per quantum to ionize atoms or molecules—that is, to 'knock off' an electron from an atom or molecule. It is this that causes damage to cells in the body that can cause cancer, or unregulated growth of cells. If this wasn't true, we'd all have cancer already from our lifetime exposure to TV radiation.
UV sunlight, x-rays, cosmic and gamma rays (i.e. nuclear radiation) lie in the frequency range above visible light, and DO have enough energy to ionize atoms. This is ionizing radiation, and is why we must be careful of our exposure to man-made x-rays, exposure to too much UV light, exposure to cosmic radiation when we fly too much etc because they can and do cause cancer.
Microwaves like TV and mobile phones? They do not, and cannot cause cancer because they simply are not the type of radiation that can. Heating? Well, they do cause heating of course - we exploit that fact in microwave ovens - at 800W or so. A cellphone that emits power in the milliwatt range is not going to cause much heating, which is why we have the SAR ratings - they measure how much heating they would cause in the most sensitive tissue in the brain to that. All current phones, even high power smartphones, lie well below the guidelines for safe operation.
Note, standing in front of a high power TV transmitter is still dangerous for your health, as is being literally right in front of a tower mounted high power cell phone transmitter, because the level of heating starts to go up, and can damage tissue through heating - especially the eyes. IIRC, this is how the idea of microwave ovens came about - high power radar dishes (which operate in the microwave spectrum) were literally cooking birds to death that roosted in front of the dishes - and they roosted there because the air was nice and warm...
Google voice and video chat is pretty solid and multiplatform option. You need to keep a gmail or igoogle tab open in the browser (with the plugin installed) to be online, but other than that it's pretty decent. Android support is currently in 2.3.4 (the Nexus S only yet officially IIRC) but it is going to be rolled out to older versions shortly. It's not yet on iOS but its rumoured to be in the works.
The problem is that ISPs and router makers have been dragging their feet over IPv6 for years - there was just no ROI in the short term for them. Rolling your own solution is doable, but doing it properly without ISP or router support is still quite tricky.
Now of course, as IPv4 running out becomes a concrete problem, it's cheaper and simpler to focus on deploying carrier grade NAT - i.e. multiple end-users sharing a single globally routable IPv4 address.
I do have IPv6 on my home network; I've got a dlink 825 flashed with openWRT as my primary router (linked to cheapie DSL modem with PPPoE) specifically so I could run the AICCU client for sixxs.net for my IPv6 tunnel on it. RADVD handles advertising the tunnel prefix to the home LAN, so all my PCs, VMs, laptops etc have IPv6 addresses using one /64 out of my allocated /48. I had to do it this way as I have a dynamic IPv4 address, and the handful of expensive routers that do support proper 6in4 tunnels generally only work if you have a fixed real IPv4 address.
I have a similar setup at work, but there it's just a linux box with the main fixed IP router forwarding the 6in4 packets to it.
The main use for this for me is to be able to connect direct over IPv6 to any of my machines at home (mostly my NAS or VMs), using SSH or RDP etc - I've just put the static IPv6 addresses into my external DNS for my own domain. Very handy if I want to test how one of our hosted services looks from outside the work network, or to queue up a download so it's ready when I get home. I even use it at home to connect to work; since the IPv6 takes a different (shorter) route, it's quite a bit lower latency than connecting to the same machine via IPv4 and VPN (my firewall allows such connections from and to work, but not the general outside world)
So it has its uses for a techie like me; but for the average home user? It's way way beyond their ability to setup. Even setting up a single machine with a dynamic IPv6 tunnel is too complex, and certainly using 6to4 or toredo or the like relies too much on having a nearby translation gateway, and they're still pretty thin on the ground leading to a pretty rubbish IPv6 connection.
I honestly think we're going to see a lot more carrier-grade NAT from ISPs - it's already happening for mobile devices - than we see major IPv6 rollouts in the near future. Of course, that will break even more than it already is P2P apps like skype, bittorrent, IM file transfer etc etc, and of course running your own IPv6 tunnel will be that much harder behind a double NAT firewall.
There's nothing wrong with QoS and putting some traffic at the front of the router queue. It just means light, latency important packets don't get drowned in a torrent of bulk traffic that doesn't really care what order the packets arrive in. But you still have the same amount of capacity for traffic at the start as the end, you're just determining which app gets to use it first, and which app you're prepared to throw away packets for first if necessary at heavy load.
The article is not about that, but bucket throttling. I.e. each user is throttled to a certain throughput, but have a small 'margin' where they can go faster. This makes the service feel snappier when browsing the 'net or other irregular small bursty traffic, but makes it much slower when doing bulk file transfers or streaming. And of course, the size of the bucket, and the rate at which it gets filled are adjustable based upon how congested the network is - and even based upon your usage pattern.
This isn't traffic shaping in the good sense. This is traffic shaping as in throttling individual users when they're using more bandwidth than you can afford them to shaping. Even the latter is acceptable on a small network with limited bandwidth so it's at least minimally usable - but needing it is a clear demonstration that you don't have enough throughput for all your users. When you're supposed to be in the business of selling bandwidth, that's bad.
Actually, that's not true. Thunderbolt provides a significant win over USB 3 in nearly every way. The author just doesn't get it.
Well, one thing USB 3.0 has going for it over thunderbolt is that you can plug USB1.1 and USB2.0 devices into it. There's an *awful* lot of those. USB 3.0 is slowly replacing USB 2.0, just as USB 2.0 replaced USB 1.1. I still have a couple of pci USB 2.0 cards I got when USB 2.0 was still a fairly rare beastie on motherboards. Give it another couple of years, and the majority, if not all motherboard rear USB ports will be USB 3.0 spec. Especially once intel finally roll out integrated support.
That all said, I agree entirely that thunderbolt is a superior design that does things that you just can't with USB. I just don't think thunderbolt is going to replace USB at all, it's either going to be a niche product for specialists, much as firewire ended up as, or it will take over the unified display cable for displayport+extras as you say and be huge (as opposed to vanilla displayport ruling the roost instead)
USB 3 offers no advantages over eSATA
It offers one, and one only. It doesn't crash my fucking machines when I hotplug the thing. The marvell chipset that seems to be in EVERY SINGLE esata implementation absolutely SUCKS for hotplug. It generally does one of three things
1) hardlock. Way too damn common.
2) nothing at all. Drive not detected until reboot.
3) It works. Once. Then you need to reboot for it be detected again.
For that reason, and that reason alone, I've switched my external drive caddies to USB 3.0. Even intel sata hotplug is pretty flaky.
we have fuel tax, road tax, "tv licensing", income tax, VAT, land tax, house-buying tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, corporation tax, national insurance contributions, gambling tax, air passenger tax, insurance premium tax, inheritance tax, council tax, and a million others,
The reason for all these is not revenue generation per se, but attempts to socially engineer the public. You put high 'sin' taxes on alcohol, tobacco, petrol, flying etc to encourage people to not smoke, not drink and take the bus. You give benefits to the low paid and families with children so that even a shit job is liveable if you don't have other income, and make it so raising children is affordable.
Council tax is based upon how much your house is worth and pays for local services; so it's a form of asset tax - VAT and other sales taxes disproportionately affect the poorest as they spend everything they earn; the wealthy squirrel most of their past income into stocks, property etc and then live off the proceeds, without spending most of it on VAT attracting stuff. If you only have an income and sales tax, the wealthy end up paying pretty much no tax at all without asset taxes, such as the council tax and capital gains tax.
Now, whether the system is broken, in that the middle classes get royally screwed with higher taxes and little child benefit; in that fuel duty just punishes workers who have no choice but to drive if they don't live inside the london orbital; that corporations use the dutch sandwich trick etc etc to pay virtually no tax; that CEOs and bankers get to set their own remuneration how they like, and such have *massively* increased their take from company profits compared to the average worker over the last 50 years; that VAT and all it's exemptions is a complex kludgy mess - I'm not going to disagree with any of that.
But to simplify the tax system, you need the politicians to take their hands off the social engineering levers they love to play with first. And getting them to do that in the tax code, let alone the health service, education or transport is a tall order indeed.
Two, there is no way to easily turn off these activities on a phone that you otherwise want to use for casual traffic on an unsecured network.
Well, going to 'settings' -> 'accounts & sync' and turning off 'background data' would do it. Then nothing in the accounts and sync page (google calendar, contacts, facebook, exchange etc etc) will be silent syncing in the background on your untrusted network. A lot of third party apps also follow that setting, so it should pretty much kill off all unsolicited background connections unless individually requested in a given app.
If you want to only kill off specific services, and have those require a manual sync, just change the settings for those options under the same acccount & sync page.
unrar is by rarlab, the same company that makes winrar and is run by Alexander Roshal - and licences the format from Eugene Roshal, who invented it. It's shareware, and can only decompress files, not create them. Rar and winrar, that can create archives, are closed source.
This one is open source, and thus can be incorporated more easily into other open source apps for extraction of the current v3 of rar files; previously, unrarlib could do v1 and v2, but not v3.
Except that it just means the 'unapproved' tablet makers will continue using 2.2 and 2.3 as the basis for their tablets, which is a worse tablet experience than honeycomb - I tried out an archos 101, and despite loving my rooted gingerbread galaxy S to death, froyo really doesn't scale well to a 10" touchscreen.
If they want android to get a reputation as a shitty ipad knock-off in the tablet arena, they're doing a fairly good job of it by stopping honeycomb seeing wider release. I personally think gingerbread is significantly better than iOS on a smartphone, but I have to admit that iOS is whupping our arse in usability when it comes to the iPad.
Did you even look at the photos? The galaxy S is only superficially similar to the iphone. The icons are very different (square rather than rounded, totally different symbols). The 'bar' at the bottom has different icons, different functions, different positions and looks different. The bar at the top with the 3G symbol etc is different, in a different place. The galaxy S has a 4" screen, at 480 x 800 pixels; it's direct competitor when it came out was the iphone 3gs, with a 3.5" 320 x 480 pixel display.
The samsung galaxy S has a great big 'samsung' on the front, and three buttons, not one. It's a direct follow-on in look and feel from the galaxy i900 two years earlier.
A grid layout for touchscreen icons on phones predates the iphone 1 by a looong way (see, for example, the palm devices). It's a direct follow-on from the desktop metaphor of icons for apps in a grid layout, so it's hardly innovative to do the same on a phone.
If you're arguing the case design (black with silver trim) is similar, well, there's the LG prada which was announced a full year before the iphone 1, or samsung's own f700 which was announced virtually at the same time. Black with silver-trim in a candy bar phone with a touch screen was nothing new.
It is beneath Samsung, or should be at least, and perhaps this lawsuit will slap some sense into them.
Well, that assumes that the galaxy line of phones and tablets are a rip-off of apple's designs, as opposed to the natural evolution of many, many phones, including samsung's own, that were available in european and asian markets with similar look-n-feel long before the iphone. The iphone was a huge success in the US when it came out because at the time you weren't getting the great phones released elsewhere in the world, where it took a lot longer to get traction against similarly (or better) spec'd competition.
Seriously, pick up a galaxy S and an iphone 3GS or even iphone 4 (I own the former, I help many users of the latter). They look, feel and operate quite differently.
Well, they're arguing that
a) samsung galaxy hardware look too much like the iphone/ipad. Cos, it's rectangular with rounded corners. And black, both high original apple features that only they did first.
b) samsung's 'touchwiz' user interface (as opposed to the standard android one) looks too much like iOS. Cos the 'app drawer' shows all installed apps in a rectangular grid. Which no-one would ever have thought of until apple did it.
Given samsung supplies apple with their screens and cpu's, it seems they want to stop their supplier well, using their own stuff and stay just as a parts supplier, not a competitor. That they have to use laughably generic look-n-feel patents to do it shows how baseless the accusation is.
This is the default galaxy S i9000 homescreen vs the apple home screen. Absolutely identical, aren't they. If you picked one up, you'd never be able to tell them apart, they're *that* similar.
I hear they're going to sue nokia next because they sell 'phones', which is a trademark infringement of apple's unique name, iPhone.