The problem is also the heat sink. Without convection and conduction, you're left with heat radiation, which is pretty damn slow. Worse, any such heat sink would actually pick up more heat due to being in direct sunlight - the existing solar shield on it to protect the instruments was at 400k! Would depend on the design, but I imagine it would be tricky to even break even against solar heating - that's a lot of energy headed your way all the time (and solar panels only convert a small part of it). So if you packed some kind of big folding heatsink to get it in the launch vehicle, you'd also need a folding shield to protect that too. Complex and heavy, and that's before you even start on the active heat pump system, which is a nightmare engineering job in space in and of itself - you really can't afford it to fail.
Frankly carrying your own dump tank of coolant (which eventually gets effectively depleted) seems like it probably was the sensible option. We got 4 years of unique data gathering, and it will take a lot longer before we finish processing it. Space is a really harsh environment, even for machines.
Christians don't believe in many Gods - Odin, Zeus, Mars, Allah, His Noodliness, Cthulu, to name a few. I just believe in one less. By the way, the clue is in the name - atheist. As in not a theist, i.e. not a believer. I don't think about, or worry about, Gods or their absence, except when theists turn up, usually to tell them politely I'm an atheist, so thank you, but not interested, and now would you kindly stop ringing my doorbell every weekend and posting wasted flyers through my door.
To borrow phrasing from a subsequent reply - "atheists are also making a decision based on a belief of their own: that there is not a God."
This is not correct. I simply don't factor belief in Gods into my decisions at all. As a Christian, do you classify yourself as a non-Odinist? Do you factor your non belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster into your every day life and decisions? Are you an active, dues paid member of the 'Thor is not a real God' club, meetings on Thor'sday, except every second week, on Woden'sday? (Seriously, look up how many old Gods have days of the week named after them - romance languages like French use the Roman gods instead)
So unless you can tell me with a straight face that on Saturdays you actively excercise your non-belief in Saturn, aka Chronos, father of Zeus, and use it affect your decisions and thought process, then please give atheists the same courtesy and accept that we simply don't believe the same things as you, and that does make our non belief in Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or Mary Mother Of God (forgive me, not sure which sect you are) any more a religous belief than your non belief in Saturn, Woden etc makes you an active non Wodenist or non Saturnist.
The whole thing about proof is our response to getting bugged by evangelical theists of all stripes. 'MY God is the one true God, and my faith is the one true faith, and you should believe it too!' - to which we say, 'Fine. Prove it.'. We certainly don't spend our days thinking about it, or incorporating it in our decisions. Well, maybe Dawkins does. But he's a sexist blowhard, and is not a representative of all atheists, any more than Abu Hamza represents all Muslims, or Koran burning Terry Jones represents all Christians. Most of us are normal, quiet people who simply don't have a particular belief that some others do, and there's plenty to go around. Not being religious does not make us weird, strange, scary or sinful. We just don't want the State to dictate what beliefs we should be forced to live by.
TLDR; if atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is the most popular hobby in the world. I have some 'What Would Cthulu do? Devour all!' bumper stickers so you can factor your not-Cthuluist religion into your daily life.
Once you've got the ADE version epub, you can easily strip off the DRM using a calibre plugin, so you don't have to faff about with authorising devices in future when you change reader/app.
I did that with the books I bought for my kobo; I've since upgraded to a kindle paperwhite, and used calibre to convert the drm-removed files to mobi, and can read them on that now. If a higher-res kobo with built in light had been available at the time, I probably would have stuck with that...
Well it's certainly pretty straightfoward to remove the adobe digital editions drm from the epub and get a vanilla, unrestricted epub at the end of it - as long as you have the key to download and open it in the first place, anyway. As I understand it, epub DRM is done as an additional layer, separate from the XML/CSS that makes up the document itself, and no particular scheme is part of the spec - once the drm layer is removed from the content, it's no different to an unrestricted epub. But the file itself is an epub extension, so the ADEPT DRM is admittedly inside the zip file, and you need something capable of reading adobe digital editions restricted epubs to read it, i.e. pretty much any e-reader except the kindle. For me, the drm layer is a wrapper round the content that once removed gives a vanilla epub, but as you define it, no, it's not a separate wrapper with a custom extension.
And what are IT supposed to do? Leave a known vulnerable version with dozens of critical flaws - including the HIGHLY exploitable browser plugin - on business critical PCs across the org, including the business critical ones of that small group?
Who's neck would it be if those machines got remote rooted by some chinese hacker driveby? I'm betting not yours.
Perhaps a dialog with IT where you don't install the browser plugin at least, and firewall the group off from the rest of the network in exchange for a tested, custom (i.e. slower) rollout for your setup. It wouldn't hurt if your department volunteered to cough up the cash to pay for the extra engineer time required...
Or you could start evaluating alternative platforms for your business critical software that don't have more holes than my colander?
For future reference, the adobe digital edition version is the drm-wrapped epub for transferring to any compatible app/reader. For kobo store to kobo reader, they use their own format (though it's still epub inside I think) - the formatting is a little better sometimes than the epub version. So you can buy in the kobo store, on pc or reader, and then sync directly over wifi into the kobo without needing to run it through calibre or any pc first - once it's in your kobo store library, you can delete and download direct as many times as you like. If you don't have wifi, you can download it in the kobo desktop app (again in kobo's own library format) and sync to the kobo over usb. I haven't tried it in wine (the desktop app is windows or osx only), but that may work better for getting it onto the reader than going via adobe crapware.
Of course, that still leaves you with getting a permanent copy to put in calibre via adobe digital editions, left as an exercise for the reader. Given you'd already paid for it, I'd probably have just pirated the drm free version...
The funkiest part for me is that you can have a more or less effective placebo. A sugar pill painkiller in a 'name brand' box is a more effective placebo than one in plain packaging, and both are more effective at the apparent relief of mild pain than doing nothing. Also, having a sit down consult with a doctor followed by placebo is more effective than a placebo just given by a pharmacist. When it comes to mild depression, most anti-depressants are barely more effective than placebo (though severe depression responds significantly better to meds). Of course, talk therapy is also effective in many cases, and you could argue that itself is a form of placebo.
Obviously there are many illnesses, diseases and damage where placebos are ineffective, and using them instead of actual treatment is downright dangerous - Steve Jobs being a recent example - but the effect of placebo making you feel better where feeling better with no serious physical underlying cause is the goal, should definitely not be dismissed.
Of course, knowing that what you're getting is a placebo destroys the effect, which makes it hard to study with informed patient consent...
Much as I like the idea of the extra large pixels in the CCD in the One - and the hugely visible improvement with low-light snaps that comes with that - I'm a bit concerned about the amount of post processing it seems to do on normal light photos, making them rather smoothed and blurred out in reviews. Waiting to see if a 3rd party camera app avoids that, or it's done at a lower level. Other than that (and the non-removable battery, sigh) the One is definitely on the top of my list for next upgrade. The only one that might displace it now I think is a nexus 5 - if they can make the specs good, a decent body, and keep it half the price of the competition off-contract, I'll definitely be tempted.
Bear in mind, a big part of the screen increases is due to a) much thinner bezels, and occupying that real estate with screen b) (mostly) getting rid of the big row of physical buttons at the bottom, and going to soft buttons as part of the main screen that can be minimised away.
The rest is mostly making it longer.
Take the original galaxy S - 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 mm (often used as a benchmark for a 'real' sized 4" android phone) The new htc one is 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3mm (and a beauty to hold, supposedly)
So that's a 4" screen going to a 4.7", for an extra 12% in length (15mm) and extra 6% width (a mere 4mm). The rest of the front is mainly speakers.
Or the galaxy S4 - 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.6mm - 11% longer, 8% wider, 30% thinner for going from 4" to 5".
For a 25% increase in diagonal screen size, I don't think a half a cm extra width is making it really that much bigger.
If you include having a decent speakerphone mode, you can go pretty large indeed. The 5.3" galaxy note phablet is still fine to use normally though, even if I do feel a bit like Dom Joly sometimes.
AFAIK, the camera does not work with Cyanogen Mod 10. Have they fixed that problem yet?
Been working for a while - they fixed most of the hardware bugs for the n7000 around the 10.1 timeframe (the shift to jellybean 4.2), including getting good quality mali drivers for the graphics chip. I tried the official stock 4.1 rom that came out the other week - cyanogenmod is actually smoother than stock now, and I went back - well, strictly speaking, to a a new linaro compiled cyanogenmod 10.1 base, carbonrom that works lovely.
Me too. I keep it mostly in my suit jacket inside pocket most of the time, or my coat pocket when casual - I wear slacks instead of jeans, so it goes there (in a case) in summer.
The bigger screen is glorious for email and web browsing - especially in landscape - going back to my old 4" galaxy s feels like using a toy phone now, it's just so small.
I can unlock and text with my thumb if I want to (helllllo, swype and now swiftkey flow) and running on cyanogenmod 10.1 the thing is lovely and fast. I do tend to hold it in one hand and type with the other though. I use it more than my nexus 7, simply because I always have it with me, though the mini tablet is ideal for sofa browsing and meetings as it can still be held one handed but gives that bit more screen estate.
I don't see myself going back to any smartphone that's significantly smaller than 5"; even the galaxy s3 (which is pretty large for a smartphone in its own right) is a bit small for my preference now.
I guess it's what you use it for; mine is a full blown mini computer, complete with ssh client, that fits in my pocket. Mobile data is where it's at, and actual phone calls are a bit of a rarity. I can get two days out of my note no problem, because the battery is that much wider. Not sure I'd want it much thicker though, would make it harder to span your hand round it, even when you do have big-man hands like me. Just have to hope some of the promised battery tech improvements that keep showing up in research actually start ending up in real devices.
Which also means we'll hopefully see PC games take more advantage of modern PC hardware, including quad core etc, instead of the ports that are slightly shinier versions of code designed to run on 7 year old hardware.
My personal favorite that's worth paying for is StartIsBack ($3); it perfectly replicates a customisable windows 7 start menu without any metro apps or weird stuff, merges in the start menu right click shortcuts to various system tools, and lets you keep the metro menu with only metro apps on it on ctrl-win or the right hand charms bar, so you can still play the new shiny metro minesweeper without having to deal with metro the rest of the time - or you can just kill off metro altogether if you prefer.
With it, windows 8 is basically a faster windows 7 with a nicer task manager and an actually functional file copy - what microsoft should have released in the first place. I actually like windows 8 now; I don't have to deal with bloody metro every time I just want to launch a program, or clean up all the crap when I install something because metro can't cope with folders, for just two examples.
Still, I doubt I'd actually bother if I didn't get windows 8 free through work.
I mean, 1) you're going to spend so much time in the VM, you might as well stay in, and 2) you've done the work of making your system easy to restore to get around reinstalling Office, why not take advantage and make all your software as easy to restore?
My boss is a bit of a mac fan, and osx has been breeding at various high levels, so I ended up with a 27" imac as my own machine to replace my old q6600-based pc, theoretically so I could get more familiar with OSX and support it better. The biggest issue I've found with running windows virtualised is disk i/o making it feel sluggish - swapping out the mechanical drive for a 256MB SSD solved that one.
So I run two worlds, side by side. I have a full screen windows VM with all my active directory management tools, plus vsphere console to manage the tin boxes running esx with most of our servers on, rdp for management of windows app servers, plus office 2010 and various other windows specific apps. In the other world of OSX, I keep my email, primary browser, tabbed iterm windows for ssh/mosh into our linux servers as needed, and sublime text, github client (and a terminal) for the in-house web app coding I'm doing as a side project.
I'm currently using vmware fusion; I was using parallels which was marginally faster, but it didn't like the combination of mountain lion, two displays, and windows vm fullscreen across both in it's own fullscreen space when I upgraded to ML. They may have finally fixed it by now, but fusion works, so I don't really care.
I probably spend about 60-70% of my time in virtual windows, but have mapped the mouse thumb buttons for switching back and forth easily. There's no reason I couldn't spend all my time there, and one of my colleagues who ended up in the same boat as me does exactly that, as he pretty much hates OSX but still has to go into sometimes, and running a windows vm fullscreen is easier than bootcamp.
Doing all that just because microsoft licencing blows on 2013 though? Just stick with an earlier version of office, it's not like the feature set has changed very much...
Not that I think an open source BIOS-a-like like coreboot is a bad idea in principle, but have you looked at what's supported? The most modern chipset I can see is a couple of SB700's, and those are from late 2007 - quite a lot of that list is made up of golden oldies like socket 939 amd and slot 1 intel boards!
Unless that new desktop you're planning on buying is going to be made up of parts from ebay, I think you're probably going to have to get a UEFI system. I don't even get the UEFI hate anyway. It's a hell of a step forward in features, hardware support (i.e. GPT boot disks, for a start, 64 bit) and getting rid of DOS era cruft slowing down bootup. It's not like secure boot is even an issue on standalone motherboards, and that's an entirely separate issue to UEFI anyway.
a) You actually just (intentionally?) misquoted the article you linked: "Google’s security officials replied in minutes, confirming the flaw and promising to correct it. Within days they had incorporated a fix into the latest version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.2, and made available a security update for earlier versions." Now there's certainly an argument to be made about how OEMs and carriers suck for not pushing those updates out fast enough, but it's an outright lie to say they're not available from google. And OEMs generally DO push out the point fixes with backported patches, it's the big version bumps that take a while.
b) if you're on iOS, you might not actually want to apply those updates, because they may well screw up your phone and battery life - and that's not a unique problem to 6.1, either. And that's not even counting the feature downgrade to Apple Maps that iOS6 involved, as well as losing your jailbreak as apple does its level best to block you from having control of your own device.
Back in the days when you bought games individually, you could share them around the household. So if I had bought say, a copy of unreal tournament 3 and call of duty 2, I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc (real example! if you prefer, substitute mate or brother for same effect)
Now, with two online game equivalents on my steam account, we can only play one, as both require being online. Even if it came in a box from retail for cash, you often still end up with a steamworks copy. Just giving my wife access to my steam account so we can juggle offline mode between us violates the ToS which theoretically means they can shut down my account and deny access to all my games, or make most of them non playable online with a VAC ban. Same applies for creating a new steam account for each game; not only would that be a giant pain in the ass, but trying to register the same card for multiple accounts risks the lot getting disabled.
They already have the ability to transfer licences between accounts with the gifting system, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to transfer my games to my wife so she can play them when I'm done with them, other than greed.
CGN means you're double masquerade NAT'd. Your router get's 1 private IP, and NAT's that to your internal address range. Your router is also NAT'd behind another router, which has your real, globally routable IP - which you're sharing with a bunch of other customers. If you wish to experience what this is like, setup a 2nd router in front of your current one, and pretend you're not allowed to change anything on the one that has the real IP.
So opening outbound connections is OK; both routers keep track of the request, wait for the response, and send it on to the device that requested it. But you can't have your router answer and foward unsolicited traffic any more; no manually forwarded ports, no uPnP. well, you can set it up, but since the upstream NAT router doesn't know about it, it means bupkiss. And besides, how would the router decide who gets the 80 or 22 port out of the potentially thousands of customers all sharing one fixed IP? Same goes for upnp port requests. So any fixed server is out, no setting up a mailserver, web server, ssh, remote access, your own private IPv6 tunnel. Even VPN clients can start getting tricky in some cases.
Then there's the temporary servers via upnp. Games consoles do this all the time, as most multiplayer is peer-to-peer - quite often it won't even try if its double NAT'd. Video conferencing can punch through NAT these days using a 3rd party relay, but when both ends are double NAT'd it gets much harder. Obviously any explicit peer to peer stuff is out unless the other end is open, so bittorrent etc will work a lot less well, if at all. Get to your Dad's computer via remote access when he's double NAT'd? Good luck.
Even worse, they may well set you up with 10's of thousands of others with a shared address pool, so that your outbound traffic comes from a different IP every time, which will play merry hell with any server you connect to that expects you to stick to one for the whole session, such as online banking or streaming. Even with tracking, so the router attempts to keep your session on one IP, you can come unstuck with sites spread over so many different URLs.
So while you can get some stuff to work tolerably well behind double NAT, even relatively basic stuff can come unstuck, and trying to do anything even vaguely peer to peer, like playing on online games or going on skype can get really unreliable, and there's a lot more of that than you'd think in our new Cloud enabled world. And actual server stuff is right out.
NAT was a hack to get round not enough globally routable addresses. Now we're even tighter on address space with no more to allocate, instead of deploying the new system with enough addresses for everyone and everything, we just splice up the old address space even smaller and more shared? Sigh.
And it's a lie in the article that there aren't consumer routers that do IPv6 over WAN. Dlink, apple and belkin all do for starters. We just need the ISPs to stop dragging their feet and start handing out IPv6 address space - especially if they're going to double NAT IPv4.
Here in the UK, capped tariffs only generally count quota for downloads, not uploads. On the other hand, they also use sandvine or other DPI kit to throttle the crap out of torrent traffic during peak time anyway. I spent years on 50GB capped tariffs, only recently escaped due to LLU finally in my exchange.
It's actually a peering fight between cogent and france telecom; cogent being google's carrier, with google being the hostage and orange being france telecom's consumer arm.
Basically youtube (and streaming tf1, a popular french tv channel) are getting throttled because there's not enough capacity on the peering links between FT and cogent. Since much more traffic goes from cogent to FT, FT want more money to carry it. Note, this is not unusual in the peering world. Where they agree to carry each others traffic (because it's roughly equal) then they do it for free i.e. peering. When one party sends much more traffic, then sender pays for transit is common - after all, the receiving party is the one that has to pay for more equipment to carry the traffic, often including more 'last mile' infrastructure for that data to actually go to, or big pipes to other networks the transiting party needs access to.
In this case, FT is saying they want more money from cogent for transit, i.e. for all the google traffic - not money from google directly, but from their carrier; and because they have exclusive access to many households because they own and maintain the physical phone lines and exchange infrastructure, cogent can't just peer with someone else and route round FT (many french ISP's have to pay to use the FT infrastructure even though they're competitors to orange, in a similar way that a lot of British ISP's use BT lines and exchanges for DSL). If Cogent don't cough up more cash for transit to, then google traffic will continue to get throttled along with other cogent traffic at the boundary to FT's network.
The reporting on this has been woeful though, confusing the 'receiver pays' model of end users, the 'sender pays' model of big transit networks, and of course google with cogent, and France Telecom with orange.
As an engineer (or in fact as pretty much any registered professional) if I just do my job, but ignore the forseeable and realistic risk of someone dying as a result, I'd get sued into the ground and almost certainly never work in my career again.
Yet intentionally putting as much pressure as possible with threats of life-long imprisonment on someone who you know is a credible suicide risk, yet comitted a misdemeanor at worst in order to force them to do what you want gets away scot-free?
The difference between Swartz and Resier is that one trespassed on MIT campus and breached a TOS to copy works that are in the public domain. The other murdered his wife.
Swartz did go into MIT, and did copy the files. Unlike Reiser before he confessed, there's not really any doubt over what Swartz did. The difference is that Swartz was facing a potentially higher prison time than Reiser!
How is that just? Even the proffer of 6 months federal time - with no parole, so he'd serve the full 6, and a hefty fine to boot - was an insane price, especially given he was already facing bankruptcy, and being a felon would drastically impact the rest of his life and career. And when he refused the deal, they basically told him they were going to throw the book at him.
JSTOR wanted the charges dropped, so that leaves trespass of MIT. Trespass with no harm caused. Sure that's worth ruining a young, very talented and idealistic's guy's entire life over? Because I'm sure not.
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The problem is also the heat sink. Without convection and conduction, you're left with heat radiation, which is pretty damn slow. Worse, any such heat sink would actually pick up more heat due to being in direct sunlight - the existing solar shield on it to protect the instruments was at 400k! Would depend on the design, but I imagine it would be tricky to even break even against solar heating - that's a lot of energy headed your way all the time (and solar panels only convert a small part of it). So if you packed some kind of big folding heatsink to get it in the launch vehicle, you'd also need a folding shield to protect that too. Complex and heavy, and that's before you even start on the active heat pump system, which is a nightmare engineering job in space in and of itself - you really can't afford it to fail.
Frankly carrying your own dump tank of coolant (which eventually gets effectively depleted) seems like it probably was the sensible option. We got 4 years of unique data gathering, and it will take a lot longer before we finish processing it. Space is a really harsh environment, even for machines.
Christians don't believe in many Gods - Odin, Zeus, Mars, Allah, His Noodliness, Cthulu, to name a few. I just believe in one less. By the way, the clue is in the name - atheist. As in not a theist, i.e. not a believer. I don't think about, or worry about, Gods or their absence, except when theists turn up, usually to tell them politely I'm an atheist, so thank you, but not interested, and now would you kindly stop ringing my doorbell every weekend and posting wasted flyers through my door.
To borrow phrasing from a subsequent reply - "atheists are also making a decision based on a belief of their own: that there is not a God."
This is not correct. I simply don't factor belief in Gods into my decisions at all. As a Christian, do you classify yourself as a non-Odinist? Do you factor your non belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster into your every day life and decisions? Are you an active, dues paid member of the 'Thor is not a real God' club, meetings on Thor'sday, except every second week, on Woden'sday? (Seriously, look up how many old Gods have days of the week named after them - romance languages like French use the Roman gods instead)
So unless you can tell me with a straight face that on Saturdays you actively excercise your non-belief in Saturn, aka Chronos, father of Zeus, and use it affect your decisions and thought process, then please give atheists the same courtesy and accept that we simply don't believe the same things as you, and that does make our non belief in Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or Mary Mother Of God (forgive me, not sure which sect you are) any more a religous belief than your non belief in Saturn, Woden etc makes you an active non Wodenist or non Saturnist.
The whole thing about proof is our response to getting bugged by evangelical theists of all stripes. 'MY God is the one true God, and my faith is the one true faith, and you should believe it too!' - to which we say, 'Fine. Prove it.'. We certainly don't spend our days thinking about it, or incorporating it in our decisions. Well, maybe Dawkins does. But he's a sexist blowhard, and is not a representative of all atheists, any more than Abu Hamza represents all Muslims, or Koran burning Terry Jones represents all Christians. Most of us are normal, quiet people who simply don't have a particular belief that some others do, and there's plenty to go around. Not being religious does not make us weird, strange, scary or sinful. We just don't want the State to dictate what beliefs we should be forced to live by.
TLDR; if atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is the most popular hobby in the world. I have some 'What Would Cthulu do? Devour all!' bumper stickers so you can factor your not-Cthuluist religion into your daily life.
Once you've got the ADE version epub, you can easily strip off the DRM using a calibre plugin, so you don't have to faff about with authorising devices in future when you change reader/app.
I did that with the books I bought for my kobo; I've since upgraded to a kindle paperwhite, and used calibre to convert the drm-removed files to mobi, and can read them on that now. If a higher-res kobo with built in light had been available at the time, I probably would have stuck with that...
Well it's certainly pretty straightfoward to remove the adobe digital editions drm from the epub and get a vanilla, unrestricted epub at the end of it - as long as you have the key to download and open it in the first place, anyway. As I understand it, epub DRM is done as an additional layer, separate from the XML/CSS that makes up the document itself, and no particular scheme is part of the spec - once the drm layer is removed from the content, it's no different to an unrestricted epub. But the file itself is an epub extension, so the ADEPT DRM is admittedly inside the zip file, and you need something capable of reading adobe digital editions restricted epubs to read it, i.e. pretty much any e-reader except the kindle. For me, the drm layer is a wrapper round the content that once removed gives a vanilla epub, but as you define it, no, it's not a separate wrapper with a custom extension.
And what are IT supposed to do? Leave a known vulnerable version with dozens of critical flaws - including the HIGHLY exploitable browser plugin - on business critical PCs across the org, including the business critical ones of that small group?
Who's neck would it be if those machines got remote rooted by some chinese hacker driveby? I'm betting not yours.
Perhaps a dialog with IT where you don't install the browser plugin at least, and firewall the group off from the rest of the network in exchange for a tested, custom (i.e. slower) rollout for your setup. It wouldn't hurt if your department volunteered to cough up the cash to pay for the extra engineer time required...
Or you could start evaluating alternative platforms for your business critical software that don't have more holes than my colander?
For future reference, the adobe digital edition version is the drm-wrapped epub for transferring to any compatible app/reader. For kobo store to kobo reader, they use their own format (though it's still epub inside I think) - the formatting is a little better sometimes than the epub version. So you can buy in the kobo store, on pc or reader, and then sync directly over wifi into the kobo without needing to run it through calibre or any pc first - once it's in your kobo store library, you can delete and download direct as many times as you like. If you don't have wifi, you can download it in the kobo desktop app (again in kobo's own library format) and sync to the kobo over usb. I haven't tried it in wine (the desktop app is windows or osx only), but that may work better for getting it onto the reader than going via adobe crapware.
Of course, that still leaves you with getting a permanent copy to put in calibre via adobe digital editions, left as an exercise for the reader. Given you'd already paid for it, I'd probably have just pirated the drm free version...
The funkiest part for me is that you can have a more or less effective placebo. A sugar pill painkiller in a 'name brand' box is a more effective placebo than one in plain packaging, and both are more effective at the apparent relief of mild pain than doing nothing. Also, having a sit down consult with a doctor followed by placebo is more effective than a placebo just given by a pharmacist. When it comes to mild depression, most anti-depressants are barely more effective than placebo (though severe depression responds significantly better to meds). Of course, talk therapy is also effective in many cases, and you could argue that itself is a form of placebo.
Obviously there are many illnesses, diseases and damage where placebos are ineffective, and using them instead of actual treatment is downright dangerous - Steve Jobs being a recent example - but the effect of placebo making you feel better where feeling better with no serious physical underlying cause is the goal, should definitely not be dismissed.
Of course, knowing that what you're getting is a placebo destroys the effect, which makes it hard to study with informed patient consent...
Much as I like the idea of the extra large pixels in the CCD in the One - and the hugely visible improvement with low-light snaps that comes with that - I'm a bit concerned about the amount of post processing it seems to do on normal light photos, making them rather smoothed and blurred out in reviews. Waiting to see if a 3rd party camera app avoids that, or it's done at a lower level. Other than that (and the non-removable battery, sigh) the One is definitely on the top of my list for next upgrade. The only one that might displace it now I think is a nexus 5 - if they can make the specs good, a decent body, and keep it half the price of the competition off-contract, I'll definitely be tempted.
Bear in mind, a big part of the screen increases is due to
a) much thinner bezels, and occupying that real estate with screen
b) (mostly) getting rid of the big row of physical buttons at the bottom, and going to soft buttons as part of the main screen that can be minimised away.
The rest is mostly making it longer.
Take the original galaxy S - 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 mm (often used as a benchmark for a 'real' sized 4" android phone)
The new htc one is 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3mm (and a beauty to hold, supposedly)
So that's a 4" screen going to a 4.7", for an extra 12% in length (15mm) and extra 6% width (a mere 4mm). The rest of the front is mainly speakers.
Or the galaxy S4 - 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.6mm - 11% longer, 8% wider, 30% thinner for going from 4" to 5".
For a 25% increase in diagonal screen size, I don't think a half a cm extra width is making it really that much bigger.
If you include having a decent speakerphone mode, you can go pretty large indeed. The 5.3" galaxy note phablet is still fine to use normally though, even if I do feel a bit like Dom Joly sometimes.
AFAIK, the camera does not work with Cyanogen Mod 10. Have they fixed that problem yet?
Been working for a while - they fixed most of the hardware bugs for the n7000 around the 10.1 timeframe (the shift to jellybean 4.2), including getting good quality mali drivers for the graphics chip. I tried the official stock 4.1 rom that came out the other week - cyanogenmod is actually smoother than stock now, and I went back - well, strictly speaking, to a a new linaro compiled cyanogenmod 10.1 base, carbonrom that works lovely.
Me too. I keep it mostly in my suit jacket inside pocket most of the time, or my coat pocket when casual - I wear slacks instead of jeans, so it goes there (in a case) in summer.
The bigger screen is glorious for email and web browsing - especially in landscape - going back to my old 4" galaxy s feels like using a toy phone now, it's just so small.
I can unlock and text with my thumb if I want to (helllllo, swype and now swiftkey flow) and running on cyanogenmod 10.1 the thing is lovely and fast. I do tend to hold it in one hand and type with the other though. I use it more than my nexus 7, simply because I always have it with me, though the mini tablet is ideal for sofa browsing and meetings as it can still be held one handed but gives that bit more screen estate.
I don't see myself going back to any smartphone that's significantly smaller than 5"; even the galaxy s3 (which is pretty large for a smartphone in its own right) is a bit small for my preference now.
I guess it's what you use it for; mine is a full blown mini computer, complete with ssh client, that fits in my pocket. Mobile data is where it's at, and actual phone calls are a bit of a rarity. I can get two days out of my note no problem, because the battery is that much wider. Not sure I'd want it much thicker though, would make it harder to span your hand round it, even when you do have big-man hands like me. Just have to hope some of the promised battery tech improvements that keep showing up in research actually start ending up in real devices.
Which also means we'll hopefully see PC games take more advantage of modern PC hardware, including quad core etc, instead of the ports that are slightly shinier versions of code designed to run on 7 year old hardware.
My personal favorite that's worth paying for is StartIsBack ($3); it perfectly replicates a customisable windows 7 start menu without any metro apps or weird stuff, merges in the start menu right click shortcuts to various system tools, and lets you keep the metro menu with only metro apps on it on ctrl-win or the right hand charms bar, so you can still play the new shiny metro minesweeper without having to deal with metro the rest of the time - or you can just kill off metro altogether if you prefer.
With it, windows 8 is basically a faster windows 7 with a nicer task manager and an actually functional file copy - what microsoft should have released in the first place. I actually like windows 8 now; I don't have to deal with bloody metro every time I just want to launch a program, or clean up all the crap when I install something because metro can't cope with folders, for just two examples.
Still, I doubt I'd actually bother if I didn't get windows 8 free through work.
256GB SSD, obviously. D'oh.
I mean, 1) you're going to spend so much time in the VM, you might as well stay in, and 2) you've done the work of making your system easy to restore to get around reinstalling Office, why not take advantage and make all your software as easy to restore?
My boss is a bit of a mac fan, and osx has been breeding at various high levels, so I ended up with a 27" imac as my own machine to replace my old q6600-based pc, theoretically so I could get more familiar with OSX and support it better. The biggest issue I've found with running windows virtualised is disk i/o making it feel sluggish - swapping out the mechanical drive for a 256MB SSD solved that one.
So I run two worlds, side by side. I have a full screen windows VM with all my active directory management tools, plus vsphere console to manage the tin boxes running esx with most of our servers on, rdp for management of windows app servers, plus office 2010 and various other windows specific apps. In the other world of OSX, I keep my email, primary browser, tabbed iterm windows for ssh/mosh into our linux servers as needed, and sublime text, github client (and a terminal) for the in-house web app coding I'm doing as a side project.
I'm currently using vmware fusion; I was using parallels which was marginally faster, but it didn't like the combination of mountain lion, two displays, and windows vm fullscreen across both in it's own fullscreen space when I upgraded to ML. They may have finally fixed it by now, but fusion works, so I don't really care.
I probably spend about 60-70% of my time in virtual windows, but have mapped the mouse thumb buttons for switching back and forth easily. There's no reason I couldn't spend all my time there, and one of my colleagues who ended up in the same boat as me does exactly that, as he pretty much hates OSX but still has to go into sometimes, and running a windows vm fullscreen is easier than bootcamp.
Doing all that just because microsoft licencing blows on 2013 though? Just stick with an earlier version of office, it's not like the feature set has changed very much...
Not that I think an open source BIOS-a-like like coreboot is a bad idea in principle, but have you looked at what's supported? The most modern chipset I can see is a couple of SB700's, and those are from late 2007 - quite a lot of that list is made up of golden oldies like socket 939 amd and slot 1 intel boards!
Unless that new desktop you're planning on buying is going to be made up of parts from ebay, I think you're probably going to have to get a UEFI system. I don't even get the UEFI hate anyway. It's a hell of a step forward in features, hardware support (i.e. GPT boot disks, for a start, 64 bit) and getting rid of DOS era cruft slowing down bootup. It's not like secure boot is even an issue on standalone motherboards, and that's an entirely separate issue to UEFI anyway.
a) You actually just (intentionally?) misquoted the article you linked:
"Google’s security officials replied in minutes, confirming the flaw and promising to correct it. Within days they had incorporated a fix into the latest version of the Android operating system, Jelly Bean 4.2, and made available a security update for earlier versions."
Now there's certainly an argument to be made about how OEMs and carriers suck for not pushing those updates out fast enough, but it's an outright lie to say they're not available from google. And OEMs generally DO push out the point fixes with backported patches, it's the big version bumps that take a while.
b) if you're on iOS, you might not actually want to apply those updates, because they may well screw up your phone and battery life - and that's not a unique problem to 6.1, either. And that's not even counting the feature downgrade to Apple Maps that iOS6 involved, as well as losing your jailbreak as apple does its level best to block you from having control of your own device.
Back in the days when you bought games individually, you could share them around the household. So if I had bought say, a copy of unreal tournament 3 and call of duty 2, I could play one, and my wife could play the other on her pc (real example! if you prefer, substitute mate or brother for same effect)
Now, with two online game equivalents on my steam account, we can only play one, as both require being online. Even if it came in a box from retail for cash, you often still end up with a steamworks copy. Just giving my wife access to my steam account so we can juggle offline mode between us violates the ToS which theoretically means they can shut down my account and deny access to all my games, or make most of them non playable online with a VAC ban. Same applies for creating a new steam account for each game; not only would that be a giant pain in the ass, but trying to register the same card for multiple accounts risks the lot getting disabled.
They already have the ability to transfer licences between accounts with the gifting system, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to transfer my games to my wife so she can play them when I'm done with them, other than greed.
CGN means you're double masquerade NAT'd. Your router get's 1 private IP, and NAT's that to your internal address range. Your router is also NAT'd behind another router, which has your real, globally routable IP - which you're sharing with a bunch of other customers. If you wish to experience what this is like, setup a 2nd router in front of your current one, and pretend you're not allowed to change anything on the one that has the real IP.
So opening outbound connections is OK; both routers keep track of the request, wait for the response, and send it on to the device that requested it. But you can't have your router answer and foward unsolicited traffic any more; no manually forwarded ports, no uPnP. well, you can set it up, but since the upstream NAT router doesn't know about it, it means bupkiss. And besides, how would the router decide who gets the 80 or 22 port out of the potentially thousands of customers all sharing one fixed IP? Same goes for upnp port requests. So any fixed server is out, no setting up a mailserver, web server, ssh, remote access, your own private IPv6 tunnel. Even VPN clients can start getting tricky in some cases.
Then there's the temporary servers via upnp. Games consoles do this all the time, as most multiplayer is peer-to-peer - quite often it won't even try if its double NAT'd. Video conferencing can punch through NAT these days using a 3rd party relay, but when both ends are double NAT'd it gets much harder. Obviously any explicit peer to peer stuff is out unless the other end is open, so bittorrent etc will work a lot less well, if at all. Get to your Dad's computer via remote access when he's double NAT'd? Good luck.
Even worse, they may well set you up with 10's of thousands of others with a shared address pool, so that your outbound traffic comes from a different IP every time, which will play merry hell with any server you connect to that expects you to stick to one for the whole session, such as online banking or streaming. Even with tracking, so the router attempts to keep your session on one IP, you can come unstuck with sites spread over so many different URLs.
So while you can get some stuff to work tolerably well behind double NAT, even relatively basic stuff can come unstuck, and trying to do anything even vaguely peer to peer, like playing on online games or going on skype can get really unreliable, and there's a lot more of that than you'd think in our new Cloud enabled world. And actual server stuff is right out.
NAT was a hack to get round not enough globally routable addresses. Now we're even tighter on address space with no more to allocate, instead of deploying the new system with enough addresses for everyone and everything, we just splice up the old address space even smaller and more shared? Sigh.
And it's a lie in the article that there aren't consumer routers that do IPv6 over WAN. Dlink, apple and belkin all do for starters. We just need the ISPs to stop dragging their feet and start handing out IPv6 address space - especially if they're going to double NAT IPv4.
You should check out Mint. Debian goodness without the UI insanity of ubuntu of late. aptitude > yum, to boot - and I say that as a centos user.
Here in the UK, capped tariffs only generally count quota for downloads, not uploads. On the other hand, they also use sandvine or other DPI kit to throttle the crap out of torrent traffic during peak time anyway. I spent years on 50GB capped tariffs, only recently escaped due to LLU finally in my exchange.
It's actually a peering fight between cogent and france telecom; cogent being google's carrier, with google being the hostage and orange being france telecom's consumer arm.
Basically youtube (and streaming tf1, a popular french tv channel) are getting throttled because there's not enough capacity on the peering links between FT and cogent. Since much more traffic goes from cogent to FT, FT want more money to carry it. Note, this is not unusual in the peering world. Where they agree to carry each others traffic (because it's roughly equal) then they do it for free i.e. peering. When one party sends much more traffic, then sender pays for transit is common - after all, the receiving party is the one that has to pay for more equipment to carry the traffic, often including more 'last mile' infrastructure for that data to actually go to, or big pipes to other networks the transiting party needs access to.
In this case, FT is saying they want more money from cogent for transit, i.e. for all the google traffic - not money from google directly, but from their carrier; and because they have exclusive access to many households because they own and maintain the physical phone lines and exchange infrastructure, cogent can't just peer with someone else and route round FT (many french ISP's have to pay to use the FT infrastructure even though they're competitors to orange, in a similar way that a lot of British ISP's use BT lines and exchanges for DSL). If Cogent don't cough up more cash for transit to, then google traffic will continue to get throttled along with other cogent traffic at the boundary to FT's network.
The reporting on this has been woeful though, confusing the 'receiver pays' model of end users, the 'sender pays' model of big transit networks, and of course google with cogent, and France Telecom with orange.
As an engineer (or in fact as pretty much any registered professional) if I just do my job, but ignore the forseeable and realistic risk of someone dying as a result, I'd get sued into the ground and almost certainly never work in my career again.
Yet intentionally putting as much pressure as possible with threats of life-long imprisonment on someone who you know is a credible suicide risk, yet comitted a misdemeanor at worst in order to force them to do what you want gets away scot-free?
That is, bluntly, utter bollocks.
The difference between Swartz and Resier is that one trespassed on MIT campus and breached a TOS to copy works that are in the public domain. The other murdered his wife.
Swartz did go into MIT, and did copy the files. Unlike Reiser before he confessed, there's not really any doubt over what Swartz did. The difference is that Swartz was facing a potentially higher prison time than Reiser!
How is that just? Even the proffer of 6 months federal time - with no parole, so he'd serve the full 6, and a hefty fine to boot - was an insane price, especially given he was already facing bankruptcy, and being a felon would drastically impact the rest of his life and career. And when he refused the deal, they basically told him they were going to throw the book at him.
JSTOR wanted the charges dropped, so that leaves trespass of MIT. Trespass with no harm caused. Sure that's worth ruining a young, very talented and idealistic's guy's entire life over? Because I'm sure not.