Not at all. I'm using this build (the one including google talk) from this post. It's a small variant of the beta2 build of ICS by onecosmic with working TTS and fixed DPI, along with a compatible phone firmware for ICS included.
That's in the main thread about this ICS build, which has the vanilla beta2, as well as instructions on how to flash. Note, it does require rooting and installing a custom kernel, and you will need to back up your apps and data (i.e. phone call records, sms etc) using titanium or my backup pro if you want to put them back after flashing ICS. There are also a couple of scripts you need to run to make the external microSD writable, and enable USB mounting after flashing; sorry, don't have them bookmarked, will try and find them later. They're not essential though. You may also need the right kernel from the first post if you have a variant of the i9000, i.e. the i9000b or the like.
The other option, especially if you're not already a veteran rom flasher on the galaxy S, is to go with the cyanogenmod9 version from here; it's caught up with onecosmic's build in terms of what's working, and is a bit easier to get working.
In both cases, you'll need to copy the rom (and maybe the kernel) zip to the internal SD, via USB mount for example, then install a gingerbread custom kernel via odin to give you clockwork mod, that then lets you go in and flash ICS from the internal SD from recovery mode.
If you've not done that before, best to flash this kernel (cf-root) using odin - instructions and links for it are in the post, just follow the guide on flashing via odin/download manager. That roots your phone, along with giving you clockwork mod in recovery while still keeping the rest of your stock rom intact. You don't need to faff about with ext4 or flashing a custom gingerbread rom, as you'll be going straight to ICS. Once you have clockwork mod though (which is included in the ICS builds), you don't need odin again, you can always flash new updates via recovery mode which makes life simpler.
Finally, make sure you're already on gingerbread (2.3) official or custom rom first; going from froyo to gingerbread updated the bootloaders, and I don't think a gingerbread kernel will work on a froyo stock.
The nexus s will still be the first phone to get an official update; everyone else will be months away yet. While cyanogen have usable builds, you do have to be somewhat savvy to root and flash the rom - official roms are much easier, and it will all work, not just most of it.
Given it's going out to employees, the final public release can't be far off now. Cyanogen mod is great and all, but the gingerbread version on my galaxy S always had a few minor issues, so I stuck to modified stock Samsung roms.
Personally I'd rather have the nexus s than my galaxy S, very similar hardware (nexus s wasn't out when I upgraded) but no touchwiz or other crap. Even though I do have ICS now, for the longer run not having to deal with oem modifications would be worth it.
I've been running ICS on my galaxy S for the last week or so; the onecosmic build rather than cyanogen mod. It all works remarkably well given how fresh it is and lack of official drivers. Video recording doesn't work and the front camera is distorted;both should get fixed once the nexus source is released.
The launcher is much improved, so much I've felt no need for launcher pro at all. The stock keyboard is a direct competitor to SwiftKey now, and even better in some ways. The back camera is faster, but nowhere near as fast as the galaxy nexus alas - its hardware, not just ICS. The gmail apply and browser are both very fast and nicer to use; bookmark sync with chrome via your google account works well.
Unlike gingerbread, I've had no problems with application launches struggling due to lack of ram, it handles ram much better for inactive apps. The swipe to remove function on both notifications and the task manager is nice. I do miss having the wifi etc buttons on the notification bar though, the widget isn't as useful when you're in an app.
So far, I've only found two apps that don't work yet; copilot live doesn't work, and Astrid crashes when editing tasks. Both will get fixed no doubt. I do like the new TTS engine, it sounds a hell of a lot better than pico.
Overall its all very slick and google have clearly been working on usability a lot for ICS. I have no desire to go back to gingerbread at all. Be good to get the remaining issues ironed out, but it's very usable as is. Oh and no CarrierIQ of course:)
The firmware on a new (shipped with lion) mac is capable of restoring the recovery partition to a blank drive; and the recovery partition then goes on the internet, and the recovery partition can run Disk Utility and also verify the machine is eligible to install lion via internet download. If it isn't, you can still use your app store account to verify you purchased lion.
Having tested this in anger on an imac (we bought a bunch of them to dual boot with windows, and I wanted to see what happened if I twatted the recovery partition and wiped the disk using our pxe-booted linux cloning environment). I was quite impressed that it does all work, though I had a partclone copy of it and the gpt partition table just in case. Of course, we needed cd-boot on the mac to load pxe, as the imac doesn't support pxe natively.
The other option of course is to do a usb install; you can buy one outright from apple, or just make your own from a lion mac.
This is the kind of unscientific sensationalism we need to get away from.
Ahh. You're one of those people that thinks all the climate change research done so far is bunkum, and we don't need to worry. We're already observing changes. Have you even read the IPCC reports? Actually, don't bother answering. Looking at your other postings in this thread alone, you're clearly entirely closed to the idea that there is a problem, or that it will get worse. The rest of this is for the benefit of people who are prepared to look at the actual evidence.
Current vulnerabilities to climate are strongly correlated with climate variability, in particular precipitation variability. These vulnerabilities are largest in semi-arid and arid low-income countries, where precipitation and streamflow are concentrated over a few months, and where year-to-year variations are high (Lenton, 2004). In such regions a lack of deep groundwater wells or reservoirs (i.e., storage) leads to a high level of vulnerability to climate variability, and to the climate changes that are likely to further increase climate variability in future. In addition, river basins that are stressed due to non-climatic drivers are likely to be vulnerable to climate change. However, vulnerability to climate change exists everywhere, as water infrastructure (e.g., dikes and pipelines) has been designed for stationary climatic conditions, and water resources management has only just started to take into account the uncertainties related to climate change.
A warmer climate, with its increased climate variability, will increase the risk of both floods and droughts (Wetherald and Manabe, 2002; Table SPM2 in IPCC, 2007).
Food: Water balance and weather extremes are key to many agricultural and forestry impacts. Decreases in precipitation are predicted by more than 90% of climate model simulations by the end of the 21st century for the northern and southern sub-tropics (IPCC, 2007a).
There's plenty more of that sort of thing in the IPCC reports. But if you live in a wealthy country away from the seaboard and can afford the increases in prices for fresh water, food and military spending to keep the oil flowing from areas less lucky than you; then yes, the impact won't be so bad in your lifetime. Lucky you. Shame about the rest of the planet, and our descendants though.
That's not what they say in the article, and not what they mean by the phrase 'point of no return'.
The generally accepted 'safe' minimum rise from pre-industrial levels is 2 degC, which we'll reach with 450ppm atmospheric CO2. We know how many Gigatons of CO2 we're pumping into the air every year. Every new fossil power plant we build increases those emissions, and will do so for several decades. The forcing effect of the CO2 they emit lasts for several more decades.
A rise close to 2 degC is already inevitable due to the amount of CO2 we've already dumped, and are dumping in the air. If we keep building at even close to our current rate, it will be impossible for us NOT to put enough CO2 in the air to cause a rise higher than 2 degC. The longer we wait, the more we build, the higher the final temperature will be that we won't be able to bring down again without some fantastical pie-in-the-sky geo-engineering project.
Going above a 2 degC rise increases the risk that we will trigger an equilibrium change; by for example, causing enough permafrost to melt that mass methane clathrate stores release their methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas - we're already seeing a big increase in methane emissions - up to 100x in places - in the siberian arctic. The higher the rise, the bigger the risk. We don't know precisely how much bigger, because we have one shot and only one experimental model. And we're living on it.
Even assuming that that doesn't happen, the predictable effects of a 2 degC rise are bad enough with loss of arable land, alterations to fresh water routes - and quantity, increase in storm violence and damage, worse flooding of coastal regions etc. The higher we go, the worse they get.
If the IEA, a really conservative body when it comes to predictions, is saying we're going to hit 2 degC whether we like it or not if we don't radically change course in the next couple of years, frankly it's probably already to late to avoid a 2 degC rise.
I did buy the first one. It's pretty neat, and has been getting regular updates of honeycomb - hopefully it will also get the bump to ICS at some point. While my phone (Galaxy S) is rooted with custom firmware, I haven't felt the need to on the tablet. I did have a froyo-based archos 101 that sucked big time (crappy screen) that went back due a large dead zone, which I was grateful for. The screen on the transformer is nice and sensitive, and not had any problems with it not registering touches, unlike the archos.
I use it in tablet mode mostly when reading the internet on the sofa, though it sometimes comes into the kitchen too - playing something in the background or recipe etc. When I went to France for summer holiday, it came with me instead of my full laptop, and did sterling duty playing music (external SD card), the odd video, light internet browsing via wifi, as well as angry birds and fruit ninja HD of course (the latter two run lovely with the bigger screen); mostly acting as a netbook with docked keyboard except when playing. Didn't have any problems using it on the patio in daylight. If I had a garden at home, I'd use it there too in tablet mode. I did use to read slashdot on it in docked mode at breakfast (my hands were busy with my bowl of cereal), but I'm trying to break *that* habit.
I have to say I've been very happy with it; can't remember the last time I dug out the laptop, and it works very well as a netbook when docked, which also gives a hefty battery boost - and it works just fine as a conventional tablet. Honeycomb might not be quite as slick as iOS, but it gets the job done - and there's a lot more flexibility. Plus it comes bundled with a version of splashtop, which is handy.
I used it today in my meeting with my boss in fact; just trying out handrite with a capacitive pen to jot down handwritten notes and then dump into evernote for later carving into specific job tickets. Bit easier to do that than thumbtype at speed (my boss has a 'slump' sofa seating area, with nowhere for a netbook and you can't easily rest on your knees, or I'd just use it in docked mode).
The new one looks nice too, but frankly I'm perfectly happy with the first gen. Tegra 2 plays every game I'd thrown at it (including heavy beasties like Cordy) so far.
Chrome updates silently in the background - you launch it, and you might notice a new feature, but otherwise it's almost always entirely seamless that you've been updated since you last closed it; extensions silently update too.
Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION! UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have to go through the rigmarole of clicking and downloading it, going through the install routine (or updating via repository on certain distros), clicking through prompts all the way. Then you get to play the 'which extensions got broken THIS time?' game.
And that's on my home machine. At work, that means I get to play 'build the new package deployment package' (seeing as firefox STILL doesn't officially support MSI), checking to see if the silent install options have changed - again - then push it out to the clients via wpkg. Of course, we could give the students local admin rights so they could install the update themselves when it nags them...
We are seriously considering switching to chrome - complete with silent MSI installer, and non-admin updates - as a straight swap for firefox. Or there's always IE9. Ech.
Well, precisely. How exactly are companies who don't own the rights supposed to be able to identify who owns what, and whether they are an authorised provider of that material or not? Some copyright owners, especially smaller or indies, do in fact self-publish their work on youtube or other places. Hell, even comedy central and Channel 4 in the UK post their stuff on youtube. The only people who CAN police this stuff are the copyright owners themselves.
If the MAFIAA gets the changes they want, only 'authorised' channels posting material from known large corporate accounts -viewable for a fee, no doubt - would be able to to put up anything on the internet at all - individiuals and small publishers wouldn't be able to set their own distribution network, and no ISP could host anything as they'd never be able to work out who could give permission. You'd be turning the internet into a broadcast-only medium for the biggest content cartel companies only!
It was in fact the court that ordered BT to use the Cleanfeed filtering system to block the Newzbin2 domain, IP and any others they start using. This is partly because BT argued the cost of setting up and maintaining a new system to do all-port IP range blocking would be too expensive, and was an unwarranted expense to impose on them considering they're (BT) not actually doing anything illegal.
But you're entirely correct that this validates the concerns that any censorship system will eventually be expanded. Now the courts have decided Cleanfeed is suitable for trying to block sites accused of assisting copyright infringement - and will no doubt add the piratebay to the list, how long before they also agree to order BT to start blocking sites accused of promoting terrorism, racial hatred or even just accused of hosting libelous statements? UK courts have already shut down such sites that were UK hosted, now they've a mechanism for doing so for foreign hosted sites.
That it doesn't block ports outside of 80 - including https! - means it's an entirely worthless exercise for the technically savvy, but the same doesn't hold true once political blogs or forums that the less savvy might read start getting blocked.
(Note for the non-UK residents - BT internet are the biggest consumer ISP, with about 1/4 of all internet users in the UK. BT also runs the copper telephone line infrastructure, and has the vast majority of POTS customers. A number of other ISPs resell BT internet access, and some of them also subscribe to Cleanfeed, the child-porn filter. Virgin and TalkTalk, the next two biggest ISPs have also been involved in the court cases, but have not - yet - been ordered to block newzbin 2)
You can say 'upgrading from version 2.3 to 4.0' in that meeting with your boss if you prefer. People often prefer the code-names as they're easier to remember the distinguishing features; gingerbread and froyo mean more to me than 2.3.4 and 2.2.1, but whatever works for you.
Personally, I was really looking forward to the nexus prime as the 'flagship' for ice cream sandwich (or 4.0!) - but the hardware looks pretty unimpressive compared to the galaxy S II, the new Razr or even something older like the optimus 3D.
Hopefully it goes AOSP soon so it can get back-ported by cyanogenmod to existing phones in something like a reasonable time frame - if we wait for the OEMs and then the carriers, it'll be many months if it happens at all.
Though I'm keeping my eye on the LG LU6400 - could be a good phone, and may launch with ice cream sandwich.
It's not even the same characters; the short stories were written years ago, and none of them are even in the same genre as the book she's writing for penguin. They're reading the non-compete clause to mean any work written by the author cannot be published by amazon, regardless of association to the current book, or when it was written or previously; they even tried to complain about her first short story compilation that was published by amazon before she even signed the contract for the new book with penguin! (until her lawyer slapped them down on that, at least).
To expect complete publishing veto over all an author's work, past or present, for two years over a contract for a single book and an advance of $20k is ridiculous.
Clearly the moral of the tale is, don't publish your book through penguin as they think they then own you and your entire back catalog - even when it's not mentioned in the contract at all, and even when they have no interest in publishing it themselves!
The problem isn't the web-browsing - it's the OS you run the browser on. Both mainstream linux distros and windows assume that people have faster and faster hardware over time, so start ladling on all the bells and whistles, making them run like poop on older processors, especially if they're also light on RAM compared to modern setups.
Yes, it's possible to put a streamlined version of linux on it with a bit of work, but let's face it, with XP rapidly approaching final retirement after 10+ years most 'normal' users are going to want to upgrade soon.
And as you say. Flash. And streaming video. Once you want to start decoding 720p or 1080p in realtime, processor grunt becomes quite important.
The 'kindle keyboard' is still around, wifi version for $99. There's the cheaper slimline version with no touch screen, 2GB storage and just the 5-way button, page-turn buttons (and soft keyboard) that's 2/3 the weight for $79, as well as the kindle touch and fire versions.
Seriously though, how often do you actually type on the kindle keyboard though? You mostly use the nav and page buttons. Unless you buy books on the kindle itself, rather than via browser I guess, but I've had a 'kindle keyboard' for a year now, and can think of maybe 3 times I've actually typed some text on the kindle directly.
I don't know whether I'd want a touch screen or not; I've got used to it on my galaxy S, and cleaning the screen periodically isn't that much of a bother. That said, I do like the dedicated page-turn buttons, so am probably more in the market for the basic keyboard-less kindle if/when my current one suffers an accident.
I've no interest in the fire, but then I already have an asus transformer which works nicely as a tablet/netbook when I'm travelling. I *like* e-ink for book reading, it's much better than a backlit screen of an evening.
Amazon are clearly flogging the kindle store as much as the physical device you read it on, so I don't think they'll cancel the kindle keyboard (i.e. the kindle 3) anytime soon.
While a complete re-work of the certificate signers is a good idea - and implementing DNSSEC widely is also a good idea - we're still going to need TLS, and that means certificates. DNSSEC doesn't provide any mechanism for encrypting the data stream after you've securely established you're talking to the right server, nor should it, that's not its job.
So DNSSEC protects against DNS poisoning and some MITM attacks; but there are plenty of other ways such as fake gateway, passive listening of wifi traffic, ARP spoofing etc etc so you're still going to want TLS, or some other form of encrypted data transfer for email and http etc. OK, IPSEC implementations may be a lot more widespread with IPv6, but that's a long way off even in a best case scenario.
I think the best we can hope for, for now, is DNSSEC + TLS. TLS secures your data stream, DNSSEC ensures you've not been DNS spoofed. 'Officially' signed certs for TLS is a belts-and-braces approach. With that, someone has to spoof the certificate or get a fake issued AND find another way of watching your traffic without DNS poisoning - which is harder to do on a bulk scale if you're not the network provider/ISP itself. Self-signed certs are too easy to spoof. Yes, it's not a perfect system, but security is a layered approach, not a one-trick pony.
VMware makes a hetrogenous environment far, far easier to deal with - we have some 70 odd servers running on 5 physical servers. It makes it much easier to single-task a given server/VM, spread the load without having to invest far more in server hardware, and allows having backup/redundant servers to allow for patching/upgrades of servers with much more minimal effort.
While in-OS virtualization is great if you only require a single OS to do everything; but if you have hetrogenous servers to handle different tasks for different clients - i.e. AD/exchange for the windows users, linux for the webservers and network infrastructure etc, then hypervisors are frankly essential for sysadmin these days.
Re:Modified, Harmless HIV Used
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 4, Informative
It wasn't even denatured HIV that treated them; they used it as gene therapy to modify white blood cells to make them specifically target the lukemia cancer, and added a gene to make the white blood cells multiply like crazy. It was these 'killer' reprogrammed white blood cells that were injected, and went onto multiply heavily and attack the cancerous cells.
Gene therapies like this, using white blood cells to attack cancer have been tried before, but they only killed a small amount of cancerous cells before dying off. The new approach here is using modified HIV as the carrier, and also including a replicator gene to make the white blood cells much more effective.
That said; this is only 3 patients. We don't know how scalable this approach will be to other patients, whether it will be generally effective, and whether it actually kills the cancer or only slows it down. Presumably the same approach could be used to target other cancers, but even if it only hits this common form of leukemia, it's still a massive step forward IFF it's scalable and effective, compared to other treatments such as radiation and chemo.
I did initially think 'Why on earth would you go to the trouble and inefficiency of this with an expensive electric car?' and then the penny dropped. It's in Japan, where they were having rolling brownouts due to the nuclear disaster and the loss of capacity, and are still under threat of blackouts over the summer.
Minting new money just devalues that which you already have. Do too much of it - and two trillion is quite comfortably on the side of 'too much' - and your currency becomes worthless. Which means all those imports you buy with dollars - not least shittons of OIL (which would in short-order switch to euros) - become way more expensive. The US is utterly dependent upon cheap imports, and the chinese being willing to provide them by keeping its own currency low and keeping hundreds of millions of chinese in work.
Inflating your way out of debt problems might sound attractive, but the ultimate cost is far worse in the long run.
They did close on and off a couple of weeks ago; invites would be open briefly until they hit their desired number cap, then close again. Now invites are permanently on; if you have a prior invite, you can use the link to get in now, or any new invite will do the trick.
The facebook process is entirely retarded, and facebook officially want everything you post to be public, so I doubt it's ever going to be made more visible and usable. Plus facebook have a habit of changing the default privacy settings around, and over-riding your previous settings to be more public. Google+ circles is a really intuitive way of segregating who you know into different groups. I have a circle of people I'm 'following' - i.e. like Trey Ratcliff who's an awesome HDR photographer and has been posting shots from paris recently, or Wil Wheaton. It's rather twitter like. I also have circles for my family, and IRL friends, another circle for members of a gaming forum I'm on (who've signed up en-mass), and another circle called 'err' for people who I've followed for posting cool stuff, and have now circled me back. I choose who gets to see what I post for every post easily, and of course, there's always public if I want to make it visible to people who I haven't circled yet. Plus - no Zygna! Thank God.
There are other really useful features of google+ though, like hangouts - it uses the same video plugin as google talk video, but it lets you do up to 10-way simultaneous video chat. It's really simple, and it works really, really well. It beats the crap out of skype premium.
Another dead handy feature is I can easily choose who can tag me in photos - it defaults to your circles, but you can make it smaller than that. Handy for making sure only people you really really trust can tag you in photos - you can select nobody at all if you like.
Anyone who circles you, but you don't circle back, their public posts and stuff sent to the circle you're in ends up in a circle called 'incoming' - so you can see it if you want, but it's not in your main stream. You can also block someone if they're annoying or spamming, and they'll vanish entirely as far as you're concerned.
Admittedly, the mobile client is a bit featureless for posting links and videos - you can do status updates and upload photos on the move really easily, but not much else. Hopefully that will improve, after all, google+ has only been out in field test for 3 weeks. also, you want to turn off most of the email notifications otherwise you just drown.
Two really good extensions for chrome are: start google plus that allows you to integrate facebook and/or twitter posts into your google stream (or put them in a specific circle), and cross-post stuff from google+ to them if you want to, easily.
google plus me that lets you collapse posts+comments down, so they don't clog up your stream (it shows how many unread comments are in that collapsed post and you can hover to see contents) - handy when you follow felicia day! It also has a list mode, where they are all collapsed which really allows you to focus on just one post at a time.
Overall, I'm using google+ far, far more than I ever used facebook, and seeing a ton of interesting stuff linked on there. Knowing I can easily keep stuff well away from co-workers, and not post geeky stuff to my family they're not going to be interested in is so much better.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. I'm using this build (the one including google talk) from this post. It's a small variant of the beta2 build of ICS by onecosmic with working TTS and fixed DPI, along with a compatible phone firmware for ICS included.
That's in the main thread about this ICS build, which has the vanilla beta2, as well as instructions on how to flash. Note, it does require rooting and installing a custom kernel, and you will need to back up your apps and data (i.e. phone call records, sms etc) using titanium or my backup pro if you want to put them back after flashing ICS. There are also a couple of scripts you need to run to make the external microSD writable, and enable USB mounting after flashing; sorry, don't have them bookmarked, will try and find them later. They're not essential though. You may also need the right kernel from the first post if you have a variant of the i9000, i.e. the i9000b or the like.
The other option, especially if you're not already a veteran rom flasher on the galaxy S, is to go with the cyanogenmod9 version from here; it's caught up with onecosmic's build in terms of what's working, and is a bit easier to get working.
In both cases, you'll need to copy the rom (and maybe the kernel) zip to the internal SD, via USB mount for example, then install a gingerbread custom kernel via odin to give you clockwork mod, that then lets you go in and flash ICS from the internal SD from recovery mode.
If you've not done that before, best to flash this kernel (cf-root) using odin - instructions and links for it are in the post, just follow the guide on flashing via odin/download manager. That roots your phone, along with giving you clockwork mod in recovery while still keeping the rest of your stock rom intact. You don't need to faff about with ext4 or flashing a custom gingerbread rom, as you'll be going straight to ICS. Once you have clockwork mod though (which is included in the ICS builds), you don't need odin again, you can always flash new updates via recovery mode which makes life simpler.
Finally, make sure you're already on gingerbread (2.3) official or custom rom first; going from froyo to gingerbread updated the bootloaders, and I don't think a gingerbread kernel will work on a froyo stock.
The nexus s will still be the first phone to get an official update; everyone else will be months away yet. While cyanogen have usable builds, you do have to be somewhat savvy to root and flash the rom - official roms are much easier, and it will all work, not just most of it.
Given it's going out to employees, the final public release can't be far off now. Cyanogen mod is great and all, but the gingerbread version on my galaxy S always had a few minor issues, so I stuck to modified stock Samsung roms.
Personally I'd rather have the nexus s than my galaxy S, very similar hardware (nexus s wasn't out when I upgraded) but no touchwiz or other crap. Even though I do have ICS now, for the longer run not having to deal with oem modifications would be worth it.
I've been running ICS on my galaxy S for the last week or so; the onecosmic build rather than cyanogen mod. It all works remarkably well given how fresh it is and lack of official drivers. Video recording doesn't work and the front camera is distorted ;both should get fixed once the nexus source is released.
The launcher is much improved, so much I've felt no need for launcher pro at all. The stock keyboard is a direct competitor to SwiftKey now, and even better in some ways. The back camera is faster, but nowhere near as fast as the galaxy nexus alas - its hardware, not just ICS. The gmail apply and browser are both very fast and nicer to use; bookmark sync with chrome via your google account works well.
Unlike gingerbread, I've had no problems with application launches struggling due to lack of ram, it handles ram much better for inactive apps. The swipe to remove function on both notifications and the task manager is nice. I do miss having the wifi etc buttons on the notification bar though, the widget isn't as useful when you're in an app.
So far, I've only found two apps that don't work yet; copilot live doesn't work, and Astrid crashes when editing tasks. Both will get fixed no doubt. I do like the new TTS engine, it sounds a hell of a lot better than pico.
Overall its all very slick and google have clearly been working on usability a lot for ICS. I have no desire to go back to gingerbread at all. Be good to get the remaining issues ironed out, but it's very usable as is. Oh and no CarrierIQ of course :)
The firmware on a new (shipped with lion) mac is capable of restoring the recovery partition to a blank drive; and the recovery partition then goes on the internet, and the recovery partition can run Disk Utility and also verify the machine is eligible to install lion via internet download. If it isn't, you can still use your app store account to verify you purchased lion.
Having tested this in anger on an imac (we bought a bunch of them to dual boot with windows, and I wanted to see what happened if I twatted the recovery partition and wiped the disk using our pxe-booted linux cloning environment). I was quite impressed that it does all work, though I had a partclone copy of it and the gpt partition table just in case. Of course, we needed cd-boot on the mac to load pxe, as the imac doesn't support pxe natively.
The other option of course is to do a usb install; you can buy one outright from apple, or just make your own from a lion mac.
This is the kind of unscientific sensationalism we need to get away from.
Ahh. You're one of those people that thinks all the climate change research done so far is bunkum, and we don't need to worry. We're already observing changes. Have you even read the IPCC reports? Actually, don't bother answering. Looking at your other postings in this thread alone, you're clearly entirely closed to the idea that there is a problem, or that it will get worse. The rest of this is for the benefit of people who are prepared to look at the actual evidence.
For example - fresh water;
Current vulnerabilities to climate are strongly correlated with climate variability, in particular precipitation variability. These vulnerabilities are largest in semi-arid and arid low-income countries, where precipitation and streamflow are concentrated over a few months, and where year-to-year variations are high (Lenton, 2004). In such regions a lack of deep groundwater wells or reservoirs (i.e., storage) leads to a high level of vulnerability to climate variability, and to the climate changes that are likely to further increase climate variability in future. In addition, river basins that are stressed due to non-climatic drivers are likely to be vulnerable to climate change. However, vulnerability to climate change exists everywhere, as water infrastructure (e.g., dikes and pipelines) has been designed for stationary climatic conditions, and water resources management has only just started to take into account the uncertainties related to climate change.
Floods;
A warmer climate, with its increased climate variability, will increase the risk of both floods and droughts (Wetherald and Manabe, 2002; Table SPM2 in IPCC, 2007).
Food:
Water balance and weather extremes are key to many agricultural and forestry impacts. Decreases in precipitation are predicted by more than 90% of climate model simulations by the end of the 21st century for the northern and southern sub-tropics (IPCC, 2007a).
There's plenty more of that sort of thing in the IPCC reports. But if you live in a wealthy country away from the seaboard and can afford the increases in prices for fresh water, food and military spending to keep the oil flowing from areas less lucky than you; then yes, the impact won't be so bad in your lifetime. Lucky you. Shame about the rest of the planet, and our descendants though.
That's not what they say in the article, and not what they mean by the phrase 'point of no return'.
The generally accepted 'safe' minimum rise from pre-industrial levels is 2 degC, which we'll reach with 450ppm atmospheric CO2. We know how many Gigatons of CO2 we're pumping into the air every year. Every new fossil power plant we build increases those emissions, and will do so for several decades. The forcing effect of the CO2 they emit lasts for several more decades.
A rise close to 2 degC is already inevitable due to the amount of CO2 we've already dumped, and are dumping in the air. If we keep building at even close to our current rate, it will be impossible for us NOT to put enough CO2 in the air to cause a rise higher than 2 degC. The longer we wait, the more we build, the higher the final temperature will be that we won't be able to bring down again without some fantastical pie-in-the-sky geo-engineering project.
Going above a 2 degC rise increases the risk that we will trigger an equilibrium change; by for example, causing enough permafrost to melt that mass methane clathrate stores release their methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas - we're already seeing a big increase in methane emissions - up to 100x in places - in the siberian arctic. The higher the rise, the bigger the risk. We don't know precisely how much bigger, because we have one shot and only one experimental model. And we're living on it.
Even assuming that that doesn't happen, the predictable effects of a 2 degC rise are bad enough with loss of arable land, alterations to fresh water routes - and quantity, increase in storm violence and damage, worse flooding of coastal regions etc. The higher we go, the worse they get.
If the IEA, a really conservative body when it comes to predictions, is saying we're going to hit 2 degC whether we like it or not if we don't radically change course in the next couple of years, frankly it's probably already to late to avoid a 2 degC rise.
I did buy the first one. It's pretty neat, and has been getting regular updates of honeycomb - hopefully it will also get the bump to ICS at some point. While my phone (Galaxy S) is rooted with custom firmware, I haven't felt the need to on the tablet. I did have a froyo-based archos 101 that sucked big time (crappy screen) that went back due a large dead zone, which I was grateful for. The screen on the transformer is nice and sensitive, and not had any problems with it not registering touches, unlike the archos.
I use it in tablet mode mostly when reading the internet on the sofa, though it sometimes comes into the kitchen too - playing something in the background or recipe etc. When I went to France for summer holiday, it came with me instead of my full laptop, and did sterling duty playing music (external SD card), the odd video, light internet browsing via wifi, as well as angry birds and fruit ninja HD of course (the latter two run lovely with the bigger screen); mostly acting as a netbook with docked keyboard except when playing. Didn't have any problems using it on the patio in daylight. If I had a garden at home, I'd use it there too in tablet mode. I did use to read slashdot on it in docked mode at breakfast (my hands were busy with my bowl of cereal), but I'm trying to break *that* habit.
I have to say I've been very happy with it; can't remember the last time I dug out the laptop, and it works very well as a netbook when docked, which also gives a hefty battery boost - and it works just fine as a conventional tablet. Honeycomb might not be quite as slick as iOS, but it gets the job done - and there's a lot more flexibility. Plus it comes bundled with a version of splashtop, which is handy.
I used it today in my meeting with my boss in fact; just trying out handrite with a capacitive pen to jot down handwritten notes and then dump into evernote for later carving into specific job tickets. Bit easier to do that than thumbtype at speed (my boss has a 'slump' sofa seating area, with nowhere for a netbook and you can't easily rest on your knees, or I'd just use it in docked mode).
The new one looks nice too, but frankly I'm perfectly happy with the first gen. Tegra 2 plays every game I'd thrown at it (including heavy beasties like Cordy) so far.
Chrome updates silently in the background - you launch it, and you might notice a new feature, but otherwise it's almost always entirely seamless that you've been updated since you last closed it; extensions silently update too.
Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION! UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have to go through the rigmarole of clicking and downloading it, going through the install routine (or updating via repository on certain distros), clicking through prompts all the way. Then you get to play the 'which extensions got broken THIS time?' game.
And that's on my home machine. At work, that means I get to play 'build the new package deployment package' (seeing as firefox STILL doesn't officially support MSI), checking to see if the silent install options have changed - again - then push it out to the clients via wpkg. Of course, we could give the students local admin rights so they could install the update themselves when it nags them...
We are seriously considering switching to chrome - complete with silent MSI installer, and non-admin updates - as a straight swap for firefox. Or there's always IE9. Ech.
Well, precisely. How exactly are companies who don't own the rights supposed to be able to identify who owns what, and whether they are an authorised provider of that material or not? Some copyright owners, especially smaller or indies, do in fact self-publish their work on youtube or other places. Hell, even comedy central and Channel 4 in the UK post their stuff on youtube. The only people who CAN police this stuff are the copyright owners themselves.
If the MAFIAA gets the changes they want, only 'authorised' channels posting material from known large corporate accounts -viewable for a fee, no doubt - would be able to to put up anything on the internet at all - individiuals and small publishers wouldn't be able to set their own distribution network, and no ISP could host anything as they'd never be able to work out who could give permission. You'd be turning the internet into a broadcast-only medium for the biggest content cartel companies only!
Oh. Right.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Microsoft. What genius thought font parsing belonged in ring 0?
It was in fact the court that ordered BT to use the Cleanfeed filtering system to block the Newzbin2 domain, IP and any others they start using. This is partly because BT argued the cost of setting up and maintaining a new system to do all-port IP range blocking would be too expensive, and was an unwarranted expense to impose on them considering they're (BT) not actually doing anything illegal.
But you're entirely correct that this validates the concerns that any censorship system will eventually be expanded. Now the courts have decided Cleanfeed is suitable for trying to block sites accused of assisting copyright infringement - and will no doubt add the piratebay to the list, how long before they also agree to order BT to start blocking sites accused of promoting terrorism, racial hatred or even just accused of hosting libelous statements? UK courts have already shut down such sites that were UK hosted, now they've a mechanism for doing so for foreign hosted sites.
That it doesn't block ports outside of 80 - including https! - means it's an entirely worthless exercise for the technically savvy, but the same doesn't hold true once political blogs or forums that the less savvy might read start getting blocked.
(Note for the non-UK residents - BT internet are the biggest consumer ISP, with about 1/4 of all internet users in the UK. BT also runs the copper telephone line infrastructure, and has the vast majority of POTS customers. A number of other ISPs resell BT internet access, and some of them also subscribe to Cleanfeed, the child-porn filter. Virgin and TalkTalk, the next two biggest ISPs have also been involved in the court cases, but have not - yet - been ordered to block newzbin 2)
Oops, that should be the LG LU6200.
You can say 'upgrading from version 2.3 to 4.0' in that meeting with your boss if you prefer. People often prefer the code-names as they're easier to remember the distinguishing features; gingerbread and froyo mean more to me than 2.3.4 and 2.2.1, but whatever works for you.
Personally, I was really looking forward to the nexus prime as the 'flagship' for ice cream sandwich (or 4.0!) - but the hardware looks pretty unimpressive compared to the galaxy S II, the new Razr or even something older like the optimus 3D.
Hopefully it goes AOSP soon so it can get back-ported by cyanogenmod to existing phones in something like a reasonable time frame - if we wait for the OEMs and then the carriers, it'll be many months if it happens at all.
Though I'm keeping my eye on the LG LU6400 - could be a good phone, and may launch with ice cream sandwich.
It's not even the same characters; the short stories were written years ago, and none of them are even in the same genre as the book she's writing for penguin. They're reading the non-compete clause to mean any work written by the author cannot be published by amazon, regardless of association to the current book, or when it was written or previously; they even tried to complain about her first short story compilation that was published by amazon before she even signed the contract for the new book with penguin! (until her lawyer slapped them down on that, at least).
To expect complete publishing veto over all an author's work, past or present, for two years over a contract for a single book and an advance of $20k is ridiculous.
Clearly the moral of the tale is, don't publish your book through penguin as they think they then own you and your entire back catalog - even when it's not mentioned in the contract at all, and even when they have no interest in publishing it themselves!
The problem isn't the web-browsing - it's the OS you run the browser on. Both mainstream linux distros and windows assume that people have faster and faster hardware over time, so start ladling on all the bells and whistles, making them run like poop on older processors, especially if they're also light on RAM compared to modern setups.
Yes, it's possible to put a streamlined version of linux on it with a bit of work, but let's face it, with XP rapidly approaching final retirement after 10+ years most 'normal' users are going to want to upgrade soon.
And as you say. Flash. And streaming video. Once you want to start decoding 720p or 1080p in realtime, processor grunt becomes quite important.
The 'kindle keyboard' is still around, wifi version for $99. There's the cheaper slimline version with no touch screen, 2GB storage and just the 5-way button, page-turn buttons (and soft keyboard) that's 2/3 the weight for $79, as well as the kindle touch and fire versions.
Seriously though, how often do you actually type on the kindle keyboard though? You mostly use the nav and page buttons. Unless you buy books on the kindle itself, rather than via browser I guess, but I've had a 'kindle keyboard' for a year now, and can think of maybe 3 times I've actually typed some text on the kindle directly.
I don't know whether I'd want a touch screen or not; I've got used to it on my galaxy S, and cleaning the screen periodically isn't that much of a bother. That said, I do like the dedicated page-turn buttons, so am probably more in the market for the basic keyboard-less kindle if/when my current one suffers an accident.
I've no interest in the fire, but then I already have an asus transformer which works nicely as a tablet/netbook when I'm travelling. I *like* e-ink for book reading, it's much better than a backlit screen of an evening.
Amazon are clearly flogging the kindle store as much as the physical device you read it on, so I don't think they'll cancel the kindle keyboard (i.e. the kindle 3) anytime soon.
While a complete re-work of the certificate signers is a good idea - and implementing DNSSEC widely is also a good idea - we're still going to need TLS, and that means certificates. DNSSEC doesn't provide any mechanism for encrypting the data stream after you've securely established you're talking to the right server, nor should it, that's not its job.
So DNSSEC protects against DNS poisoning and some MITM attacks; but there are plenty of other ways such as fake gateway, passive listening of wifi traffic, ARP spoofing etc etc so you're still going to want TLS, or some other form of encrypted data transfer for email and http etc. OK, IPSEC implementations may be a lot more widespread with IPv6, but that's a long way off even in a best case scenario.
I think the best we can hope for, for now, is DNSSEC + TLS. TLS secures your data stream, DNSSEC ensures you've not been DNS spoofed. 'Officially' signed certs for TLS is a belts-and-braces approach. With that, someone has to spoof the certificate or get a fake issued AND find another way of watching your traffic without DNS poisoning - which is harder to do on a bulk scale if you're not the network provider/ISP itself. Self-signed certs are too easy to spoof. Yes, it's not a perfect system, but security is a layered approach, not a one-trick pony.
Perhaps you should have asked for their macbook PRO line.
VMware makes a hetrogenous environment far, far easier to deal with - we have some 70 odd servers running on 5 physical servers. It makes it much easier to single-task a given server/VM, spread the load without having to invest far more in server hardware, and allows having backup/redundant servers to allow for patching/upgrades of servers with much more minimal effort.
While in-OS virtualization is great if you only require a single OS to do everything; but if you have hetrogenous servers to handle different tasks for different clients - i.e. AD/exchange for the windows users, linux for the webservers and network infrastructure etc, then hypervisors are frankly essential for sysadmin these days.
It wasn't even denatured HIV that treated them; they used it as gene therapy to modify white blood cells to make them specifically target the lukemia cancer, and added a gene to make the white blood cells multiply like crazy. It was these 'killer' reprogrammed white blood cells that were injected, and went onto multiply heavily and attack the cancerous cells.
Gene therapies like this, using white blood cells to attack cancer have been tried before, but they only killed a small amount of cancerous cells before dying off. The new approach here is using modified HIV as the carrier, and also including a replicator gene to make the white blood cells much more effective.
That said; this is only 3 patients. We don't know how scalable this approach will be to other patients, whether it will be generally effective, and whether it actually kills the cancer or only slows it down. Presumably the same approach could be used to target other cancers, but even if it only hits this common form of leukemia, it's still a massive step forward IFF it's scalable and effective, compared to other treatments such as radiation and chemo.
I did initially think 'Why on earth would you go to the trouble and inefficiency of this with an expensive electric car?' and then the penny dropped. It's in Japan, where they were having rolling brownouts due to the nuclear disaster and the loss of capacity, and are still under threat of blackouts over the summer.
Let me introduce you to the world of hyper inflation.
Minting new money just devalues that which you already have. Do too much of it - and two trillion is quite comfortably on the side of 'too much' - and your currency becomes worthless. Which means all those imports you buy with dollars - not least shittons of OIL (which would in short-order switch to euros) - become way more expensive. The US is utterly dependent upon cheap imports, and the chinese being willing to provide them by keeping its own currency low and keeping hundreds of millions of chinese in work.
Inflating your way out of debt problems might sound attractive, but the ultimate cost is far worse in the long run.
They did close on and off a couple of weeks ago; invites would be open briefly until they hit their desired number cap, then close again. Now invites are permanently on; if you have a prior invite, you can use the link to get in now, or any new invite will do the trick.
Ironic you pick that example, as google have specifically said Mark Twain would be acceptable:
For a hypothetical example, Samuel Clemens could choose to be known as ‘Mark Twain,’ although we wouldn’t allow him to go by Authordude88.
Source.
The facebook process is entirely retarded, and facebook officially want everything you post to be public, so I doubt it's ever going to be made more visible and usable. Plus facebook have a habit of changing the default privacy settings around, and over-riding your previous settings to be more public. Google+ circles is a really intuitive way of segregating who you know into different groups. I have a circle of people I'm 'following' - i.e. like Trey Ratcliff who's an awesome HDR photographer and has been posting shots from paris recently, or Wil Wheaton. It's rather twitter like. I also have circles for my family, and IRL friends, another circle for members of a gaming forum I'm on (who've signed up en-mass), and another circle called 'err' for people who I've followed for posting cool stuff, and have now circled me back. I choose who gets to see what I post for every post easily, and of course, there's always public if I want to make it visible to people who I haven't circled yet. Plus - no Zygna! Thank God.
This video puts it better than I can.
There are other really useful features of google+ though, like hangouts - it uses the same video plugin as google talk video, but it lets you do up to 10-way simultaneous video chat. It's really simple, and it works really, really well. It beats the crap out of skype premium.
Another dead handy feature is I can easily choose who can tag me in photos - it defaults to your circles, but you can make it smaller than that. Handy for making sure only people you really really trust can tag you in photos - you can select nobody at all if you like.
Anyone who circles you, but you don't circle back, their public posts and stuff sent to the circle you're in ends up in a circle called 'incoming' - so you can see it if you want, but it's not in your main stream. You can also block someone if they're annoying or spamming, and they'll vanish entirely as far as you're concerned.
Admittedly, the mobile client is a bit featureless for posting links and videos - you can do status updates and upload photos on the move really easily, but not much else. Hopefully that will improve, after all, google+ has only been out in field test for 3 weeks. also, you want to turn off most of the email notifications otherwise you just drown.
Two really good extensions for chrome are:
start google plus that allows you to integrate facebook and/or twitter posts into your google stream (or put them in a specific circle), and cross-post stuff from google+ to them if you want to, easily.
google plus me that lets you collapse posts+comments down, so they don't clog up your stream (it shows how many unread comments are in that collapsed post and you can hover to see contents) - handy when you follow felicia day! It also has a list mode, where they are all collapsed which really allows you to focus on just one post at a time.
Overall, I'm using google+ far, far more than I ever used facebook, and seeing a ton of interesting stuff linked on there. Knowing I can easily keep stuff well away from co-workers, and not post geeky stuff to my family they're not going to be interested in is so much better.