Originally I was getting this message as well, which is why I called them in the first place. The techs told me that they were enabling the feature gradually (pushing some sort of update to the phone?) and that it would be available nationwide tomorrow (Friday).
I found this earlier today indicating that Rogers will allow anyone with a 1GB or greater data plan to tether. I called them to confirm and I am in fact allowed to consume bandwidth right up to my 6GB cap, same as if I was consuming the bandwidth on the phone itself.
The really surprising thing is that it's automatic. I didn't have to get them to turn anything on in my account. I simply turned it on in the Network Settings page and was able to tether my Windows 7 laptop and a friends Macbook Pro over both Bluetooth and USB without issues and, even more surprisingly, without iTunes installed (on the Win7 machine).
Bandwidth was around 3Mbps down and 0.3Mbps up, with a minimum ping of around 150ms, tested on multiple servers using Speedtest.net. This is in the middle of Halifax, NS.
"No, wait, Windows CE is 13 years old. It's had a little more time to design the window manager for different screen sizes."
While I agree with everything you've said here, and that the age of Windows CE makes the comparative shortcomings in Android somewhat excusable, it doesn't change the fact that Windows CE seems to do what NVidia wants and Android doesn't.
Android being new is a perfectly valid excuse, but in a here-and-now business sense Nvidia just has to go with what works... I guess.
Writing this is hurting me. I really, really hate Windows CE (or Windows Mobile or whatever they call it these days.)
Re:What about people with disabillities?
on
Why Natal Is a Big Deal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I understand the point you're trying to make, but the question is a bit silly. While I acknowledge that this eliminates more physical disabilities from gameplay than traditional console designs, I don't think that a one-armed person could play, say, Halo on a normal XBox 360 controller either. Further, the much-loved Nintendo Wii has plenty of games that also require the Wii-mote attachment and therefore two hands, including Boxing which ships with the console (part of Wii Sports).
It is unfortunate that people with certain physical disabilities are being excluded from gaming by these new controller designs, but to suggest that game companies shouldn't innovate in this way lest some people be excluded by unfortunate circumstances sounds a lot like a Vonnegut short story to me.
We were required to have a "Cisco Clean Access Agent" installed on our machines. There were two options available for me, and I ended up going with the second.
1) The clean access agent only actually requires that you "authenticate" as clean to the network about once every two weeks. I installed a copy of Windows on a small partition at the end of my drive, put the clean access agent on it and authenticated myself. Whenever I was "cut off" from the network, I would reboot into the other (isolated) Windows partition (make sure your actual in-use partitions aren't mounted), do a scan to regain access and then reboot again. Worked reasonably well.
2) Because our network was so slow, I eventually decided that it wasn't worth the trouble. In the residence I was in the phones were provided by the local phone company and the cable was provided by the local cable company. It was a bit of a grey area regarding the policies in place in the residence, but I was able to have cable internet installed directly into my room. Perhaps you can do the same?
So far as I can tell, asus.co.uk is not Asus' UK website. If you go to asus.com and select the United Kingdom, you are sent to uk.asus.com.
The page you linked shows "asus.co.uk" in the address bar, yet if you go to "asus.co.uk" directly, you get redirected (as in "please wait while we redirect you") to uk.asus.com. I was unable to find this page on uk.asus.com. Furthermore, uk.asus.com is 66.238.93.162 while the page you linked (asus.co.uk) is hosted at 87.106.102.168.
A lookup on asus.co.uk shows that it is registered to Asustek, but it was updated very recently (May 22, 2009) and the nameservers are now at 1and1.co.uk (never heard of them).
Is it possible that someone has intercepted the domain in order to provide "proof" that the site in the summary is legitimate?
As someone who spends well above your $220 mark on any video card he buys, I agree with your scale. In reality, I could play through all the games I own (there are many, ranging from very low (Defcon) to very high (Crysis Warhead) demands) on a card costing far less than the one I currently own.
I do contest that I don't have any sense though, buying high end cards. (For the record, my current card is a Radeon 4870x2. I bought it used, if it helps.) Really, it's an issue of priorities. A person doesn't need 250hp in their card, or a 60" LCD to watch movies, or a 3000+ square foot house for a couple, or whatever. You can drive, watch movies and sleep at night with far more modest versions of those things. I take the bus, I have a small "home theater" (sort of) and I live in a relatively modest one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. I like playing games though - it's escapism. It isn't even just escapism - I'm awed by how powerful these system have become. I like tweaking my system for maximum performance. I like running games maxed out at 60fps, and then modifying them to push the visual quality up even higher.
I'm not saying that everyone should do what I do. I'm not saying what I do makes sense for most people. Almost everyone has a guilty pleasure though, into which they dump their disposable income. Mine is my computer. My girlfriend's is books and movies. I have friends that blow their extra cash on bars, or on clothes or on their car. Those are valid too. It's just a choice.
I'm not calling you out here, I don't think you meant to insult me or anyone else. I'm just... giving you the perspective of someone who likes high-end gaming hardware.
It's interesting that they say this actually. I'm a terrible chess player not because I don't 'get' the game, but because I'm not very patient. So I tend to do fairly well playing speed chess, but doing very, very poorly in a normal game. I tend to just get tired of evaluating the possible moves after a while and just make whatever one was the most promising out of the few that I did think about.
Isn't that sort of the same thing as limiting the number of calculations? In this case limiting the calculations would replicate the stupid moves that I (as a human/meat popsicle) would make, assuming that the order in which the computer evaluated possible moves was decided using more or less the same set or priorities that I would use (which are also probably stupid).
So the trick to coming up with a "realistic" AI opponent for chess might be more about figuring out how a human surveys the board and in what order they evaluate the moves. You can replicate the behaviour of dumb humans (like me) just by cutting off the evaluation at some very early point and scale up the difficulty by extending it.
When I was younger I remember watching new episodes Star Trek The Next Generation at 10pm on Friday nights on CityTV. I don't think anyone can argue that TNG did poorly.
Unless that was just a CityTV thing, or it was an encore presentation for new episodes or something.
I'm just wondering where you read about Starter Edition being meant for netbooks. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable claim, but I was under the impression that Starter Edition was for emerging markets and wouldn't be sold in developed countries. Did Microsoft and/or a netbook manufacturer announce that they intend to supply the machines with Starter Edition pre-installed?
"Their arguement is like someone discovering how to copy a Rolls Royce for free. Suddenly all the millions of Rolls Royces on the road being driven by people of modest means represent lost sales?"
I think a potential real world example of this happening is with synthetic (i.e. lab-made) diamonds. Companies like De Beers are scared shitless because they can no longer create a situation of artificial scarcity and charge massive prices for their diamonds, since they're relatively easy to make in a lab now via CVD.
I was at a conference recently that had a trade show going on and there was a company there selling relatively small lab-made diamonds for cheap (a couple hundred bucks). Now these lab-made diamonds are supposedly very high quality (I've heard that an expert can spot synthetic diamonds specifically because they're flawless, in a way that no natural diamond would ever be). Just for the sake of comparison I wrote down the specs for a small, high-grade diamond they had at the show for something like $300 and asked in a diamond store how much a stone with those characteristics would generally go for, and the answer was in the $3000 ballpark.
I can afford a $300 diamond, but I can't afford a $3000 diamond (at the moment). So in my case buying a $300 synthetic diamond would not be a lost sale for De Beers. I'm sure they'd feel differently though.
Seriously though, no, I'm not hugely concerned. That said, the iPhone is, at least in my area, associated with a particularly type of person (i.e. the type who works it into conversation for no reason other than to brag). I'd rather not be thought of that way. Excuse me.
And, yeah, 'teh iPhone'. Millions of emo Starbucks drinking retards posting their unboxing vids on youtube and looking for every single possible way they can somehow work their phone into their conversations to try to make it clear just how 'special' they are.
Fuck. This is totally why I hide my iPhone from view when I'm on the bus or in public in general. It was the best, cheapest option (seriously) for me to get an effective browsing/email client on the road (BBs are crazily expensive and the iPhone 3G was having a launch sale) but I'm deeply embarassed to be seen with it.
It's a great device. It does what I need it to do. I'm happy I own it. I just wish nobody else knew that I own it.
I use a nitrogen box (O2 and H2O less than 0.1 ppm) in my lab to test transistors. I test several hundred transistors at a time, and need to connect probes to electrodes on each one manually, so my hands are always in the glove box. In order to start my analysis program and enter a filename, I wired a USB port to an electrical feedthrough and put a USB hub inside. Originally the hub was just for a keyboard and mouse, but it has since proved useful for other devices (cameras, etc) as well.
Can you do something similar here, assuming a keyboard and mouse can be sufficiently sterilized?
Are you kidding me? That was fucking awesome! The CDC asked for data from Blizzard so they could use it as a model to study disease transmission through a population!
I suppose I can see how it might've given Blizzard employees a nervous breakdown though.
Couldn't the RIAA simply grant MediaSentry the rights to distribute the music of all its members? That would render the "send me one first" action legal, and avoid the entrapment claims, would it not?
We try to promote skepticism and it's a good thing that we do. Teaching people to question the things that they are told is good. However, there is a relatively small minority of Slashdot readers who have missed the point.
Scientific skepticism is about making sure you understand the details of how a conclusion was reached. You look for holes in the method. You look for faulty assumptions. What scientific skepticism is not is the practice of simply not believing anything at all.
Disclaimer: I work in a lab that develops both transistors and photocells. I don't know exactly what they did, but based on the summary and the article, I'd surmise the following.
In an organic photocell an incoming photo will excite an electron. The positive and negative charges (electron and hole) will be "linked" together (i.e. they will move around together). In this state they are not useful. However, if you can separate them and draw them in different directions, then you'll get a current. They can only be drawn apart if you create a situation in which it is energetically favorable for them to separate, usually by attracting them to high and low work function contacts. Therefore, in a photocell of this type, you sandwich two materials together - one in which it is easy for holes to move, but difficult for electrons, and one in which it is easy for electrons to move, but difficult for holes (called the hole transport and electron transport layers). Then, you put a bias across the layers by using two dissimilar contact materials, one high work function and one low work function. Note that one contact needs to be transparent (ITO is most common) so photons can get to the middle layers.
Anyway, when an exciton is created it goes on a random walk through the material in which it is created, and will eventually collapse. The 'exciton diffusion length' is the distance over which your average exciton will move before collapsing. You want any created excitons to be within a diffusion length of the interface between the hole and electron transport layers. When the exciton hits an interface, it separates and the charges move towards their respective contacts. Put a load across the contacts, and you've got a working circuit (assuming excitons are being created).
This is a mildly simplified explanation, but it works.
Anyway, you can go the other way - imagine injecting an electron in one side and a hole into the other. You could choose your materials such that they would meet up at the interface and collapse together, emitting a photon. This is an OLED, and is conceptually similar to the photocells I just described.
So now imagine that you make it so that either the hole or electron transport layer is semiconducting. You could set up your device such that a dielectric layer and then a 'gate' contact are touching the transport layers along an axis perpendicular to the nominal current flow through your device (like in a thin-film transistor). Then, the layers would only transport charge (like in a transistor) and hence emit light (like in an OLED) when a voltage is applied to the gate contact. Then you have a thin-film device across which you put a bias that only emits light (and draws current) when it is switched 'on' by the gate contact.
In other words, you've combined a TFT with an OLED. Very, very slick.
"Last year a man in Cedar Springs, Mich., was fined $400 for mooching off somebody else's wi-fi--a police officer spotted him laptop-surfing in a parked car."
My laptop has an internal EVDO Rev A card that has become my primary mode of connecting to the net outside of my home. I've only had it for a month or so. I use this laptop in cars or other public spaces all the time. It seems unlikely that I'd be able to convince a police officer that I do in fact own the connection that I'm using to surf in a parking lot. It's an easy assumption to make that anyone using a laptop out in the open is likely using a nearby 802.11 network.
So, assuming the cop doesn't believe me, how is the fine given out? If I'm spotted, does the cop write me a ticket? Does he arrest me? Do I have to go to court and prove that I am, in fact, using a connection for which I've paid?
Hopefully there's more to that story than the article lets on. Hopefully showing the officer the "TELUS" logo on my connection app would be convincing enough. Otherwise, it seems like this sort of thing is very guilty-until-proven-innocent.
"in fact is MORE LIKELY to change if you start cooling water ahead of it"
Well, maybe we can't break up a storm, but diverting it away from a population center still sounds like a plus to me.
I do tend to agree that the number involved don't look particularly workable though.
Originally I was getting this message as well, which is why I called them in the first place. The techs told me that they were enabling the feature gradually (pushing some sort of update to the phone?) and that it would be available nationwide tomorrow (Friday).
I found this earlier today indicating that Rogers will allow anyone with a 1GB or greater data plan to tether. I called them to confirm and I am in fact allowed to consume bandwidth right up to my 6GB cap, same as if I was consuming the bandwidth on the phone itself.
The really surprising thing is that it's automatic. I didn't have to get them to turn anything on in my account. I simply turned it on in the Network Settings page and was able to tether my Windows 7 laptop and a friends Macbook Pro over both Bluetooth and USB without issues and, even more surprisingly, without iTunes installed (on the Win7 machine).
Bandwidth was around 3Mbps down and 0.3Mbps up, with a minimum ping of around 150ms, tested on multiple servers using Speedtest.net. This is in the middle of Halifax, NS.
"No, wait, Windows CE is 13 years old. It's had a little more time to design the window manager for different screen sizes."
While I agree with everything you've said here, and that the age of Windows CE makes the comparative shortcomings in Android somewhat excusable, it doesn't change the fact that Windows CE seems to do what NVidia wants and Android doesn't.
Android being new is a perfectly valid excuse, but in a here-and-now business sense Nvidia just has to go with what works... I guess.
Writing this is hurting me. I really, really hate Windows CE (or Windows Mobile or whatever they call it these days.)
I understand the point you're trying to make, but the question is a bit silly. While I acknowledge that this eliminates more physical disabilities from gameplay than traditional console designs, I don't think that a one-armed person could play, say, Halo on a normal XBox 360 controller either. Further, the much-loved Nintendo Wii has plenty of games that also require the Wii-mote attachment and therefore two hands, including Boxing which ships with the console (part of Wii Sports).
It is unfortunate that people with certain physical disabilities are being excluded from gaming by these new controller designs, but to suggest that game companies shouldn't innovate in this way lest some people be excluded by unfortunate circumstances sounds a lot like a Vonnegut short story to me.
We were required to have a "Cisco Clean Access Agent" installed on our machines. There were two options available for me, and I ended up going with the second.
1) The clean access agent only actually requires that you "authenticate" as clean to the network about once every two weeks. I installed a copy of Windows on a small partition at the end of my drive, put the clean access agent on it and authenticated myself. Whenever I was "cut off" from the network, I would reboot into the other (isolated) Windows partition (make sure your actual in-use partitions aren't mounted), do a scan to regain access and then reboot again. Worked reasonably well.
2) Because our network was so slow, I eventually decided that it wasn't worth the trouble. In the residence I was in the phones were provided by the local phone company and the cable was provided by the local cable company. It was a bit of a grey area regarding the policies in place in the residence, but I was able to have cable internet installed directly into my room. Perhaps you can do the same?
So far as I can tell, asus.co.uk is not Asus' UK website. If you go to asus.com and select the United Kingdom, you are sent to uk.asus.com.
The page you linked shows "asus.co.uk" in the address bar, yet if you go to "asus.co.uk" directly, you get redirected (as in "please wait while we redirect you") to uk.asus.com. I was unable to find this page on uk.asus.com. Furthermore, uk.asus.com is 66.238.93.162 while the page you linked (asus.co.uk) is hosted at 87.106.102.168.
A lookup on asus.co.uk shows that it is registered to Asustek, but it was updated very recently (May 22, 2009) and the nameservers are now at 1and1.co.uk (never heard of them).
Is it possible that someone has intercepted the domain in order to provide "proof" that the site in the summary is legitimate?
As someone who spends well above your $220 mark on any video card he buys, I agree with your scale. In reality, I could play through all the games I own (there are many, ranging from very low (Defcon) to very high (Crysis Warhead) demands) on a card costing far less than the one I currently own.
I do contest that I don't have any sense though, buying high end cards. (For the record, my current card is a Radeon 4870x2. I bought it used, if it helps.) Really, it's an issue of priorities. A person doesn't need 250hp in their card, or a 60" LCD to watch movies, or a 3000+ square foot house for a couple, or whatever. You can drive, watch movies and sleep at night with far more modest versions of those things. I take the bus, I have a small "home theater" (sort of) and I live in a relatively modest one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. I like playing games though - it's escapism. It isn't even just escapism - I'm awed by how powerful these system have become. I like tweaking my system for maximum performance. I like running games maxed out at 60fps, and then modifying them to push the visual quality up even higher.
I'm not saying that everyone should do what I do. I'm not saying what I do makes sense for most people. Almost everyone has a guilty pleasure though, into which they dump their disposable income. Mine is my computer. My girlfriend's is books and movies. I have friends that blow their extra cash on bars, or on clothes or on their car. Those are valid too. It's just a choice.
I'm not calling you out here, I don't think you meant to insult me or anyone else. I'm just... giving you the perspective of someone who likes high-end gaming hardware.
Actually, I don't. I'd love some PC-106000 RAM.
It's interesting that they say this actually. I'm a terrible chess player not because I don't 'get' the game, but because I'm not very patient. So I tend to do fairly well playing speed chess, but doing very, very poorly in a normal game. I tend to just get tired of evaluating the possible moves after a while and just make whatever one was the most promising out of the few that I did think about.
Isn't that sort of the same thing as limiting the number of calculations? In this case limiting the calculations would replicate the stupid moves that I (as a human/meat popsicle) would make, assuming that the order in which the computer evaluated possible moves was decided using more or less the same set or priorities that I would use (which are also probably stupid).
So the trick to coming up with a "realistic" AI opponent for chess might be more about figuring out how a human surveys the board and in what order they evaluate the moves. You can replicate the behaviour of dumb humans (like me) just by cutting off the evaluation at some very early point and scale up the difficulty by extending it.
When I was younger I remember watching new episodes Star Trek The Next Generation at 10pm on Friday nights on CityTV. I don't think anyone can argue that TNG did poorly.
Unless that was just a CityTV thing, or it was an encore presentation for new episodes or something.
I'm just wondering where you read about Starter Edition being meant for netbooks. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable claim, but I was under the impression that Starter Edition was for emerging markets and wouldn't be sold in developed countries. Did Microsoft and/or a netbook manufacturer announce that they intend to supply the machines with Starter Edition pre-installed?
"Their arguement is like someone discovering how to copy a Rolls Royce for free. Suddenly all the millions of Rolls Royces on the road being driven by people of modest means represent lost sales?"
I think a potential real world example of this happening is with synthetic (i.e. lab-made) diamonds. Companies like De Beers are scared shitless because they can no longer create a situation of artificial scarcity and charge massive prices for their diamonds, since they're relatively easy to make in a lab now via CVD.
I was at a conference recently that had a trade show going on and there was a company there selling relatively small lab-made diamonds for cheap (a couple hundred bucks). Now these lab-made diamonds are supposedly very high quality (I've heard that an expert can spot synthetic diamonds specifically because they're flawless, in a way that no natural diamond would ever be). Just for the sake of comparison I wrote down the specs for a small, high-grade diamond they had at the show for something like $300 and asked in a diamond store how much a stone with those characteristics would generally go for, and the answer was in the $3000 ballpark.
I can afford a $300 diamond, but I can't afford a $3000 diamond (at the moment). So in my case buying a $300 synthetic diamond would not be a lost sale for De Beers. I'm sure they'd feel differently though.
No, I'm embarrassed that it's shiny and black.
Seriously though, no, I'm not hugely concerned. That said, the iPhone is, at least in my area, associated with a particularly type of person (i.e. the type who works it into conversation for no reason other than to brag). I'd rather not be thought of that way. Excuse me.
And, yeah, 'teh iPhone'. Millions of emo Starbucks drinking retards posting their unboxing vids on youtube and looking for every single possible way they can somehow work their phone into their conversations to try to make it clear just how 'special' they are.
Fuck. This is totally why I hide my iPhone from view when I'm on the bus or in public in general. It was the best, cheapest option (seriously) for me to get an effective browsing/email client on the road (BBs are crazily expensive and the iPhone 3G was having a launch sale) but I'm deeply embarassed to be seen with it.
It's a great device. It does what I need it to do. I'm happy I own it. I just wish nobody else knew that I own it.
I use a nitrogen box (O2 and H2O less than 0.1 ppm) in my lab to test transistors. I test several hundred transistors at a time, and need to connect probes to electrodes on each one manually, so my hands are always in the glove box. In order to start my analysis program and enter a filename, I wired a USB port to an electrical feedthrough and put a USB hub inside. Originally the hub was just for a keyboard and mouse, but it has since proved useful for other devices (cameras, etc) as well.
Can you do something similar here, assuming a keyboard and mouse can be sufficiently sterilized?
Are you kidding me? That was fucking awesome! The CDC asked for data from Blizzard so they could use it as a model to study disease transmission through a population!
I suppose I can see how it might've given Blizzard employees a nervous breakdown though.
Couldn't the RIAA simply grant MediaSentry the rights to distribute the music of all its members? That would render the "send me one first" action legal, and avoid the entrapment claims, would it not?
Burma Shave.
"Dawkins doesn't have all the answers, you know."
Blasphemy!
We try to promote skepticism and it's a good thing that we do. Teaching people to question the things that they are told is good. However, there is a relatively small minority of Slashdot readers who have missed the point.
Scientific skepticism is about making sure you understand the details of how a conclusion was reached. You look for holes in the method. You look for faulty assumptions. What scientific skepticism is not is the practice of simply not believing anything at all.
Disclaimer: I work in a lab that develops both transistors and photocells. I don't know exactly what they did, but based on the summary and the article, I'd surmise the following.
In an organic photocell an incoming photo will excite an electron. The positive and negative charges (electron and hole) will be "linked" together (i.e. they will move around together). In this state they are not useful. However, if you can separate them and draw them in different directions, then you'll get a current. They can only be drawn apart if you create a situation in which it is energetically favorable for them to separate, usually by attracting them to high and low work function contacts. Therefore, in a photocell of this type, you sandwich two materials together - one in which it is easy for holes to move, but difficult for electrons, and one in which it is easy for electrons to move, but difficult for holes (called the hole transport and electron transport layers). Then, you put a bias across the layers by using two dissimilar contact materials, one high work function and one low work function. Note that one contact needs to be transparent (ITO is most common) so photons can get to the middle layers.
Anyway, when an exciton is created it goes on a random walk through the material in which it is created, and will eventually collapse. The 'exciton diffusion length' is the distance over which your average exciton will move before collapsing. You want any created excitons to be within a diffusion length of the interface between the hole and electron transport layers. When the exciton hits an interface, it separates and the charges move towards their respective contacts. Put a load across the contacts, and you've got a working circuit (assuming excitons are being created).
This is a mildly simplified explanation, but it works.
Anyway, you can go the other way - imagine injecting an electron in one side and a hole into the other. You could choose your materials such that they would meet up at the interface and collapse together, emitting a photon. This is an OLED, and is conceptually similar to the photocells I just described.
So now imagine that you make it so that either the hole or electron transport layer is semiconducting. You could set up your device such that a dielectric layer and then a 'gate' contact are touching the transport layers along an axis perpendicular to the nominal current flow through your device (like in a thin-film transistor). Then, the layers would only transport charge (like in a transistor) and hence emit light (like in an OLED) when a voltage is applied to the gate contact. Then you have a thin-film device across which you put a bias that only emits light (and draws current) when it is switched 'on' by the gate contact.
In other words, you've combined a TFT with an OLED. Very, very slick.
80 * the speed of light in nanometers per attoseconds
"Last year a man in Cedar Springs, Mich., was fined $400 for mooching off somebody else's wi-fi--a police officer spotted him laptop-surfing in a parked car."
My laptop has an internal EVDO Rev A card that has become my primary mode of connecting to the net outside of my home. I've only had it for a month or so. I use this laptop in cars or other public spaces all the time. It seems unlikely that I'd be able to convince a police officer that I do in fact own the connection that I'm using to surf in a parking lot. It's an easy assumption to make that anyone using a laptop out in the open is likely using a nearby 802.11 network.
So, assuming the cop doesn't believe me, how is the fine given out? If I'm spotted, does the cop write me a ticket? Does he arrest me? Do I have to go to court and prove that I am, in fact, using a connection for which I've paid?
Hopefully there's more to that story than the article lets on. Hopefully showing the officer the "TELUS" logo on my connection app would be convincing enough. Otherwise, it seems like this sort of thing is very guilty-until-proven-innocent.
Oh very nice. It says 3 on the site now, but the version is still 2.0. The download link itself is rather amusing.