VLF systems have been in use for decades to communicate with the US Submarine fleet, not because of interference, but because it passes through just about everything and has a very, very wide propagation. Unfortunately, the power levels are so high that people wonder/suspect it's causing nature / health problems for nearby residents.
I mean for fucks' sakes, this stuff was in use by the German navy during WW2- 70 years ago. All this kid did was apply the obvious, and apparently, it's so obvious, someone thought of it 40 years ago. More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency
Also, the kid didn't implement any sort of retransmission or error correction. That makes it pretty useless for both emergencies (imagine: "person has 3 hours to live" instead of "30 hours") and scientific data collection. It's also pretty standard these days.
Either this patent is for a technology Google had figured out a long time ago
Ding ding ding. Google's been using the technology for a while; they just filed for the application.
You don't have to file for a patent the second you invent something. In fact, you usually want to wait as long as possible before the final steps. You get your foot in the door by filing some paperwork with the patent attorney, notarizing documents showing the invention, etc. etc.
First, it's pretty fucking funny that you're using a fictional TV show to argue a point. Anyway:
There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
Uh, actually, since that money went to going to the moon, it didn't go to renewable energy research, education, etc. Fun fact: the percentage of kids in the United States who don't get enough to eat has climbed steadily since the 60's. Right now it's around 13-14 million kids each year.
So yes, there are a lot of people who are dumber and colder and hungrier because of all the money flushed down the drain into what is little more than nationalism in the name of science.
Don't you think we have certain societal obligations before we flush hundreds of trillions of dollars down the drain putting a couple of guys in a tin can above the earth for the world's most expensive dog and pony show?
Newsflash, folks: politicians, even JFK, don't give a flying fuck about scientific exploration. They care about getting their agendas through and re-elected. Kennedy did what he did because if he hadn't, the anti-communists would have had a field day.
Maybe if we'd spent the money on renewable energy technology, we wouldn't be spewing so much pollution into the air to generate power and heat, wouldn't need to fight two wars in Iraq, etc. If our homes were generating their own power and more efficient, imagine what we could do with all that money not being wasted on a complex power grid? Hmm, maybe go into space?
by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie.
You clearly were not paying attention; they dressed in a similar STYLE, but there was wide variation. They WERE free-thinking and individualistic compared to the people who went into work wearing the same color shirts (usually white), ties, hats, shoes, slacks, jackets. Streets of major cities at rush hour at the time were a sea of men dressed the same.
Also: anyone who claims Apple has an inside culture of creativity and free thinking is full of shit. A few idea people bring ideas to the top, and everyone else is told exactly how to implement things, with strict parameters. It's one reason a friend of mine left- he spent several years working on Apple's flagship software components and hardware, but had no say in anything. Now he makes less money but at a smaller company, where he also felt his input would matter.
Another culture shift at Apple: remember when there were credits? No more. Apple now refuses to recognize to the public the contributions its employees make, except for 2-3 top-level people. Jobs, Ive, etc.
Both the top-down ideas and refusal to recognize employee work are cashing in short-term profits for long-term stability. I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
When your brand is as much your top level executives as your products, you have a big problem down the road.
- I have done thousands of operations and never a wrong-side operation. It is something that is taken *extremely* seriously, and we have at least three checks that guard against this. With over a billion procedures done per year, yes, there will be many that make the news, not unlike planes taking off on the wrong runway, etc., etc.
And yet, despite all those checks, surgeons still fuck it up. And of course, why were all those checks necessary in the first place? Answer: incompetent, arrogant surgeons/doctors. You make it out like it's a rarity. http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=surgery+"wrong+side+of+the"
*Golf clap*. You just justified something completely moronic (operating on the wrong part of the patient) by saying that because it's done so many times, we should excuse the "few" idiots.
I don't care how many fucking operations you do. The surgeon should be aware of the patient's history to the extent that something as unbelievably simple as "which side am I operating on" should not be possible. How can they possibly treat/operate effectively if they can't even get something that simple done?
The post has a core of truth, but like all Slashdot-postings the "It's so simple I could just figure it out and do better" high-school naivety predominates.
It IS SO SIMPLE. Fire and criminally prosecute doctors, nurses, and surgeons who injure or kill patients through their incompetence. Watch as the medical profession suddenly becomes more interested in competence, safety, etc- and not just exploiting med students. If patient safety is so important, why are med students run through a meat grinder? What a bunch of macho bullshit to claim it's to "test" them. When I'm seen by a med student who is operating on 3 hours of sleep over the last 48 hours, I'm not going to get anything remotely approaching a level of decent care.
By the way, take that ad hominem and cram it up your ass; I never applied for med school. Zero interest.
Yeah, the nurse should have installed it, and she fucked up. However, it is a basic fact of humans that all of them fuck up from time to time, some more than others, and more under some conditions than others. Unless that particular nurse has an atypically bad record for forgetting, it is unlikely that firing her will improve the quality of the system as a whole very much. Instead, such safety critical systems should be designed to take human error into account. Routine use of checklists, for instance, has been demonstrated to reduce human error.
When the failure could or WILL result in the patient dying, that nurse is aware of the consequences and should take whatever steps THEY feel is necessary to make sure THEY get it done.
It's not society's place to shepherd those who hold the lives of others in their hands. If you can't recognize the importance of something and make sure you follow proper procedure, you're undeserving of the job.
This appears in textbooks. Problems like this shouldn't still be happening.
They happen because the entire medical system is flawed; look at where many of the errors occurred. They had nothing to do with software. If the radiation shield/guide isn't installed, that's not the software's fault. Don't blame human problems on technical things, and don't solve human problems with technical solutions. If a nurse forgets to put a radiation shield in place, FIRE THEIR ASS.
How flawed is the medical system in the US?
Doctors are trained by making them work the really shitty hours the older, more experienced doctors don't want to work- and working them to the bone (because they're paid a fixed salary, which is a pittance for the hours they're putting in) so that they're sleep-deprived. Which is know to interfere with judgment and decision-making processes. Perfect for diagnostic thinking, right?
Doctors can't be bothered to PRINT clearly on prescription slips, so pharmacies often fill the prescription out incorrectly, or have to call and pester the doctor- who probably doesn't remember what they wrote, and saw so many patients, that they don't remember correctly.
Doctors and surgeons routinely fuck up on the most basic things, like which side of the body they're operating on, often in some VERY serious, permanent operations, like amputations.
Doctors and nurses, time and time again, have been shown to not practice the most simple procedures for infection control, like washing their hands before/after every patient.
A couple of doctors in the Boston area have a)left patients on the operating table (opened up!) to run an errand at the bank b)shown up drunk or high for operations c)been beyond unprofessional to staff 'below' them (screaming, throwing things etc.)
These are people who are some of the most highly paid people in society, who have taken an oath (which the are happy to get uppity about whenever it serves them.) When they fuck up, their malpractice insurance covers the lawsuit. And then the doctors turn around and bitch at us about how expensive it is to be a doctor, mostly because of their insane malpractice insurance.
Did I mention that everyone goes into obscure specialties, meaning that if you want a Toe Oncologist, you can see one in a few days, but you've got to wait weeks in most major cities for a general practitioner...who just so happens to be the only person who can approve your care if you're on an HMO?
Your wireless account has nothing to do with network quality. Secondly, you have illegally voided your contract, ruling you out from any legitimate apples to apples comparison.
Yeah, that's it, I meant that my account affected network quality and I'm a complete moron, hey did you know that planes fly because angels push up on the wings?
Or I could have been saying that, gosh, I've been a customer for almost A FUCKING DECADE and haven't noticed any major problems compared to all the emotechtards that bought iPhones and expect to magically be able to place (and continue) a telephone call anywhere on the planet.
So you're saying that between New England and NYC, your user report has been that more people that you have seen have been complaining in NYC than New England. Again, not a great statistical analysis which networks truly need.
Why do people insist this is carrier specific? I had a friend who had Verizon and lived in NH. When he was driving he'd regularly say "I'm going to lose you in the next minute or so." Sure enough, bam, gone. And Verizon supposedly has awesome coverage.
NEWS FLASH: New England is a sparsely populated area, and EVERY carrier has about the same coverage- many of them are on the same fucking physical tower. Also, if you place your phone in a cradle or use a bluetooth handset and put the phone on the seat or the center armrest, it shields it quite a bit from the car. There are also car windshield heaters and aftermarket tint that is murder on RF.
Do what my father did: buy an RF amplifier/booster with a rooftop antenna. It works great with any phone- there is a transceiver that faces the backplate of the phone. As long as I could get ANY signal without it, putting the iPhone in the cradle gave me almost 5 bars- and in areas where there was no service, I'd often get plenty to make a phone call. In both cases, crystal-clear calls with no cutouts in the conversation, instant reception of text messages, etc.
The iPhone itself doesn't really handle the switch from 3G to EDGE very gracefully, so calls that are in-progress tend to fail whenever 3G connections aren't optimal and the phone attempts to step down to EDGE.
Given that carriers test phones on networks, it would not be the least surprising to learn that AT&T technical staff evaluated the iPhone (or already had experience with the 'modem' it uses), told management about the problems, and management decided what was more important was the couple of years of revenue from people who wanted iPhones regardless of the network.
I've been a customer of AT&T since the "AT&T wireless" days (pre AT&T, pre "cingular", etc.) and I can count the number of dropped calls on one hand. I currently have an original iPhone, jailbroken/unlocked, on a very old AT&T Wireless account. $30/month for a regional plan = awesome (as is having one device to surf the web where I can get Wifi, play games, listen to music, and make phone calls.)
Living in New England, I also haven't heard many complaints from 3G iPhone users. Seems to be mostly NYC where people are screaming (yes kids, NY and NYC are not "New England.")
Back in '99, Digital River was doing electronic software delivery. I love this bit:
"Digital River understands that small business owners need that cash immediately," explains David Heath, CEO of Matrix Games, a computer game company that has worked with Digital River for three years.
Funny, Digital River never paid the company I worked at...at all. They sold hundreds of copies of the software, and didn't send our company a fucking dime. Ever.
Got so bad, word had to be spread via online forums, usergroups, and dealers that DR wasn't paying the company, and nobody should do business with them.
The problem is, will Nokia keep on updating their free directions? Generally, when you have a large company that seems to be losing money and marketshare left and right they will release a lot of paid things for free in order to not have to update them or maintain them as much as a paid product.
I think this is being done for two reasons:
1)Everyone else is doing it. 2)It makes it more difficult to legislate using phone while driving illegal. Customers (voters) will be pissed if they're used to using their phone to navigate, and suddenly they can't use their phone while driving.
While you're right about this, of course, the problem is compounded with combustion engines because with altitude the thinner air means less oxygen to burn fuel with
No kidding; I don't deny this. But the article doesn't say that it has a higher ceiling; it says: "It has no flight ceiling."
It's not commonly known because it is just plain wrong. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe Camera RAW.
Adobe Camera Raw, as well as most of the other commercial software which decodes raw images, used dcraw source and probably still uses much of that code. The license for dcraw permits it, and Dave Coffin is pretty proud of that. He should be- his code is used worldwide by millions of photographers.
Google around, bud. You can find dozens of articles, as well as Dave's resume, talking about this. He lists the dozens of programs which use dcraw, too, on the dcraw homepage.
Raw Therapee is a frontend to DCraw, which has been around for at least 5 years.
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
The challenge isn't demosaicing the images, nor is there a need for the user to have control over it, assuming it works properly. It's reading the file format; Nikon encrypts theirs, and everyone else changes their formats seemingly with every new model/model year. Makes for an annoying moving target for most of the programs which support raw images, and the entire reason Adobe created an open raw image format, which few companies have moved to support.
On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington..."
What would have been more interesting would have been including data on how many semesters people had been on campus. I strongly suspect that freshmen would be more likely to notice the guy on the unicycle, and seniors to ignore him.
College is where every flamboyant moron "expresses" himself/herself, so you get used to seeing unusual things. A unicycle is pretty normal for a clown- and a clown isn't that unusual for a college campus.
So in a dark underpass, they cover a guy completely in a dark suit, and in a video the size of a postage stamp, it's supposed to be a surprise you don't see him?
Then they just come back an hour with a motion of discovery, the constable, and 3 deputies.
And the problem is what, exactly? That's exactly what they SHOULD have to do.
The reason the BSA shows up unannounced is because they're fishing, and hoping to get enough to THEN either threaten you or take you to court. There is no possible good to come, and nothing that will work in your favor, by granting them access.
They've already decided that it's not worth the cost of filing a suit, and in order to get anywhere, they need to have evidence, which they may not have in sufficient quantity. A pissed off sysadmin with a bone to pick is about as credible as a fox in a chicken coop.
The company that says "go fish, assholes" MIGHT see them again with a court order in hand, but it's not likely. The company that says "uuuuuh....okay, come on in" finds themselves in a few weeks threatened with a huge lawsuit, or a "settlement" calculated to be just below what the company could possibly afford...
What right would that be, exactly? If they're not law enforcement, and they don't have a court order, they have zero "rights." Yes, even if they show up wearing fancy raid jackets to try and look like law enforcement.
I've posted this several times before. If the BSA or any of these other vultures come knocking, they have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING, SEE ANYTHING, TALK TO ANYONE, etc WITHOUT A COURT ORDER. If they have one, that means you're already in the process of being sued, and the first person you should call is your lawyer, and you should ONLY do EXACTLY what the court order requires you to.
Here's the Superbanana Super Guide To BSA Bullshit Shutdown.
Your receptionist and anyone else that is near the front door should keep them as far out of the building as possible, at a minimum the reception area. Block their path. If they even so much as poke your check with a finger, call the police immediately. Maybe even call the police, preemptively ("Hi, 911? Some people in raid jackets showed up at our business, they're not police, but they seem to be pretending like they are. There's a lot of them, we think they might be trying to rob us or something.") At a company where I worked, we had a silent alarm button at the reception desk.
Send someone to find the most senior person in the company, preferably an officer (CEO, CFO, President, etc.) They do all the talking. That talking should consist almost entirely of "Who are you" (where your attorney will send a very nasty letter to). "Do you have a court order?" (No.) "Get off our property, you're trespassing."
If the "auditors" refuse to leave, get physical, or try to connect to the network or start poking around, call the police immediately.
If they don't have a court order, don't let them see anything, touch anything, install anything, connect anything. Don't answer any questions. The only information you should give them is your attorney's phone number.
This isn't an issue with early adopters. It's an issue with Google selling a product and then being shocked and amazed that people have questions and problems. It's an issue with Google having a culture from the search engine world of holding the customer off not at arm's length, but at continent's length.
Before they could hide behind the carrier, which had the infrastructure for this sort of thing. With their online products, nobody was really paying for anything, or if they were, they were B2B-type customers.
This is a consumer product, and the cardinal rule of consumer products is that you stand behind what you sell, or you won't be selling it for long. There's another cardinal rule, which I read off a sign posted above the door of an industrial supply company: "For every customer that walks out this door angry, ten never walk in it."
Unfortunately, Google is failing to remember something critical: screwing over people with the "Google Phone" they just bought means devaluing their brand name, which is their biggest asset- those people are more receptive to switching to different alternative products (mail, search, etc.) and also, they're going to post about their problems on Facebook, Twitter, etc. One negative status message kills thousands of dollars in advertising.
To me, the API stuff is just further proof that Google has committed the Apple Of The 90's Sin: they're now into everything, and doing nothing well. This is a problem that should sound familiar for other reasons *cough*Microsoft*cough*.
Slashdot Mirror
VLF systems have been in use for decades to communicate with the US Submarine fleet, not because of interference, but because it passes through just about everything and has a very, very wide propagation. Unfortunately, the power levels are so high that people wonder/suspect it's causing nature / health problems for nearby residents.
I mean for fucks' sakes, this stuff was in use by the German navy during WW2- 70 years ago. All this kid did was apply the obvious, and apparently, it's so obvious, someone thought of it 40 years ago. More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency
Also, the kid didn't implement any sort of retransmission or error correction. That makes it pretty useless for both emergencies (imagine: "person has 3 hours to live" instead of "30 hours") and scientific data collection. It's also pretty standard these days.
Either this patent is for a technology Google had figured out a long time ago
Ding ding ding. Google's been using the technology for a while; they just filed for the application.
You don't have to file for a patent the second you invent something. In fact, you usually want to wait as long as possible before the final steps. You get your foot in the door by filing some paperwork with the patent attorney, notarizing documents showing the invention, etc. etc.
First, it's pretty fucking funny that you're using a fictional TV show to argue a point. Anyway:
There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
Uh, actually, since that money went to going to the moon, it didn't go to renewable energy research, education, etc. Fun fact: the percentage of kids in the United States who don't get enough to eat has climbed steadily since the 60's. Right now it's around 13-14 million kids each year.
So yes, there are a lot of people who are dumber and colder and hungrier because of all the money flushed down the drain into what is little more than nationalism in the name of science.
Don't you think we have certain societal obligations before we flush hundreds of trillions of dollars down the drain putting a couple of guys in a tin can above the earth for the world's most expensive dog and pony show?
Newsflash, folks: politicians, even JFK, don't give a flying fuck about scientific exploration. They care about getting their agendas through and re-elected. Kennedy did what he did because if he hadn't, the anti-communists would have had a field day.
Maybe if we'd spent the money on renewable energy technology, we wouldn't be spewing so much pollution into the air to generate power and heat, wouldn't need to fight two wars in Iraq, etc. If our homes were generating their own power and more efficient, imagine what we could do with all that money not being wasted on a complex power grid? Hmm, maybe go into space?
At some point Scudder and his followers will be out and humanity will go to the stars again.
Let me fix that for you: "a dozen or two highly educated, mostly-military people will go into orbit again. And a couple of billionaires".
Just FYI, we've been doing the people-in-space thing for fifty years. Haven't learned much for the trillions of dollars we've blown out the airlock.
by acting, dressing, and thinking like every other hippie.
You clearly were not paying attention; they dressed in a similar STYLE, but there was wide variation. They WERE free-thinking and individualistic compared to the people who went into work wearing the same color shirts (usually white), ties, hats, shoes, slacks, jackets. Streets of major cities at rush hour at the time were a sea of men dressed the same.
Also: anyone who claims Apple has an inside culture of creativity and free thinking is full of shit. A few idea people bring ideas to the top, and everyone else is told exactly how to implement things, with strict parameters. It's one reason a friend of mine left- he spent several years working on Apple's flagship software components and hardware, but had no say in anything. Now he makes less money but at a smaller company, where he also felt his input would matter.
Another culture shift at Apple: remember when there were credits? No more. Apple now refuses to recognize to the public the contributions its employees make, except for 2-3 top-level people. Jobs, Ive, etc.
Both the top-down ideas and refusal to recognize employee work are cashing in short-term profits for long-term stability. I wouldn't invest in Apple long-term if you paid me to; the day Steve Jobs or Ive retire, get hit by a bus, or just drop dead- Apple stock will crumble because everyone is under the perception (correctly) that they are the driving force.
When your brand is as much your top level executives as your products, you have a big problem down the road.
- I have done thousands of operations and never a wrong-side operation. It is something that is taken *extremely* seriously, and we have at least three checks that guard against this. With over a billion procedures done per year, yes, there will be many that make the news, not unlike planes taking off on the wrong runway, etc., etc.
And yet, despite all those checks, surgeons still fuck it up. And of course, why were all those checks necessary in the first place? Answer: incompetent, arrogant surgeons/doctors. You make it out like it's a rarity. http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=surgery+"wrong+side+of+the"
*Golf clap*. You just justified something completely moronic (operating on the wrong part of the patient) by saying that because it's done so many times, we should excuse the "few" idiots.
I don't care how many fucking operations you do. The surgeon should be aware of the patient's history to the extent that something as unbelievably simple as "which side am I operating on" should not be possible. How can they possibly treat/operate effectively if they can't even get something that simple done?
The post has a core of truth, but like all Slashdot-postings the "It's so simple I could just figure it out and do better" high-school naivety predominates.
It IS SO SIMPLE. Fire and criminally prosecute doctors, nurses, and surgeons who injure or kill patients through their incompetence. Watch as the medical profession suddenly becomes more interested in competence, safety, etc- and not just exploiting med students. If patient safety is so important, why are med students run through a meat grinder? What a bunch of macho bullshit to claim it's to "test" them. When I'm seen by a med student who is operating on 3 hours of sleep over the last 48 hours, I'm not going to get anything remotely approaching a level of decent care.
By the way, take that ad hominem and cram it up your ass; I never applied for med school. Zero interest.
Yeah, the nurse should have installed it, and she fucked up. However, it is a basic fact of humans that all of them fuck up from time to time, some more than others, and more under some conditions than others. Unless that particular nurse has an atypically bad record for forgetting, it is unlikely that firing her will improve the quality of the system as a whole very much. Instead, such safety critical systems should be designed to take human error into account. Routine use of checklists, for instance, has been demonstrated to reduce human error.
When the failure could or WILL result in the patient dying, that nurse is aware of the consequences and should take whatever steps THEY feel is necessary to make sure THEY get it done.
It's not society's place to shepherd those who hold the lives of others in their hands. If you can't recognize the importance of something and make sure you follow proper procedure, you're undeserving of the job.
This appears in textbooks. Problems like this shouldn't still be happening.
They happen because the entire medical system is flawed; look at where many of the errors occurred. They had nothing to do with software. If the radiation shield/guide isn't installed, that's not the software's fault. Don't blame human problems on technical things, and don't solve human problems with technical solutions. If a nurse forgets to put a radiation shield in place, FIRE THEIR ASS.
How flawed is the medical system in the US?
These are people who are some of the most highly paid people in society, who have taken an oath (which the are happy to get uppity about whenever it serves them.) When they fuck up, their malpractice insurance covers the lawsuit. And then the doctors turn around and bitch at us about how expensive it is to be a doctor, mostly because of their insane malpractice insurance.
Did I mention that everyone goes into obscure specialties, meaning that if you want a Toe Oncologist, you can see one in a few days, but you've got to wait weeks in most major cities for a general practitioner...who just so happens to be the only person who can approve your care if you're on an HMO?
Your wireless account has nothing to do with network quality. Secondly, you have illegally voided your contract, ruling you out from any legitimate apples to apples comparison.
Yeah, that's it, I meant that my account affected network quality and I'm a complete moron, hey did you know that planes fly because angels push up on the wings?
Or I could have been saying that, gosh, I've been a customer for almost A FUCKING DECADE and haven't noticed any major problems compared to all the emotechtards that bought iPhones and expect to magically be able to place (and continue) a telephone call anywhere on the planet.
So you're saying that between New England and NYC, your user report has been that more people that you have seen have been complaining in NYC than New England. Again, not a great statistical analysis which networks truly need.
http://www.google.com/search?q=NYC+iphone
Idiot.
NEWS FLASH: New England is a sparsely populated area, and EVERY carrier has about the same coverage- many of them are on the same fucking physical tower. Also, if you place your phone in a cradle or use a bluetooth handset and put the phone on the seat or the center armrest, it shields it quite a bit from the car. There are also car windshield heaters and aftermarket tint that is murder on RF.
Do what my father did: buy an RF amplifier/booster with a rooftop antenna. It works great with any phone- there is a transceiver that faces the backplate of the phone. As long as I could get ANY signal without it, putting the iPhone in the cradle gave me almost 5 bars- and in areas where there was no service, I'd often get plenty to make a phone call. In both cases, crystal-clear calls with no cutouts in the conversation, instant reception of text messages, etc.
The iPhone itself doesn't really handle the switch from 3G to EDGE very gracefully, so calls that are in-progress tend to fail whenever 3G connections aren't optimal and the phone attempts to step down to EDGE.
Given that carriers test phones on networks, it would not be the least surprising to learn that AT&T technical staff evaluated the iPhone (or already had experience with the 'modem' it uses), told management about the problems, and management decided what was more important was the couple of years of revenue from people who wanted iPhones regardless of the network.
I've been a customer of AT&T since the "AT&T wireless" days (pre AT&T, pre "cingular", etc.) and I can count the number of dropped calls on one hand. I currently have an original iPhone, jailbroken/unlocked, on a very old AT&T Wireless account. $30/month for a regional plan = awesome (as is having one device to surf the web where I can get Wifi, play games, listen to music, and make phone calls.)
Living in New England, I also haven't heard many complaints from 3G iPhone users. Seems to be mostly NYC where people are screaming (yes kids, NY and NYC are not "New England.")
"Digital River understands that small business owners need that cash immediately," explains David Heath, CEO of Matrix Games, a computer game company that has worked with Digital River for three years.
Funny, Digital River never paid the company I worked at...at all. They sold hundreds of copies of the software, and didn't send our company a fucking dime. Ever.
Got so bad, word had to be spread via online forums, usergroups, and dealers that DR wasn't paying the company, and nobody should do business with them.
It's pretty normal for support personnel to have access to production systems in order to provide support.
On Facebook? What support?
The problem is, will Nokia keep on updating their free directions? Generally, when you have a large company that seems to be losing money and marketshare left and right they will release a lot of paid things for free in order to not have to update them or maintain them as much as a paid product.
I think this is being done for two reasons:
1)Everyone else is doing it. 2)It makes it more difficult to legislate using phone while driving illegal. Customers (voters) will be pissed if they're used to using their phone to navigate, and suddenly they can't use their phone while driving.
While you're right about this, of course, the problem is compounded with combustion engines because with altitude the thinner air means less oxygen to burn fuel with
No kidding; I don't deny this. But the article doesn't say that it has a higher ceiling; it says: "It has no flight ceiling."
That is utter bullshit!
since the engine is electric it has no flight ceiling and can fly up to 9,150 meters high, uninhibited by thin air
Seriously, who who wrote this? Thin air = less air for the props to bite, and less air to provide lift for the wings.
And who calls an electric motor an "engine"? Gaaaah. If this were Wired, I'd be more forgiving on both counts- but this is Scientific American!
It's not commonly known because it is just plain wrong. Photoshop and Lightroom use Adobe Camera RAW.
Adobe Camera Raw, as well as most of the other commercial software which decodes raw images, used dcraw source and probably still uses much of that code. The license for dcraw permits it, and Dave Coffin is pretty proud of that. He should be- his code is used worldwide by millions of photographers.
Google around, bud. You can find dozens of articles, as well as Dave's resume, talking about this. He lists the dozens of programs which use dcraw, too, on the dcraw homepage.
Raw Therapee is a frontend to DCraw, which has been around for at least 5 years.
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
The challenge isn't demosaicing the images, nor is there a need for the user to have control over it, assuming it works properly. It's reading the file format; Nikon encrypts theirs, and everyone else changes their formats seemingly with every new model/model year. Makes for an annoying moving target for most of the programs which support raw images, and the entire reason Adobe created an open raw image format, which few companies have moved to support.
On the other hand, when asked 'Did you see anything unusual?' only about one person in three mentioned a unicycling clown. So maybe unicycling clowns aren't enough of a distraction at the University of Western Washington..."
What would have been more interesting would have been including data on how many semesters people had been on campus. I strongly suspect that freshmen would be more likely to notice the guy on the unicycle, and seniors to ignore him.
College is where every flamboyant moron "expresses" himself/herself, so you get used to seeing unusual things. A unicycle is pretty normal for a clown- and a clown isn't that unusual for a college campus.
So in a dark underpass, they cover a guy completely in a dark suit, and in a video the size of a postage stamp, it's supposed to be a surprise you don't see him?
That's camouflage, not "awareness".
Check if you're in a glass house first.
I believe this particular patent image illustrates what I'm wondering about [google.com] (Roger Hajjar is one of Prysm's founders).
So let me get this straight- they've patented a design that's already used for laser shows, CRTs, and thousands of persistence of vision devices?
Then they just come back an hour with a motion of discovery, the constable, and 3 deputies.
And the problem is what, exactly? That's exactly what they SHOULD have to do.
The reason the BSA shows up unannounced is because they're fishing, and hoping to get enough to THEN either threaten you or take you to court. There is no possible good to come, and nothing that will work in your favor, by granting them access.
They've already decided that it's not worth the cost of filing a suit, and in order to get anywhere, they need to have evidence, which they may not have in sufficient quantity. A pissed off sysadmin with a bone to pick is about as credible as a fox in a chicken coop.
The company that says "go fish, assholes" MIGHT see them again with a court order in hand, but it's not likely. The company that says "uuuuuh....okay, come on in" finds themselves in a few weeks threatened with a huge lawsuit, or a "settlement" calculated to be just below what the company could possibly afford...
They may be within their rights,
What right would that be, exactly? If they're not law enforcement, and they don't have a court order, they have zero "rights." Yes, even if they show up wearing fancy raid jackets to try and look like law enforcement.
I've posted this several times before. If the BSA or any of these other vultures come knocking, they have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING, SEE ANYTHING, TALK TO ANYONE, etc WITHOUT A COURT ORDER. If they have one, that means you're already in the process of being sued, and the first person you should call is your lawyer, and you should ONLY do EXACTLY what the court order requires you to.
Here's the Superbanana Super Guide To BSA Bullshit Shutdown.
If they don't have a court order, don't let them see anything, touch anything, install anything, connect anything. Don't answer any questions. The only information you should give them is your attorney's phone number.
This isn't an issue with early adopters. It's an issue with Google selling a product and then being shocked and amazed that people have questions and problems. It's an issue with Google having a culture from the search engine world of holding the customer off not at arm's length, but at continent's length.
Before they could hide behind the carrier, which had the infrastructure for this sort of thing. With their online products, nobody was really paying for anything, or if they were, they were B2B-type customers.
This is a consumer product, and the cardinal rule of consumer products is that you stand behind what you sell, or you won't be selling it for long. There's another cardinal rule, which I read off a sign posted above the door of an industrial supply company: "For every customer that walks out this door angry, ten never walk in it."
Unfortunately, Google is failing to remember something critical: screwing over people with the "Google Phone" they just bought means devaluing their brand name, which is their biggest asset- those people are more receptive to switching to different alternative products (mail, search, etc.) and also, they're going to post about their problems on Facebook, Twitter, etc. One negative status message kills thousands of dollars in advertising.
To me, the API stuff is just further proof that Google has committed the Apple Of The 90's Sin: they're now into everything, and doing nothing well. This is a problem that should sound familiar for other reasons *cough*Microsoft*cough*.