Google will simply prioritize bandwidth of its services to IP blocks by **revenue**. When your ISP's revenue numbers plummet, so does the bandwidth / latency for your ISP's network. As ISPs are rated by customers for providing service, this will lead to competitors that are more neutral to be preferred among customers. Imagine the scenario of two strangers on a bus, one of which using ISP A seems to have an outage with Google Maps or News or Mail or YouTube because his service filters content and Google restricts bandwidth or adds noticeable latency as a result. The other uses ISP B and they have _fast_ access to all of Google's services. Both customers pay their ISPs. Which ISP serves their customers better?
Suppose that that's not enough to get the attention of ISP A - suppose the added latency / limited bandwidth difference doesn't cause customers to call the ISPs customer service hotlines over and over again complaining about performance of YouTube and Gmail and Maps, etc. Google could then add a warning message to its services: "ISP A is filtering your access to Google services. We recommend you find another carrier that does not filter your service. Here is a list of ISPs in your area sorted by Google's performance measurements: ISP B - XXX GB/s, xxx ms avg latency, ISP C - YYY GB/s, yyy ms avg latency, ISP D - ZZZ GB/s, zzz ms avg latency."
Netflix didn't have the balls to do that, but Google probably does. Granted, it's not the first measure that I would expect Google to use. They do after all have lawyers. I don't think we'll get to that point. There's probably an opportunity for Google to make business deals with competitor ISP B to carry traffic better _and_ advertise to ISP A customers for a profit, so even if ISP A and C ran afoul of Google by taking that approach, you could bet that ISP B would see the opportunity to snatch customers. The difference between the Mobile carriers and the US cable and phone ISPs is that the mobile carriers overlap far more and actually have competition.
A perverse part of me wants to see some of this actually happen in reality...
What happens to a GPS device if you wrap aluminum foil around it? Does the metal make a Faraday Cage? What about mesh? For that matter, how about pants with metal mesh integrated into them?
Missing from the summary is that not only are they documenting the exploit in detail, but they are also providing a hack to patch the hole.
The point of releasing this "Five day exploit" which has been vulnerable for 9 years now (XP was released in 2001) is to point out that Microsoft needs to do a better job responding to security threats and that the closed source model is less robust to these kinds of threats. Had this been open source, they could have simply issued a patch to a mailing list to close the hole.
No compiled software is safe from someone with the means and the motivation to modify it. Having the source code does not make it any easier or harder to exploit, but it does make it easier to patch exploits and allows for more people to examine the code for exploits.
I went to the National HPC conference about 2 weeks ago. Read this abstract of this talk. The director of the research lab in Rome, NY with all the PS3's stated that the new slim PS3 won't support Linux and answered your question - selling Linux boxes lowers the attach rate, so they are looking at other options.
I was representing one of the vendors at the show, and he stopped by our booth and asked a bunch of questions about the hardware we had on display. The AF doesn't mess around. If game hardware has cutting edge performance, they use it.:^)
GPUs are some of the most interesting devices to code for - most people write programs for one core, where a thread is a big heavy weight thing. In GPUs, threads are your basic unit of computation, and the world is upside down. Want to make a loop 100X faster - in some cases you can do it by creating more threads and synchronizing them with a barrier to keep threads going. Don't hold onto calculations for long - recomputing them can be order of 50X faster vs making a lookup to global memory and recomputing frees up the registers so you have less register pressure/can get more threads executing simultaneously. Between the ATI Cypress (1600 cores) and the new GF100 based chips (448-512 cores), writing code that runs on these devices makes C++ seem like child's play.
This approach allows one to start with a FULL FILLUP at ground level, and likely achieve much greater altitude than the apparently current scenario of having to operate between the static boundaries of "just enough" fill to ascend at start, and "pop pressure" at what is stated to be about 20 miles up. I'm not a physicist insofar as lift calcs, but common sense would seem to dictate that the pressure relief setup could yield MUCH higher apogees?
Maybe it could go higher, but wouldn't this setup also prevent the balloon from popping? So the baloon would still be inflated, and it would reach a certain altitude and at some point it would be buoyant. It could stay at that altitude for a long, long time. At some point, you need to pop the balloon.
Maybe you could get higher if you used 2 balloons and inflated each of them to less PSI so that they would have less force to pop them. I have to wonder though, at some point, the lack of atmosphere kicks in... It would seem to be an interesting launch strategy for a light-weight space ship, though -- use a balloon to lift it to altitude, and then launch the ship.
Your description is confusing the browser trying to resolve your broken DNS request with an ISP hijacking your DNS request.
Primarily, when I'm on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, if I type 'amazon', firefox first checks if I have an amazon in my searchdomain (ie: amazon.example.com)
No. When you're on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, amazon resolves to a 'service' provided by your ISP even though it's not a registered domain.
, and if not, it tries adding a.com, then a www. and a.com...
What you mean is that if your ISP's DNS service works correctly and tells you that amazon.com doesn't exist, your web browser (Firefox in this case) has some heuristic for trying other DNS queries in an attempt to help you, and when those queries are exhausted it takes you to a search engine.
if the ISP is hijacking it, I get an answer to 'amazon' with the hijacked page. This means that I have to type the.com every time.
Which is what you should have written first.
So you have to type.com when you mean amazon.com. Yeah, that's like saying that I have to write Plymouth, MA next to 02364 on my address. The postal service is run by people, and usually, they can figure it out, but if the address is wrong, it's your fault, even if they helpfully fix it for you.
with a browser doing the same thing, I could be trying to connect to my primary server (wolverine) and if I mistype the webaddress, it redirects me to bing, changing my URL bar to the bing URL which means that when I've typed 'wolverine/some/really/long/path?with=variables' I have to go type that whole thing over again to correct it rather than just fixing it in the addressbar.
So turn off the feature which searches with the default search engine when your DNS query fails.
If you want to bypass DNS for your machines, put your own entries in your "/etc/hosts file" (%WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows). Also, you can run your own DNS service locally.
so, hijacking the DNS is a BITCH and is totally annoying all the time.
Only if you aren't technically savvy enough to use a web browser. After you type amazon.com in once into IE or Firefox or Chrome these days, the autocompletion helpers from your recent history usually have enough context that shift+enter (in IE anyway, not sure about the others) takes you where you want to go.
The real problem with DNS servers hijacking broken requests is that they lie to network tools, not just web browsers. This can cause serious problems. DNS is used for more than just HTTP.
If the iPod/iPhone software doesn't play this new music industry format then why should we care? Yet another file format - where's the value in it? There's value in making a competitor to iTMS that cuts out Apple from the profit stream and works with other devices (iPod, iPhone, Zune, Sansa, etc) and other phones. The value there is cutting out the middle man - make songs cheaper, and give more profit to the artists.
Everything else is just simply uninteresting. If the music industry wants my money, it has to offer me something I want. Reinventing the wheel on an ASX or PLS file format is not it. Both of these playlist file formats are just lists of filenames/URLs.
It's unsurprising that Bing would reflect a Microsoft centric view - Microsoft employees wrote it and Microsoft employees were the first to test its algorithms. It probably was seeded on Microsoft sites and MS content probably gets extra positive modifiers, including things like Microsoft's MSDN, Blogs, etc. Google has been working with a lot more shares of the search engine pool and for a longer time, so theoretically, they are able to refine their processes for indexing and searching better. Also, it's 80-90% of Google's business, whereas Microsoft has several other business units making money.
Microsoft going after Ad revenue has more avenues such as XBox 360 and Zune HD and Windows Mobile and Hotmail and MSN also it has partnerships with Yahoo and Facebook. Google has YouTube and GMail and Google Apps and it has the AdSense platform and Blogger and Orkut.
Microsoft does have more resources. Obviously, the results will reflect what Microsoft spends its resources on, and Microsoft has indicated publicly that this is an area it will continue to invest resources on until it wins, and it apparently is winning market share at the moment.
Let me know when the government bans all forms of communication...
Until then, the problem with secret information is always going to be a matter of trusting the people who you share the secret. Secret service routes and secret emergency locations are secret for a reason, but this kind of breach of security is not due to the technology used to leek it, but rather due to the people who leaked it.
Rather than going after P2P technology, the government should be looking into who leaked this information and making it easier to discover and prove who leaked it, and then put them in front of a firing squad.
And any members of congress looking at technology tools and thinking that the tools did the sharing and not the people using them are themselves tools of an uneducated public. We need a better education system, but we're not going to get one by electing uninformed politicians whose only issue is whether women have a right to emergency procedures if they involve the termination of a pregnancy. Running for the US government is a popularity contest, and once people make it there, the job becomes lining ones pocket through lobbying.
Sure, I may be over dramatizing to make a point... Did you expect anything less on Slashdot?:)
The only reason I can see for buying an Apple product is that they have excellent marketing. They do a fantastic job of luring in the mindless masses who don't have the wherewithal to actually think through the consequences of their purchases. When I buy something I want to control it.
When I buy something, I want it to *work*, and I want to *use* it.
Microsoft's XBox 360 console for example is a great device, and although I'd like to be able to run arbitrary software on it, unless I can break it, it's only going to run stuff approved by Microsoft. That being said, I think the device is powerful, the games are fun, and the arcade offers lots of choices of HD content. The price is reasonable, and if I want to program the device, there's the XNA Creators club. The Nintendo Wii has some titles that I love. I have both systems. I also have a DS and a GBA and a PSP. Each of them have fun games.
The Apple OS is based on BSD, and it is programmable, and so is the iPhone. You can pay Apple or just jailbreak it. Windows isn't free, and it can be easily compromised without anti-virus/anti-malware software unless you are careful and lucky. Android and the Palm Pre are based on Linux, but I like the iPhone. For a phone based on WebKit, the iPhone's web browser and integration into the UI just feels better to me. And the 65,000 apps in the app store head start that Apple has vs the Pre is a no brainer as a developer.
Apple playing traffic cop is a reality of publishing to the device. However, having an entity limiting the apps that get allowed into the store can act as a "quality bar" - maybe Apple rejects x% of apps on any given submission, but those rejections have the potential to make it so that only "higher quality" apps make it into the store.
I do disagree with the notion of duplication of software that already exists within the device. My iPhone 3G can record video. Cydia unlocked an app called Cycorder which can do that. It's not as high quality as the 3GS, and the app can't edit the video (another app can upload it to youtube). But on the whole, I like being able to record video with my 3G. Even if Apple's future product plans include that feature. I say that someone like Google should have made a patent on searching via voice and then sued Apple or had a contract in writing. I don't know, maybe if Google suddenly removed Maps and Google search access from all iPhones in retaliation, Apple would take a beating from its customers... It's not going to happen, though. If Steve Jobs's iPhone stopped searching the web and stopped getting Google maps, it would be funny.
You're confusing choice with freedom. We are primarily free-software supporters. The software the driver is written for is non-free by any FOSS supporter's standards (weather from free or open camp). There is no benefit regarding the user's freedom (as defined by 4 freedoms - use, copy, study, modify+redistribute) in including the above in the kernel.
I call BS. There is benefit to the user for all 4 freedoms. It's source code. It's useful.
Just because the driver works with something which is not free/open does not mean the driver itself is not free/open. By your logic, *all* device drivers in Linux are not free, and don't provide benefit. So you shouldn't buy a proprietary CPU, motherboard, RAM, GPU, etc...
If Linus rejected code that supported proprietary hardware or proprietary software he would be a hypocrite. Linus is a pragmatic person - he values the contributions of code which will add value to Linux. Device drivers that make Linux run better under VMs on Windows are valuable. For example, I recently installed Ubuntu under Virtual PC on my PC. It would be great if that experience were better. I'm selfish. VirtualPC is a free download. My laptop came with Windows. I want to run Ubuntu under a VM with better support. I don't care *who* adds the code. I care that it adds value to my experience.
What happens when you forget about the hack that you put something highly combustible in your device and try and take said device through the airport TSA checkpoint? I suppose if the answer is that the theif takes said device through TSA checkpoint then it's funny, but what if the theif sells the device to some unsuspecting victim?
Setting up a netbook to be a bomb is not just a bad idea, but it's likely to be illegal in many ways.
A good idea might be to put a keylogger which uploads to a web site into the netbook. Get your theif to give you their passwords and information, then use that information against them.
Batteries suck. There have been many times when batteries would be "10 times" more better than some previous generation. But they never are. Batteries would only be good if cellular phone could run at least a MONTH on them.
Seriously? A month? How about a solar cell that makes you not have to plug in your cell phone ever, or a motion generator that uses your movement to charge the phone?
Part of the battery life problem isn't the battery - it's the efficiency of the device being powered. If we can reduce the current/power consumption of phones by a factor of 3, and improve the capacity of the battery by a factor of 3 then we have a 9 times better story. That's realistic to expect by 2020.
Devices like the Amazon Kindle have huge power savings compared to laptops because the screen device isn't active. Once we get write ability (like a magnetic pen or maybe capacative touch) added to that kind of device, we will be well on the way to achieving "paper" computers. The prices on these new technologies will drop as they mature and economies of scale kick in. You can bet that the competition in the market place for cheaper and lower powered devices will bear fruit.
Your motivation to work on something has to come from within. That being said, if you are in a depressed mood (understandable in these times), then you are less likely to be productive. I suggest going out for a run, getting your blood pumping, etc. Sometimes caffeine helps. Music helps. Minimizing distractions helps - web browser, cell phone, etc.
One thing you can do if you want motivation is to reward completing the boring or hard tasks with easier, more fun tasks. Mix up the hard problems you have to solve with minor annoyances. That way, if you can't concentrate on a hard problem, you can at least make some progress. Making progress is the way to get through the doldrums.
Go to bed early, next to a window facing East. Wake up in sunlight.
You might also take the approach that video games do - track the work you do. Reward yourself for making milestones.
Next, they will sue any device capable of making sounds in public. Phones are just the beginning, how about iPods, car makers, "boom box" (portable stereo system) makers. While I'd love it if the guys blasting their audio in their car would stop the noise pollution when I'm in their vacinity, I don't think suing them for publicly performing a copywritten work will effect change... And I don't think AT&T is to blame here.
Copyright is a temporary monopoly given to content creators on their works so that they can earn money without being ripped off. It is not intended to be used to stranglehold any company making a device which can play a sound to pay an extortion fee to a group representing content creators.
I bought an iPhone this weekend - it was my father's day gift from my wife. AT&T needed my driver's license, SS#, and payment.
It was what they required to make the purchase, so that's the information I gave them. I didn't think anything of it other than that it took a while. But in the end, I had a new internet utility that doubled as a phone and an iPod, and I love it. It's a great gadget.
You may lament that they require your SS#, but it's the people like me who simply don't care for the hassle that make it hard for the people like you.
I answered the phones and staffed the front desk at the student help desk when I was in college. It was the best paid student job on campus - $10 per hour your first semester, and a lot of the time you weren't busy and could surf the net or do your homework. There were a few other Computer Science majors there with me, and we got to help out all levels of student, faculty, and staff with their problems. What I took away from that job is not that I dislike working in the service industry, but rather, that there were certain universal truths about end users that I couldn't learn about anywhere else.
The help desk is your opportunity to study the areas where computers and human interactions break down. Learning computer skills in some high level language like Java or C# while working at the help desk is a way to advance your career. Start out with a book, but have goals in mind. Computer Science education is all about leading you to the water. Buy or borrow a few good books, classic computer science texts, etc. Work through the examples and do the exercises when you're not on the phones.
Most importantly, design some UI on paper (I like graph paper for this because you draw a lot of boxes in designing UI). Figure out what you *want* the program to do when you click the buttons. Then use a free program like ant or Visual C# Express and build the UI. Take apart the generated code. Look at it. Study it. Solve a problem that is interesting to you. Do it for fun. If you don't enjoy making programs, then Computer Science is simply not for you. There are plenty of people in CS departments who are very smart and study very hard, but their heart is just not in it. You can tell because they stop writing software when the day is done.
If you want to practice on Linux and you have Windows, you can download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (free) or VMWare player (also free) and install Ubuntu on a virtual drive. Put that virtual drive on a USB key chain or iPod, and you have a mobile development platform that you can take home. The internet is full of human knowledge on the subject of Computer Science and other computer topics. A degree from a reputable college or university is not necessarily a requirement.
But you need to prove to most engineering firms that you have what it takes, and the best paying jobs ($75K+ benefits) usually require solid interviewing and development demonstrations with someone who has 5 to 25 years of development experience and typically a Bachelors or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Math, Physics, or something equally challenging. A degree won't get you in the door though. We see tons of people straight out of college with their Sc.B. degree who can't solve a problem involving a linked list, binary search on an array, binary search tree, hash table, dealing with memory management, and many other problems you need to be able to solve on your own as an engineer.
I started writing code sometime around the age of 6 in the early 80's because I wanted to make a game. I ended up discovering that game writing is interesting, but what I love to write are tools that interact with pixels and musical notes. Software engineering can be grueling work. In my best weeks, I write hundreds of lines of code. In my worst weeks, I spend long hours debugging and poking and proding and pulling out all the tricks, but get no closer to solving a bug which eventually is found to be something trivial in another part of the code. Highs are higher than in technical support, but lows are awfully low, too.
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie is the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as the person who drives Microsoft's technological decisions.
Live Mesh is Ray's brainchild. Why is it important to listen to what Ray says? Because he directs the future of Microsoft's development in the space. He controls billions of Microsoft dollars. The point is that he's not some random Microsoft shill - he's the guy in charge.
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
There's even more to it than that. The WebBrowser COM/.NET control is the IE control. Even if you manage to supplant IE as the browser of choice, all code which embeds the COM or.NET wrapped COM control depends on it. So for example, the Windows Shell and the help system, and Windows Update, Windows Media Player, third party apps integrating the system WebBrowser such as WinAmp, etc.
The Internet Explorer browser itself is really just a light weight set of UIs wrapped around the standard WebBrowser COM/ActiveX control. It's actually pretty fun to write.NET code that interacts with the WebBrowser. You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt).
Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry.
How on earth did that get past QA?
2.4.2.2 Text may appear slightly blurry
Text may appear slightly blurry. This can occur with any font, although different users may see different fonts as more or less blurred. MSGothic, the default font for Japanese system locales, is known to be more blurred than other fonts.
To resolve this issue:
We recommend that you keep the default fonts for Visual Studio, for example, Consolas for English SKUs of Visual Studio 2010. There is no alternative that is consistently sharper than MSGothic for Japanese characters, although some users find Meiryo more readable.
TrueType fonts are the least blurred of the non-default fonts. These fonts appear in bold in the font list on the Fonts and Colors page of the Options dialog box (Tools menu, Options, Environment, Fonts and Colors). The WPF and Visual Studio teams are working to improve font rendering in the text editor before the release of Visual Studio 2010.
You can also take a look at this white paper for more information on the issue.
The ClearType Tuner PowerToy can also help. If you are running Windows 7, it's built into the control panel.
"only informing the user of the existence of licensing terms if they scroll to the very bottom of the page doesn't make the terms binding"
Does it say anything about putting the "I agree" button at the bottom so that the user must scroll down through the text to agree?
I agree that sneaky licenses where you have to go out of your way to read the text you are agreeing to aren't enforceable, and I say that the appropriate remedy is for people to force you to scroll to the bottom before letting you continue.
When I purchase or refinance a house with a mortgage, I have to sign and/or initial somewhere on *every* page of the agreement.
Don't you need to send water to Mars to do this new test?
And just by sending these probes to Mars, don't we pretty much send a couple bacteria there, some of them theoretically can survive? What if we planted the life on Mars that we are looking to find? After all, the fact that we have successfully put down these robots onto the ground gently enough that they are sending back scientific evidence could be enough to ensure that any stow-away life was shielded from the effects of entering the atmosphere...
Maybe this is a good thing, though... Maybe we have ensured that life will take hold on Mars, should we nuke the earth into oblivion.
I like this story. See, I married into the family... Mr. Watson is my wife's great great grandfather. He left his family with an estate in New Hampshire which we go to every year and in this estate there are 2 telephones. An interesting family tradition in her branch of the family is to give the male children the middle name of Watson. Anyway, to place a call, you crank a generator which causes a bell to ring at the other end of the line, then the person at the other end of the line picks up and the call is connected.
Today we all have cell phones (and ironically, the cell phone reception isn't that great - verizon or AT&T - we brought an iPhone last summer to the estate, and it browsed the web painfully slowly - a 28K modem with AOL and all the ads would beat it), but how many people can say that they have talked on a phone made by hand by the inventor of the telephone in this day and age where cell phones can make video calls and store books and play video games and browse the web?
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Google will simply prioritize bandwidth of its services to IP blocks by **revenue**. When your ISP's revenue numbers plummet, so does the bandwidth / latency for your ISP's network. As ISPs are rated by customers for providing service, this will lead to competitors that are more neutral to be preferred among customers. Imagine the scenario of two strangers on a bus, one of which using ISP A seems to have an outage with Google Maps or News or Mail or YouTube because his service filters content and Google restricts bandwidth or adds noticeable latency as a result. The other uses ISP B and they have _fast_ access to all of Google's services. Both customers pay their ISPs. Which ISP serves their customers better?
Suppose that that's not enough to get the attention of ISP A - suppose the added latency / limited bandwidth difference doesn't cause customers to call the ISPs customer service hotlines over and over again complaining about performance of YouTube and Gmail and Maps, etc. Google could then add a warning message to its services: "ISP A is filtering your access to Google services. We recommend you find another carrier that does not filter your service. Here is a list of ISPs in your area sorted by Google's performance measurements: ISP B - XXX GB/s, xxx ms avg latency, ISP C - YYY GB/s, yyy ms avg latency, ISP D - ZZZ GB/s, zzz ms avg latency."
Netflix didn't have the balls to do that, but Google probably does. Granted, it's not the first measure that I would expect Google to use. They do after all have lawyers. I don't think we'll get to that point. There's probably an opportunity for Google to make business deals with competitor ISP B to carry traffic better _and_ advertise to ISP A customers for a profit, so even if ISP A and C ran afoul of Google by taking that approach, you could bet that ISP B would see the opportunity to snatch customers. The difference between the Mobile carriers and the US cable and phone ISPs is that the mobile carriers overlap far more and actually have competition.
A perverse part of me wants to see some of this actually happen in reality...
What happens to a GPS device if you wrap aluminum foil around it? Does the metal make a Faraday Cage? What about mesh? For that matter, how about pants with metal mesh integrated into them?
Missing from the summary is that not only are they documenting the exploit in detail, but they are also providing a hack to patch the hole.
The point of releasing this "Five day exploit" which has been vulnerable for 9 years now (XP was released in 2001) is to point out that Microsoft needs to do a better job responding to security threats and that the closed source model is less robust to these kinds of threats. Had this been open source, they could have simply issued a patch to a mailing list to close the hole.
No compiled software is safe from someone with the means and the motivation to modify it. Having the source code does not make it any easier or harder to exploit, but it does make it easier to patch exploits and allows for more people to examine the code for exploits.
I went to the National HPC conference about 2 weeks ago. Read this abstract of this talk. The director of the research lab in Rome, NY with all the PS3's stated that the new slim PS3 won't support Linux and answered your question - selling Linux boxes lowers the attach rate, so they are looking at other options.
I was representing one of the vendors at the show, and he stopped by our booth and asked a bunch of questions about the hardware we had on display. The AF doesn't mess around. If game hardware has cutting edge performance, they use it. :^)
GPUs are some of the most interesting devices to code for - most people write programs for one core, where a thread is a big heavy weight thing. In GPUs, threads are your basic unit of computation, and the world is upside down. Want to make a loop 100X faster - in some cases you can do it by creating more threads and synchronizing them with a barrier to keep threads going. Don't hold onto calculations for long - recomputing them can be order of 50X faster vs making a lookup to global memory and recomputing frees up the registers so you have less register pressure/can get more threads executing simultaneously. Between the ATI Cypress (1600 cores) and the new GF100 based chips (448-512 cores), writing code that runs on these devices makes C++ seem like child's play.
And the development environments are all V1.
This approach allows one to start with a FULL FILLUP at ground level, and likely achieve much greater altitude than the apparently current scenario of having to operate between the static boundaries of "just enough" fill to ascend at start, and "pop pressure" at what is stated to be about 20 miles up. I'm not a physicist insofar as lift calcs, but common sense would seem to dictate that the pressure relief setup could yield MUCH higher apogees?
Maybe it could go higher, but wouldn't this setup also prevent the balloon from popping? So the baloon would still be inflated, and it would reach a certain altitude and at some point it would be buoyant. It could stay at that altitude for a long, long time. At some point, you need to pop the balloon.
Maybe you could get higher if you used 2 balloons and inflated each of them to less PSI so that they would have less force to pop them. I have to wonder though, at some point, the lack of atmosphere kicks in... It would seem to be an interesting launch strategy for a light-weight space ship, though -- use a balloon to lift it to altitude, and then launch the ship.
Domain hijacking is a huge deal for me.
Your description is confusing the browser trying to resolve your broken DNS request with an ISP hijacking your DNS request.
Primarily, when I'm on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, if I type 'amazon', firefox first checks if I have an amazon in my searchdomain (ie: amazon.example.com)
No. When you're on an internet connection that's hijacking the domain, amazon resolves to a 'service' provided by your ISP even though it's not a registered domain.
, and if not, it tries adding a .com, then a www. and a .com...
What you mean is that if your ISP's DNS service works correctly and tells you that amazon.com doesn't exist, your web browser (Firefox in this case) has some heuristic for trying other DNS queries in an attempt to help you, and when those queries are exhausted it takes you to a search engine.
if the ISP is hijacking it, I get an answer to 'amazon' with the hijacked page. This means that I have to type the .com every time.
Which is what you should have written first.
So you have to type .com when you mean amazon.com. Yeah, that's like saying that I have to write Plymouth, MA next to 02364 on my address. The postal service is run by people, and usually, they can figure it out, but if the address is wrong, it's your fault, even if they helpfully fix it for you.
with a browser doing the same thing, I could be trying to connect to my primary server (wolverine) and if I mistype the webaddress, it redirects me to bing, changing my URL bar to the bing URL which means that when I've typed 'wolverine/some/really/long/path?with=variables' I have to go type that whole thing over again to correct it rather than just fixing it in the addressbar.
So turn off the feature which searches with the default search engine when your DNS query fails.
If you want to bypass DNS for your machines, put your own entries in your "/etc/hosts file" (%WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows). Also, you can run your own DNS service locally.
so, hijacking the DNS is a BITCH and is totally annoying all the time.
Only if you aren't technically savvy enough to use a web browser. After you type amazon.com in once into IE or Firefox or Chrome these days, the autocompletion helpers from your recent history usually have enough context that shift+enter (in IE anyway, not sure about the others) takes you where you want to go.
The real problem with DNS servers hijacking broken requests is that they lie to network tools, not just web browsers. This can cause serious problems. DNS is used for more than just HTTP.
If the iPod/iPhone software doesn't play this new music industry format then why should we care? Yet another file format - where's the value in it? There's value in making a competitor to iTMS that cuts out Apple from the profit stream and works with other devices (iPod, iPhone, Zune, Sansa, etc) and other phones. The value there is cutting out the middle man - make songs cheaper, and give more profit to the artists.
Everything else is just simply uninteresting. If the music industry wants my money, it has to offer me something I want. Reinventing the wheel on an ASX or PLS file format is not it. Both of these playlist file formats are just lists of filenames/URLs.
It's unsurprising that Bing would reflect a Microsoft centric view - Microsoft employees wrote it and Microsoft employees were the first to test its algorithms. It probably was seeded on Microsoft sites and MS content probably gets extra positive modifiers, including things like Microsoft's MSDN, Blogs, etc. Google has been working with a lot more shares of the search engine pool and for a longer time, so theoretically, they are able to refine their processes for indexing and searching better. Also, it's 80-90% of Google's business, whereas Microsoft has several other business units making money.
Microsoft going after Ad revenue has more avenues such as XBox 360 and Zune HD and Windows Mobile and Hotmail and MSN also it has partnerships with Yahoo and Facebook. Google has YouTube and GMail and Google Apps and it has the AdSense platform and Blogger and Orkut.
Microsoft does have more resources. Obviously, the results will reflect what Microsoft spends its resources on, and Microsoft has indicated publicly that this is an area it will continue to invest resources on until it wins, and it apparently is winning market share at the moment.
Microsoft information from http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=US:MSFT
Employees: 93,000
Last 12M Sales: $58.4B
Income: $14.6B
Google information from http://moneycentral.msn.com/companyreport?Symbol=US:GOOG
Employees: 19,786
Last 12M Sales: $22.3B
Income: $4.6B
Let me know when the government bans all forms of communication...
Until then, the problem with secret information is always going to be a matter of trusting the people who you share the secret. Secret service routes and secret emergency locations are secret for a reason, but this kind of breach of security is not due to the technology used to leek it, but rather due to the people who leaked it.
Rather than going after P2P technology, the government should be looking into who leaked this information and making it easier to discover and prove who leaked it, and then put them in front of a firing squad.
And any members of congress looking at technology tools and thinking that the tools did the sharing and not the people using them are themselves tools of an uneducated public. We need a better education system, but we're not going to get one by electing uninformed politicians whose only issue is whether women have a right to emergency procedures if they involve the termination of a pregnancy. Running for the US government is a popularity contest, and once people make it there, the job becomes lining ones pocket through lobbying.
Sure, I may be over dramatizing to make a point... Did you expect anything less on Slashdot? :)
The only reason I can see for buying an Apple product is that they have excellent marketing. They do a fantastic job of luring in the mindless masses who don't have the wherewithal to actually think through the consequences of their purchases. When I buy something I want to control it.
When I buy something, I want it to *work*, and I want to *use* it.
Microsoft's XBox 360 console for example is a great device, and although I'd like to be able to run arbitrary software on it, unless I can break it, it's only going to run stuff approved by Microsoft. That being said, I think the device is powerful, the games are fun, and the arcade offers lots of choices of HD content. The price is reasonable, and if I want to program the device, there's the XNA Creators club. The Nintendo Wii has some titles that I love. I have both systems. I also have a DS and a GBA and a PSP. Each of them have fun games.
The Apple OS is based on BSD, and it is programmable, and so is the iPhone. You can pay Apple or just jailbreak it. Windows isn't free, and it can be easily compromised without anti-virus/anti-malware software unless you are careful and lucky. Android and the Palm Pre are based on Linux, but I like the iPhone. For a phone based on WebKit, the iPhone's web browser and integration into the UI just feels better to me. And the 65,000 apps in the app store head start that Apple has vs the Pre is a no brainer as a developer.
Apple playing traffic cop is a reality of publishing to the device. However, having an entity limiting the apps that get allowed into the store can act as a "quality bar" - maybe Apple rejects x% of apps on any given submission, but those rejections have the potential to make it so that only "higher quality" apps make it into the store.
I do disagree with the notion of duplication of software that already exists within the device. My iPhone 3G can record video. Cydia unlocked an app called Cycorder which can do that. It's not as high quality as the 3GS, and the app can't edit the video (another app can upload it to youtube). But on the whole, I like being able to record video with my 3G. Even if Apple's future product plans include that feature. I say that someone like Google should have made a patent on searching via voice and then sued Apple or had a contract in writing. I don't know, maybe if Google suddenly removed Maps and Google search access from all iPhones in retaliation, Apple would take a beating from its customers... It's not going to happen, though. If Steve Jobs's iPhone stopped searching the web and stopped getting Google maps, it would be funny.
You're confusing choice with freedom. We are primarily free-software supporters. The software the driver is written for is non-free by any FOSS supporter's standards (weather from free or open camp). There is no benefit regarding the user's freedom (as defined by 4 freedoms - use, copy, study, modify+redistribute) in including the above in the kernel.
I call BS. There is benefit to the user for all 4 freedoms. It's source code. It's useful.
Just because the driver works with something which is not free/open does not mean the driver itself is not free/open. By your logic, *all* device drivers in Linux are not free, and don't provide benefit. So you shouldn't buy a proprietary CPU, motherboard, RAM, GPU, etc...
If Linus rejected code that supported proprietary hardware or proprietary software he would be a hypocrite. Linus is a pragmatic person - he values the contributions of code which will add value to Linux. Device drivers that make Linux run better under VMs on Windows are valuable. For example, I recently installed Ubuntu under Virtual PC on my PC. It would be great if that experience were better. I'm selfish. VirtualPC is a free download. My laptop came with Windows. I want to run Ubuntu under a VM with better support. I don't care *who* adds the code. I care that it adds value to my experience.
What happens when you forget about the hack that you put something highly combustible in your device and try and take said device through the airport TSA checkpoint? I suppose if the answer is that the theif takes said device through TSA checkpoint then it's funny, but what if the theif sells the device to some unsuspecting victim?
Setting up a netbook to be a bomb is not just a bad idea, but it's likely to be illegal in many ways.
A good idea might be to put a keylogger which uploads to a web site into the netbook. Get your theif to give you their passwords and information, then use that information against them.
Batteries suck. There have been many times when batteries would be "10 times" more better than some previous generation. But they never are. Batteries would only be good if cellular phone could run at least a MONTH on them.
Seriously? A month? How about a solar cell that makes you not have to plug in your cell phone ever, or a motion generator that uses your movement to charge the phone?
Part of the battery life problem isn't the battery - it's the efficiency of the device being powered. If we can reduce the current/power consumption of phones by a factor of 3, and improve the capacity of the battery by a factor of 3 then we have a 9 times better story. That's realistic to expect by 2020.
Devices like the Amazon Kindle have huge power savings compared to laptops because the screen device isn't active. Once we get write ability (like a magnetic pen or maybe capacative touch) added to that kind of device, we will be well on the way to achieving "paper" computers. The prices on these new technologies will drop as they mature and economies of scale kick in. You can bet that the competition in the market place for cheaper and lower powered devices will bear fruit.
Your motivation to work on something has to come from within. That being said, if you are in a depressed mood (understandable in these times), then you are less likely to be productive. I suggest going out for a run, getting your blood pumping, etc. Sometimes caffeine helps. Music helps. Minimizing distractions helps - web browser, cell phone, etc.
One thing you can do if you want motivation is to reward completing the boring or hard tasks with easier, more fun tasks. Mix up the hard problems you have to solve with minor annoyances. That way, if you can't concentrate on a hard problem, you can at least make some progress. Making progress is the way to get through the doldrums.
Go to bed early, next to a window facing East. Wake up in sunlight.
You might also take the approach that video games do - track the work you do. Reward yourself for making milestones.
This has got to be the dumbest thing I've heard.
Next, they will sue any device capable of making sounds in public. Phones are just the beginning, how about iPods, car makers, "boom box" (portable stereo system) makers. While I'd love it if the guys blasting their audio in their car would stop the noise pollution when I'm in their vacinity, I don't think suing them for publicly performing a copywritten work will effect change... And I don't think AT&T is to blame here.
Copyright is a temporary monopoly given to content creators on their works so that they can earn money without being ripped off. It is not intended to be used to stranglehold any company making a device which can play a sound to pay an extortion fee to a group representing content creators.
I bought an iPhone this weekend - it was my father's day gift from my wife. AT&T needed my driver's license, SS#, and payment.
It was what they required to make the purchase, so that's the information I gave them. I didn't think anything of it other than that it took a while. But in the end, I had a new internet utility that doubled as a phone and an iPod, and I love it. It's a great gadget.
You may lament that they require your SS#, but it's the people like me who simply don't care for the hassle that make it hard for the people like you.
I answered the phones and staffed the front desk at the student help desk when I was in college. It was the best paid student job on campus - $10 per hour your first semester, and a lot of the time you weren't busy and could surf the net or do your homework. There were a few other Computer Science majors there with me, and we got to help out all levels of student, faculty, and staff with their problems. What I took away from that job is not that I dislike working in the service industry, but rather, that there were certain universal truths about end users that I couldn't learn about anywhere else.
The help desk is your opportunity to study the areas where computers and human interactions break down. Learning computer skills in some high level language like Java or C# while working at the help desk is a way to advance your career. Start out with a book, but have goals in mind. Computer Science education is all about leading you to the water. Buy or borrow a few good books, classic computer science texts, etc. Work through the examples and do the exercises when you're not on the phones.
Most importantly, design some UI on paper (I like graph paper for this because you draw a lot of boxes in designing UI). Figure out what you *want* the program to do when you click the buttons. Then use a free program like ant or Visual C# Express and build the UI. Take apart the generated code. Look at it. Study it. Solve a problem that is interesting to you. Do it for fun. If you don't enjoy making programs, then Computer Science is simply not for you. There are plenty of people in CS departments who are very smart and study very hard, but their heart is just not in it. You can tell because they stop writing software when the day is done.
If you want to practice on Linux and you have Windows, you can download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (free) or VMWare player (also free) and install Ubuntu on a virtual drive. Put that virtual drive on a USB key chain or iPod, and you have a mobile development platform that you can take home. The internet is full of human knowledge on the subject of Computer Science and other computer topics. A degree from a reputable college or university is not necessarily a requirement.
But you need to prove to most engineering firms that you have what it takes, and the best paying jobs ($75K+ benefits) usually require solid interviewing and development demonstrations with someone who has 5 to 25 years of development experience and typically a Bachelors or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Math, Physics, or something equally challenging. A degree won't get you in the door though. We see tons of people straight out of college with their Sc.B. degree who can't solve a problem involving a linked list, binary search on an array, binary search tree, hash table, dealing with memory management, and many other problems you need to be able to solve on your own as an engineer.
I started writing code sometime around the age of 6 in the early 80's because I wanted to make a game. I ended up discovering that game writing is interesting, but what I love to write are tools that interact with pixels and musical notes. Software engineering can be grueling work. In my best weeks, I write hundreds of lines of code. In my worst weeks, I spend long hours debugging and poking and proding and pulling out all the tricks, but get no closer to solving a bug which eventually is found to be something trivial in another part of the code. Highs are higher than in technical support, but lows are awfully low, too.
So I was wondering who Ray Ozzie is, and how about that, he's a software architect for Microsoft.
Ray Ozzie is the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft. He replaced Bill Gates as the person who drives Microsoft's technological decisions.
Live Mesh is Ray's brainchild. Why is it important to listen to what Ray says? Because he directs the future of Microsoft's development in the space. He controls billions of Microsoft dollars. The point is that he's not some random Microsoft shill - he's the guy in charge.
I dunno, I work for a Fortune 100 company and we use IE because all the crappy "enterprise" software we run requires stupid ActiveX or JavaScript or whatever that only runs on IE6. Good luck to FireFox, but customizations ain't got nothing to do with it where I work.
There's even more to it than that. The WebBrowser COM/.NET control is the IE control. Even if you manage to supplant IE as the browser of choice, all code which embeds the COM or .NET wrapped COM control depends on it. So for example, the Windows Shell and the help system, and Windows Update, Windows Media Player, third party apps integrating the system WebBrowser such as WinAmp, etc.
The Internet Explorer browser itself is really just a light weight set of UIs wrapped around the standard WebBrowser COM/ActiveX control. It's actually pretty fun to write .NET code that interacts with the WebBrowser. You can add some interesting features like web page scrapers, etc.
I heavily use both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, so I was excited to use 2010. The thing I found most obnoxious about it was the the text in the code editor was blurry at normal font settings (Consolas 10pt). Let me restate that. The text in the primary window of the software that you will be staring at for hours daily... is blurry. How on earth did that get past QA?
Section 2.4.2.2 of the Readme describes why the code can appear blurry:
You can also take a look at this white paper for more information on the issue.
The ClearType Tuner PowerToy can also help. If you are running Windows 7, it's built into the control panel.
"only informing the user of the existence of licensing terms if they scroll to the very bottom of the page doesn't make the terms binding"
Does it say anything about putting the "I agree" button at the bottom so that the user must scroll down through the text to agree?
I agree that sneaky licenses where you have to go out of your way to read the text you are agreeing to aren't enforceable, and I say that the appropriate remedy is for people to force you to scroll to the bottom before letting you continue.
When I purchase or refinance a house with a mortgage, I have to sign and/or initial somewhere on *every* page of the agreement.
We need a new moderation tag for posts like these. I've seen +5, Funny, and in this case, I'm proposing +5, Sad.
It's just a sad statement. I don't find it terribly insightful, but I'd give it +1.
Don't you need to send water to Mars to do this new test?
And just by sending these probes to Mars, don't we pretty much send a couple bacteria there, some of them theoretically can survive? What if we planted the life on Mars that we are looking to find? After all, the fact that we have successfully put down these robots onto the ground gently enough that they are sending back scientific evidence could be enough to ensure that any stow-away life was shielded from the effects of entering the atmosphere...
Maybe this is a good thing, though... Maybe we have ensured that life will take hold on Mars, should we nuke the earth into oblivion.
Go check out AdSweep. It works just fine in Chrome. Maybe it's not AdBlock plus, but it works in Chrome without much too fuss.
http://www.adsweep.org/
I like this story. See, I married into the family... Mr. Watson is my wife's great great grandfather. He left his family with an estate in New Hampshire which we go to every year and in this estate there are 2 telephones. An interesting family tradition in her branch of the family is to give the male children the middle name of Watson. Anyway, to place a call, you crank a generator which causes a bell to ring at the other end of the line, then the person at the other end of the line picks up and the call is connected.
Today we all have cell phones (and ironically, the cell phone reception isn't that great - verizon or AT&T - we brought an iPhone last summer to the estate, and it browsed the web painfully slowly - a 28K modem with AOL and all the ads would beat it), but how many people can say that they have talked on a phone made by hand by the inventor of the telephone in this day and age where cell phones can make video calls and store books and play video games and browse the web?