I'm the owner of a Samsung Epic 4G, which of course Samsung hasn't put out an update for.
The first thing I did after getting the phone was convert the file-system to ext4 (because samsung are Epic assholes) and load a custom Froyo ROM on it. Problem Solved.
There are enough android phones out there that if you want a MotoTouchSenseBlurWhiz TM based phone, you can certainly get it... or if you don't want that then you can go with a better manufacturer that sticks to a more vanilla version of android and sends out updates in a timely manner.
So why did I get a Samsung Epic 4G knowing full well before purchasing the device that I'd spend hours replacing Samsung's software? Because there simply wasn't another phone with those kinds of specs that gave me the features I wanted (a keyboard, 4G radio, and front facing camera). Which is really the best part of it all though. Modders can make ROMs at such a high quality (probably at least partially due to the open source nature of Android) that I didn't even care what software came loaded on my device. I bought the hardware for the hardware and had the freedom to load whatever software I wanted on it.
Graphics are moving in the wrong direction
on
Review: Halo: Reach
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone else think the newer style graphics in ODST and Reach have actually gotten worse since the original?
The first Halo had a lot of luminosity and sort of a glossy sheen over structures in the environment giving the alien world a unique and strange feel, the world was bright in a building or outdoors keeping the mood lighter but also allowing you to see your enemies, and the back drops appeared to fit into the level giving epic views of the ring world you were fighting on.
Halo: Reach is dark almost everywhere making it very hard to recognize the difference between an enemy brute attempting to rip your face off or a random civilian you are supposed to be protecting. I attempted to resolve this by tuning my TVs picture mode to dynamic and upping the video brightness configuration in Halo: Reach to the highest setting, but lighting becomes uninteresting and also appears washed out while not making it much easier to identify targets. The sheen and lighting of the original Halo is not there at all, just as in ODST structures in the environment look cartoonified. Spartans and Elites are about the only things that retain some interesting lighting effects, everything else can catch a shadow, but doesn't seem to reflect light in anyway. The 2D backgrounds are non-immersive, obviously drawn, and separate from the 3d world.
Some of these lighting issues seemed forgivable in ODST as this was mainly an expansion pack and the real feature in ODST for me anyway was firefight which never seemed as dark. The use of VISR in ODST also helped to make up for the terrible lighting conditions, but at least so far I haven't seen anything like VISR in Halo: Reach. There is a night vision ability, but this just adds to the general brightness, effectively washing out everything in green.
Aside from all this at least on my xbox 360, the engine stutters(although infrequently), textures can be seen loading in even during some cut scenes(again infrequently), and there seems to be a total lack of AA which creates so much flicker at edges that after a few hours of play my eyes were left almost bleeding. Fortunately my 360 decided to commit suicide about 6 hours into gameplay saving my eyes from melting out of my skull.
I'm sure with smaller better lit levels in multiplayer or firefight the issues aren't so egregious, and the better luminosity on Spartans and Elites must make it easier to track enemies in multiplayer. For the campaign though, one word sums up my experience: unplayable.
Actually I'm pretty sure you can setup a samba domain in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with no console interaction either. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.
Have they done any usability testing on this? The button locations in the screenshots shown are less than ideal to say the least.
First of all moving the buttons from the expected upper right corner to the left is going to go against most people's expectations, for both those familiar with Windows or previous Ubuntu Releases. Is there truly a reason for moving them to the left side or are they just trying to confuse users.
Even if there is some reason to move these buttons to the left hand side the ordering is poor. I would expect the most used buttons to be in the corners where they are easy to find without having to search through all the icons. Entirely to the opposite of my expectation they have placed the maximize/restore button in the far left corner. Do people really use this button more than the minimize or close buttons? I'd like to see a a program optionally deployed to current ubuntu users to gather statistics on which buttons are most heavily used if we are going to start ordering the buttons in some totally unique way.
Also the top panel is hugely cluttered.
Where is the bottom panel and task list?
If this is supposed to be the new Ubuntu experience, they really need to get back to the drawing board.
Your almost reading it right, but it's actually 5 Gigabit. Same as the verizon aircard. Which interestingly is the exact same price and data limit on tmobile and att air cards. Funny how they all arrived at the same data cap and pricing...
In my personal experience as a student, I have never had a class where if I were graded on just tests and quizzes I would have failed. However if I was overwhelmed with school, work, responsibilities from my parents, etc. I might skip one heavily weighted assignment that would fuck me for the rest of the semester in a class. I know a significant amount of people who say they have had the same experience as a student.
Giving someone a 50%, is patently not "A for effort bullshit". In my HS anything under a 70 was failing. One 50% assignment, would need an equally weighted 90% assignment just to give you a passing score. If it were a 0% assignment it would take 3 equally weighted 94% assignments to average a passing grade. That can be overwhelming and really is bullshit.
The majority of your second paragraph seems pretty baseless.
I very much agree with you. If you read my post you'll note I did point this out. It's not an ideal solution, but it does allow you to expand the RAID 5 at some future date. The good news is that the newer drive/s are newer and I imagine we could say their chances of dying when new might be less than when old? I think we could still say it would have higher redundancy than starting with a plain old RAID 0.
Also because EVMS uses UUIDs you can plug the disk into whatever you like physically and later move it onto another bus without disruption. For instance if you did have the original 3 drive 1.5 TB array and wanted to totally replace it with a new 3 drive 3 TB raid but didn't have enough sata/scsi/yourbusofchoice channels, you could do that by getting all new disks, hooking them up via a secondary bus like USB, create a new RAID array on the new bus's disks, move the data from the old RAID to the new, then move the new array's disks to your bus of choice.
Interestingly, there is also another way to increase the space with EVMS, assuming you could migrate all the data onto a new RAID 5. You could move the data off your original array into an array with larger disks, then add you original RAID 5 as a "disk" into then new array. You could even rebuild your original RAID 5 as a RAID 0 or JBOD and add it into the new RAID 5 array without any redundancy issues. As far as I can tell this would be ideal.
He may actually be able to begin with one size drive in RAID 5 and later be able to expand onto future larger drives. Given, I just had this idea and it could be total BS, but hear me out.
Now I'm a bit more familiar with LVM2 than with EVMS, but I believe EVMS should be able to do this. With EVMS you can do 2 things that together enable this. The first thing you can do is create a RAID 5 out of Storage Regions which can be available partitions on a disk or even a Logical Volume. The second thing you can do is hot add a Storage Region and expand the RAID 5.
Given this if you had an original RAID 5 setup that was created from single 500GB partitions on 500GB disks, later you could replace a 500GB disk with a 1TB disk that was split into two 500GB paritions. You could rebuild the array onto the first partition and then expand onto the second partition allowing you to use the full space of the volume.
I've never tried it though, so I'm not even sure it's 100% possible. Actually...even if it worked you would actually be losing 2 "disks" at once if that physical disk were to fail... so you'd lose a certain amount of redundancy after the resize....
Still maybe someone will find this interesting so I'll hit Submit anyway.
Re:Yet another layout comment
on
User Mode Linux
·
· Score: 1
Seriously. This is like a punishment at 1600x1200.
You have an iFolder server, you make it accessible over your corporate LAN, WLAN, and the internet. Now you install an iFolder client on your workstation, your laptop, and your home PC.
What this enables you to do is to be working on a project at work, save the file, no worries about backing it up to FTP or emailing it to yourself or what not, when you get home, your home computer has the updated version of your project anyway. You go to work the next day and your computer burnt to the ground for whatever reason, you pull out your laptop and hook it up to the WLAN, it will either already be synched to the correct version of the file or if not it will sync itself.
The idea is automated backups to a central server where you can do centralized backup and accesibility from different locations without a lot of headaches.
That's not to say I've used it really, so I have no idea if it really does anything of this well.
Problem is that it is a host based "who" and not a user based "who".
The host can then make it a user based who, but you are trusting the host to do that. So if you have a user that is in control of that host they can acquire maximum available rights on filesystem exported to the host.
Also because in vanilla NFS you are exporting with IP based security all someone has to do is steal the hosts IP to themselves acquire this access.
First of all, go LDAP with TLS for your authentication. NIS is an insecure hunk of junk. Really, really insecure.
Second of all lose the rsync between servers, if you're not using rsync via SSH that's insecure as well.
Next drop the NFS. Once again, insecure. If you have no choice, use root_squash, but you're only fooling yourself into thinking there is security. None of the file transferred across the network are encrypted. If someone has root on the box, they can do whatever they want as far as changing their own UID.
So what do you get for files? Samba. You could store the data to build a credential file on the LDAP server. User logs on, it builds a credential file, that you could have automagically be used by the automounter, then clear the file after the mount. That's one option.
EASY WAY OUT: Use Novell OES Linux for the server and inbetween it and eDirectory it's all magic. If there's one thing that Novell's OES Linux does extremely well, that is it.
Depends on resolution as I mentioned. If you have to travel a further distance, it's harder to slow down in the same amount of space. If you have to travel a MUCH further distance it will be harder to slow down in a MUCH larger space.
Not only that, but it's not just the window the user is probably trying to return the pointer to, but some area within that window. Possibly a Text Area or Button which can be quite small in their own right.
I always found the argument as to why a global menu bar should be used quite silly.
The argument as you've given it is that you don't have to be precise to perform an action because you can move from your current pointer position to the global menu bar by flinging your mouse to what is pretty much an infinitely sized target at a screen edge. While this is great, the truth of the matter is that most of the time after you have performed some action on the global menu bar you now want to get back to the window you just came from, and now you have to perform precise mouse movements to get back to the window. This is worse on higher display resolutions as the pointer has a greater distance to traverse before reaching it's target.
So what it really comes down to is your screen resolution, usage patterns, and personal tase.
They mention painting the area with a visible or infrared light. Maybe for some other weapon system that once a human operator made confirmation the object was a sniper that is not say protecting himself with a shield of school children, can fire a response at the infrared light.
They also mention it can recognize the difference between the sounds of certain gun shots, hopefully leading to it only triggering the system if a rifle was being used. You could also just keep the system deactivated until a sniper had made his presence known. This should stop it from triggering flase positives.
By physically moving the sound device onto a card, how do you expect to offload CPU usage?
The onboard card and the sound blaster both still need to connect to the PCI bus. Where they are physically connected makes no difference. There will probably be no difference in CPU usage if your using either of these cards. The real difference in CPU usage will depend on how many extra apps they load onto your machine.
This Novell business is nonsense. How long has it been since Novell has used NDS? It's all eDirectory now.
I'm no expert with eDirectory, but from what I understand it's a very viable cross platform solution that doesn't require an all Novell shop. eDirectory running on top of SuSE Linux seems like an appealing choice from all the people I've talked to that have tried it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the owner of a Samsung Epic 4G, which of course Samsung hasn't put out an update for.
The first thing I did after getting the phone was convert the file-system to ext4 (because samsung are Epic assholes) and load a custom Froyo ROM on it. Problem Solved.
There are enough android phones out there that if you want a MotoTouchSenseBlurWhiz TM based phone, you can certainly get it... or if you don't want that then you can go with a better manufacturer that sticks to a more vanilla version of android and sends out updates in a timely manner.
So why did I get a Samsung Epic 4G knowing full well before purchasing the device that I'd spend hours replacing Samsung's software? Because there simply wasn't another phone with those kinds of specs that gave me the features I wanted (a keyboard, 4G radio, and front facing camera). Which is really the best part of it all though. Modders can make ROMs at such a high quality (probably at least partially due to the open source nature of Android) that I didn't even care what software came loaded on my device. I bought the hardware for the hardware and had the freedom to load whatever software I wanted on it.
Does anyone else think the newer style graphics in ODST and Reach have actually gotten worse since the original?
The first Halo had a lot of luminosity and sort of a glossy sheen over structures in the environment giving the alien world a unique and strange feel, the world was bright in a building or outdoors keeping the mood lighter but also allowing you to see your enemies, and the back drops appeared to fit into the level giving epic views of the ring world you were fighting on.
Halo: Reach is dark almost everywhere making it very hard to recognize the difference between an enemy brute attempting to rip your face off or a random civilian you are supposed to be protecting. I attempted to resolve this by tuning my TVs picture mode to dynamic and upping the video brightness configuration in Halo: Reach to the highest setting, but lighting becomes uninteresting and also appears washed out while not making it much easier to identify targets. The sheen and lighting of the original Halo is not there at all, just as in ODST structures in the environment look cartoonified. Spartans and Elites are about the only things that retain some interesting lighting effects, everything else can catch a shadow, but doesn't seem to reflect light in anyway. The 2D backgrounds are non-immersive, obviously drawn, and separate from the 3d world.
Some of these lighting issues seemed forgivable in ODST as this was mainly an expansion pack and the real feature in ODST for me anyway was firefight which never seemed as dark. The use of VISR in ODST also helped to make up for the terrible lighting conditions, but at least so far I haven't seen anything like VISR in Halo: Reach. There is a night vision ability, but this just adds to the general brightness, effectively washing out everything in green.
Aside from all this at least on my xbox 360, the engine stutters(although infrequently), textures can be seen loading in even during some cut scenes(again infrequently), and there seems to be a total lack of AA which creates so much flicker at edges that after a few hours of play my eyes were left almost bleeding. Fortunately my 360 decided to commit suicide about 6 hours into gameplay saving my eyes from melting out of my skull.
I'm sure with smaller better lit levels in multiplayer or firefight the issues aren't so egregious, and the better luminosity on Spartans and Elites must make it easier to track enemies in multiplayer. For the campaign though, one word sums up my experience: unplayable.
Typing "I can" results in a pretty offensive word for the top result on my machine.
The Dolphin browser does what you are asking for and has a lot of other nice features the default browser doesn't have.
Actually I'm pretty sure you can setup a samba domain in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with no console interaction either. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.
How about an Android app please?
Have they done any usability testing on this? The button locations in the screenshots shown are less than ideal to say the least.
First of all moving the buttons from the expected upper right corner to the left is going to go against most people's expectations, for both those familiar with Windows or previous Ubuntu Releases. Is there truly a reason for moving them to the left side or are they just trying to confuse users.
Even if there is some reason to move these buttons to the left hand side the ordering is poor. I would expect the most used buttons to be in the corners where they are easy to find without having to search through all the icons. Entirely to the opposite of my expectation they have placed the maximize/restore button in the far left corner. Do people really use this button more than the minimize or close buttons? I'd like to see a a program optionally deployed to current ubuntu users to gather statistics on which buttons are most heavily used if we are going to start ordering the buttons in some totally unique way.
Also the top panel is hugely cluttered.
Where is the bottom panel and task list?
If this is supposed to be the new Ubuntu experience, they really need to get back to the drawing board.
Your almost reading it right, but it's actually 5 Gigabit. Same as the verizon aircard. Which interestingly is the exact same price and data limit on tmobile and att air cards. Funny how they all arrived at the same data cap and pricing...
In my personal experience as a student, I have never had a class where if I were graded on just tests and quizzes I would have failed. However if I was overwhelmed with school, work, responsibilities from my parents, etc. I might skip one heavily weighted assignment that would fuck me for the rest of the semester in a class. I know a significant amount of people who say they have had the same experience as a student.
Giving someone a 50%, is patently not "A for effort bullshit". In my HS anything under a 70 was failing. One 50% assignment, would need an equally weighted 90% assignment just to give you a passing score. If it were a 0% assignment it would take 3 equally weighted 94% assignments to average a passing grade. That can be overwhelming and really is bullshit.
The majority of your second paragraph seems pretty baseless.
BMI or waist size should probably only be used as an initial indicator of whether or not more tests should be carried out.
Percent Body Fat or Waist/Hip ratio would probably be a good follow up test.
You can't choose your genes.
You can choose your lifestyle.
I very much agree with you. If you read my post you'll note I did point this out. It's not an ideal solution, but it does allow you to expand the RAID 5 at some future date. The good news is that the newer drive/s are newer and I imagine we could say their chances of dying when new might be less than when old? I think we could still say it would have higher redundancy than starting with a plain old RAID 0.
Also because EVMS uses UUIDs you can plug the disk into whatever you like physically and later move it onto another bus without disruption. For instance if you did have the original 3 drive 1.5 TB array and wanted to totally replace it with a new 3 drive 3 TB raid but didn't have enough sata/scsi/yourbusofchoice channels, you could do that by getting all new disks, hooking them up via a secondary bus like USB, create a new RAID array on the new bus's disks, move the data from the old RAID to the new, then move the new array's disks to your bus of choice.
Interestingly, there is also another way to increase the space with EVMS, assuming you could migrate all the data onto a new RAID 5. You could move the data off your original array into an array with larger disks, then add you original RAID 5 as a "disk" into then new array. You could even rebuild your original RAID 5 as a RAID 0 or JBOD and add it into the new RAID 5 array without any redundancy issues. As far as I can tell this would be ideal.
He may actually be able to begin with one size drive in RAID 5 and later be able to expand onto future larger drives. Given, I just had this idea and it could be total BS, but hear me out.
Now I'm a bit more familiar with LVM2 than with EVMS, but I believe EVMS should be able to do this. With EVMS you can do 2 things that together enable this. The first thing you can do is create a RAID 5 out of Storage Regions which can be available partitions on a disk or even a Logical Volume. The second thing you can do is hot add a Storage Region and expand the RAID 5.
Given this if you had an original RAID 5 setup that was created from single 500GB partitions on 500GB disks, later you could replace a 500GB disk with a 1TB disk that was split into two 500GB paritions. You could rebuild the array onto the first partition and then expand onto the second partition allowing you to use the full space of the volume.
I've never tried it though, so I'm not even sure it's 100% possible. Actually...even if it worked you would actually be losing 2 "disks" at once if that physical disk were to fail... so you'd lose a certain amount of redundancy after the resize....
Still maybe someone will find this interesting so I'll hit Submit anyway.
Seriously. This is like a punishment at 1600x1200.
Engine is open and free.
Artwork is open and free.
Anti-cheat is closed and pay for/reliant on central server.
I'm pretty sure (and the page you linked to seemed to suggest this) the Nintendo 64 launched at $250.
Here's the main idea from what I've seen of it.
You have an iFolder server, you make it accessible over your corporate LAN, WLAN, and the internet. Now you install an iFolder client on your workstation, your laptop, and your home PC.
What this enables you to do is to be working on a project at work, save the file, no worries about backing it up to FTP or emailing it to yourself or what not, when you get home, your home computer has the updated version of your project anyway. You go to work the next day and your computer burnt to the ground for whatever reason, you pull out your laptop and hook it up to the WLAN, it will either already be synched to the correct version of the file or if not it will sync itself.
The idea is automated backups to a central server where you can do centralized backup and accesibility from different locations without a lot of headaches.
That's not to say I've used it really, so I have no idea if it really does anything of this well.
Problem is that it is a host based "who" and not a user based "who".
The host can then make it a user based who, but you are trusting the host to do that. So if you have a user that is in control of that host they can acquire maximum available rights on filesystem exported to the host.
Also because in vanilla NFS you are exporting with IP based security all someone has to do is steal the hosts IP to themselves acquire this access.
First of all, go LDAP with TLS for your authentication. NIS is an insecure hunk of junk. Really, really insecure. Second of all lose the rsync between servers, if you're not using rsync via SSH that's insecure as well. Next drop the NFS. Once again, insecure. If you have no choice, use root_squash, but you're only fooling yourself into thinking there is security. None of the file transferred across the network are encrypted. If someone has root on the box, they can do whatever they want as far as changing their own UID. So what do you get for files? Samba. You could store the data to build a credential file on the LDAP server. User logs on, it builds a credential file, that you could have automagically be used by the automounter, then clear the file after the mount. That's one option. EASY WAY OUT: Use Novell OES Linux for the server and inbetween it and eDirectory it's all magic. If there's one thing that Novell's OES Linux does extremely well, that is it.
Which is why 120 degrees is the highest amount allowable for most games under competition settings.
Depends on resolution as I mentioned. If you have to travel a further distance, it's harder to slow down in the same amount of space. If you have to travel a MUCH further distance it will be harder to slow down in a MUCH larger space. Not only that, but it's not just the window the user is probably trying to return the pointer to, but some area within that window. Possibly a Text Area or Button which can be quite small in their own right.
I always found the argument as to why a global menu bar should be used quite silly.
The argument as you've given it is that you don't have to be precise to perform an action because you can move from your current pointer position to the global menu bar by flinging your mouse to what is pretty much an infinitely sized target at a screen edge. While this is great, the truth of the matter is that most of the time after you have performed some action on the global menu bar you now want to get back to the window you just came from, and now you have to perform precise mouse movements to get back to the window. This is worse on higher display resolutions as the pointer has a greater distance to traverse before reaching it's target.
So what it really comes down to is your screen resolution, usage patterns, and personal tase.
They mention painting the area with a visible or infrared light. Maybe for some other weapon system that once a human operator made confirmation the object was a sniper that is not say protecting himself with a shield of school children, can fire a response at the infrared light. They also mention it can recognize the difference between the sounds of certain gun shots, hopefully leading to it only triggering the system if a rifle was being used. You could also just keep the system deactivated until a sniper had made his presence known. This should stop it from triggering flase positives.
By physically moving the sound device onto a card, how do you expect to offload CPU usage?
The onboard card and the sound blaster both still need to connect to the PCI bus. Where they are physically connected makes no difference. There will probably be no difference in CPU usage if your using either of these cards. The real difference in CPU usage will depend on how many extra apps they load onto your machine.
This Novell business is nonsense. How long has it been since Novell has used NDS? It's all eDirectory now. I'm no expert with eDirectory, but from what I understand it's a very viable cross platform solution that doesn't require an all Novell shop. eDirectory running on top of SuSE Linux seems like an appealing choice from all the people I've talked to that have tried it.