The problem is that the Android OS doesn't strictly enforce its global "Disable Data Roaming" option. Apps are supposed to respect this setting but some do not, thus a user who thinks it is disabled can still end up with $thousands in international data fees.
First off, the firmware that was just released was 2.0.2, not 2.0.1 which had been out for a while already. Second, Apple never claimed that this update contains the 3G fix. As usual, they have been secretive and cryptic about what the update actually contains, but this was just a minor update, not the big radio firmware fix we've been waiting for. And finally, although a few people have complained about the GPS in the new version, most of the reports seem to indicate that the GPS has IMPROVED.
Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and am suffering from the 3G issues. I'm certainly no fan of the way Apple has handled this so far, but this article is just a pointless and error-filled troll.
You know, this is something I haven't been able to figure out. I live in Japan where we are hit by strong earthquakes at least a month, and typhoons (like hurricanes), thunderstorms, minor flooding, etc. almost every day during the rainy season. And no I don't live in central Tokyo, I live in the middle of a farming town and have to walk through flooded rice paddies to get from my apartment to the station. But my power and internet have NEVER gone out once in the 6 years I've lived here. We don't have anything special... the power and phone run on overhead lines on metal poles just like most places in the US.
Meanwhile, at my mom's house in the DC Metro area, USA, the power & internet go out every time there is anything more than a gentle breeze. What's going on?
Assuming CBS wants news.com for their own news portal site, the current CNet computer & tech news portal will be moved to a new, easy-to-remember address: com.news.com.com
From TFA, this ruling only covers NON-rechargable lithium batteries, like the AA/AAA lithium cells sold by Energizer, etc. Also, batteries that are installed in equipment don't count. You just can't check loose lithium batteries or carry-on more than 2 loose batteries.
Again, to stress, this has NOTHING to do with rechargable Lithium-Ion or Lithium-Polymer batteries that are in most laptops, digital cameras, celphones, iPods, portable DVD players, etc...
You can't just swap materials... the missile has to fly at a certain speed over a certain range of temperatures and atmospheric stresses. Any atmospheric friction or moisture condensation is going to ruin your optical countermeasures. Spending millions of dollars doesn't mean you can violate the laws of chemistry and physics. And anyway, it would be several orders of magnitude cheaper for the enemy to just launch more weapons or lots of dummy weapons to overwhelm the defense system.
No mirror reflects 100% of what hits it. Even if it only absorbs 0.1% of the beam, with this much energy the mirror will quickly deform or burn and its reflectivity will drop.
My personal experience in Japan over the past 5 years has shown that 3G does little or nothing to address latency issues, but 3.5G (aka HSDPA/HSUPA or together just HSPA) has made a huge breakthrough in cellular latency.
I have used data services via 2G (9600bps), PHS (32-128kbps), 3G (384kbps), and now 3.5G (3.6-12mbps). While the bandwidth has gone way up and monthly charges have gone way down, everything before 3.5G had horrible latency (400-900ms), not to mention ridiculous fees (think $20/MB or more).
Now I use a 3.5G (HSDPA) cellular data service called eMobile which sprung up just over the past few months. I get about 300KB/s (bytes not bits) down and 100ms latency, unlimited use for about $50/month. Not quite as fast as the gigabit fiber I have at home for $40/month, but it certainly works well enough for a snappy browsing experience, and WoW and FPS games are perfectly playable.
This phone is REALLY small, has 3G+GSM+Bluetooth, and the battery life is not bad at all. Granted it doesn't have a large screen or fast CPU, but the fact that they can put all that (and TWO cameras, the front one being for video calls) into this tiny form factor and still have good battery life prety much disproves the power excuse...
In 2003 I visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia, travelling by taxi from the Thailand border to Siam Reap where most of the temples are located (you can fly from Bangkok but it was too expensive for me and my backpacking friends). It was a 4hr drive down the worst roads I have ever experienced in my life. For most of the trip it was unpaved and unmaintained soft dirt roads heavily pitted and potholed by heavy rains, farm equipment, oversized trucks and livestock traffic. The car we rode in (as were all the other taxis) was an early-80s Toyota Camry with a half-broken windshield, cardboard covers for the worn-away seat cushions, and a trunk full of soda bottles filled with gasoline. I swear, that thing WAS a tank. I can't imagine someone trying to make the journey even in the hardiest of American SUVs or pickups, those cars would fall apart after the first 10km or so, but those 80s Camrys were surviving the trip 6-8 times a day for years, likely with sub-standard maintenance. Incidentally, our driver had a scary-looking fresh 8" scar on his neck from a recent carjacking attempt. Fun times!
If you check this thread http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=38176 on the site you linked to, you will see that indeed, the newer Matsushita drives (830-850 series) used in all MB/MBPs can NOT be flashed to RPC1 or read discs from outside its own region, and all attempts at working on a firmware hack have been abandoned due to the issues I mentioned in my earlier post. Of course there are still many RPC1-flashable drives being made by other companies, but none which will fit in the slimmer slot-load form-factor of the MB/MBPs.
Also note that this behavior is NOT normal for a region locked drive. With most locked drives, you can still use DeCSS-based software such as AnyDVD, DVD Region Free, DVD Decrypter, mplayer, VLC, etc. even if a RPC1 hack is not available. OTOH, only the newest Matsushita drives will flat-out refuse to read encrypted sectors (even in raw/direct mode) when the regions don't match. Software cannot get around this problem because these Matsushita drives won't even attempt to read data from the disc unless the region code matches.
So, unless Apple has dumped Matsushita in the new MBP revision, the only possibility for region-free on a MB/MBP at this time is to use an external drive, and for me that is not an acceptable option.
All of the previous MB/MBPs use Matsushita drives with extremely strict region control, and since I have a large collection of both R1 and R2 DVDs, this rules out a Mac for me. The Matsushita firmware will flat-out refuse to read a disc (even raw sectors) if the region doesn't match, so software tools like AnyDVD and DeCSS-based players like mplayer/VLC don't work. Also the drives' firmware code is encrypted and signed with high strength public-key crypto, which makes a RPC1 firmware hack virtually impossible (some hackers tried but gave up after multiple expensive mistakes because the drives brick themselves if any attempt to read or modify the firmware is made).
I'm most interested in finding out who makes the new 6x DL burner used in the 15" MBPs. If the new drives are NOT Matsushita then it looks like I'm getting a MBP... otherwise no way.
I don't think this technology will ever be useful to typical snapshooters or photographers. For the former, just stick an f16 lens on a small-sensor digicam and you'll have near-infinite DOF for most shots, and the latter generally prefer narrow DOF and know where they will be focusing before pressing the shutter.
However, I imagine this might be useful for some kinds of analysis photography, especially when dealing with high-speed motion. Those kinds of shots usually require a large aperture to gather enough light (due to the very high shutter speed), meaning a very narrow DOF. If you're shooting something which is very expensive or happens only once (say, explosion anaylsis, freezing bullet-time action, etc.) and getting the right focus or wide DOF is critical, this could be very useful.
Actually, it doesn't even do that all that well. The iPods (except for the shuffles) are somewhat infamous for having the worst audio quality of any mainstream mp3 player. You'd think that a company with so much experience in audio products could finally solve the problems after being well known for the past 4 hardware revisions. These aren't subtle "audiophile-only" issues either... they are pretty obvious to anyone.
Known audio flaws... 1) All iPods: distortion/crackling when using any EQ settings. Wouldn't be so bad, except the bass rolloff problem means you pretty much need EQ to get good bass. Other mp3 players with the same CPU as the iPod don't have this problem, so its either in the software or the analog audio circuitry. Only workaround is to turn off EQ and live with flat sound.
2) Color iPods: All of the iPods with tv-out have a serious buzzing/ringing distortion problem when using headphones with impedance of less than 32 Ohm (including Apple's in-ear phones). It can most easily be heard in piano solos, but exists in all music. There is NO way Apple could have missed this in testing, since it happens even with their own headphones! It is believed that the problem is due to bad grounding in the new 4-contact headphone jack which is needed to support tv-out. Headphones with impedance over 32Ohm (mostly large "can" types) mask the problem, but since they are less efficient, you have to crank up the volume on the iPod, which increases hiss and distortion.
(not to mention all of the software bugs such as magically disappearing playlists, songs, and album art; the lack of serious on-the-go playlist editing capabilities that most other mp3 players have; the recent firmware update that killed smart playlist auto-updating without syncing first; and the iTunes 5 bugs that erased many people's collections and make their PCs unstable)
Ironically, the shuffles are the only iPods with decent sound quality, because they use a 3rd-party integrated chip with no Apple customizations. I sincerely hope Apple gets tough on these issues when they design their next generation hardware, but based on their continuing to ignore these problems after many hardware and software updates, I have the feeling they just don't care. I certainly won't be buying any of the current iPods until Apple opens up and gets these issues fixed.
(though any mpeg4 video like xvid/divx is probably too cpu intensive to work)
Hmm... my Japanese celphone isn't much bigger than an iPod mini, and yet it can both record and playback 320x240 30fps MPEG-4 videos with its 2x optical zoom 2MP digital camera (or from any video source via a composite cable) and QVGA LCD, in addition to AAC audio and, you know, being a celphone.:) You can download music videos and short tv clips right on the phone at 2.4mbps, or download them via PC to a memory card and then just have the phone authorize & decrypt them.
So I see no reason why an iPod mini-sized device would have any trouble playing back MPEG-4 (divx/xvid), and could possibly even record to it.
I'm living abroad and bittorrent was the only was I had to view my favorite shows from home. Since I have a residence in the US where I pay for cable TV, I don't feel like I was doing anything unethical by watching the shows I would be watching if I lived there. Is it really any different from my friends sending me tapes?
Anyway, now I'm looking for a replacement. I figured one option would be to set up a server at home with a web interface and capture card (possibly 2), that lets me select shows to record, transcode them to a low bitrate format, and then make them available on secure ftp. I don't think MythTV is capable of all of this out-of-the-box, so does anyone have any suggestions for Windows or Linux software that can handle this kind of setup easily?
IIRC, the original owner of this patent really did create the JPEG format (or at least came up with the basics involved) but they filed this patent defensively, just so someone couldn't come along later and do this. But when Forgent bought the patent, they decided not to keep its defensive stance.
IMHO, public remarks about a patent being defensive-only should be enforced strictly, that is, put a comment in the patent record that definitively marks this patent as defensive-only and not eligible for actively suing anyone, and which cannot be removed for the entire life of the patent or any extensions based on it.
Anyone else notice that NONE of these laptops had visible scroll wheels or 3rd mouse buttons? I consider those to be absolutely essential, and it boggles my mind that so few laptops include them, even when you pretty much can't buy a new mouse without one.
Hehe I remember that... Me and another guy on the TI-85 assembly ML figured out how to display grayscale on the 1-bit screen by rapidly flipping video pages while adjusting the contrast. I fondly remember looking at 4-bit grayscale nudie pics in 10th grade math class.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the Android OS doesn't strictly enforce its global "Disable Data Roaming" option. Apps are supposed to respect this setting but some do not, thus a user who thinks it is disabled can still end up with $thousands in international data fees.
First off, the firmware that was just released was 2.0.2, not 2.0.1 which had been out for a while already. Second, Apple never claimed that this update contains the 3G fix. As usual, they have been secretive and cryptic about what the update actually contains, but this was just a minor update, not the big radio firmware fix we've been waiting for. And finally, although a few people have complained about the GPS in the new version, most of the reports seem to indicate that the GPS has IMPROVED.
Disclaimer: I own an iPhone and am suffering from the 3G issues. I'm certainly no fan of the way Apple has handled this so far, but this article is just a pointless and error-filled troll.
My current business card reads "Lead Systems Engineer" [snip]
You work for a Chinese toy company?
You know, this is something I haven't been able to figure out. I live in Japan where we are hit by strong earthquakes at least a month, and typhoons (like hurricanes), thunderstorms, minor flooding, etc. almost every day during the rainy season. And no I don't live in central Tokyo, I live in the middle of a farming town and have to walk through flooded rice paddies to get from my apartment to the station. But my power and internet have NEVER gone out once in the 6 years I've lived here. We don't have anything special... the power and phone run on overhead lines on metal poles just like most places in the US.
Meanwhile, at my mom's house in the DC Metro area, USA, the power & internet go out every time there is anything more than a gentle breeze. What's going on?
Assuming CBS wants news.com for their own news portal site, the current CNet computer & tech news portal will be moved to a new, easy-to-remember address: com.news.com.com
I often have the same problem with Enchiladas and my A-ring.
Well, at least it's cheaper than Lego... ;-)
From TFA, this ruling only covers NON-rechargable lithium batteries, like the AA/AAA lithium cells sold by Energizer, etc. Also, batteries that are installed in equipment don't count. You just can't check loose lithium batteries or carry-on more than 2 loose batteries.
Again, to stress, this has NOTHING to do with rechargable Lithium-Ion or Lithium-Polymer batteries that are in most laptops, digital cameras, celphones, iPods, portable DVD players, etc...
You can't just swap materials... the missile has to fly at a certain speed over a certain range of temperatures and atmospheric stresses. Any atmospheric friction or moisture condensation is going to ruin your optical countermeasures. Spending millions of dollars doesn't mean you can violate the laws of chemistry and physics. And anyway, it would be several orders of magnitude cheaper for the enemy to just launch more weapons or lots of dummy weapons to overwhelm the defense system.
No mirror reflects 100% of what hits it. Even if it only absorbs 0.1% of the beam, with this much energy the mirror will quickly deform or burn and its reflectivity will drop.
My personal experience in Japan over the past 5 years has shown that 3G does little or nothing to address latency issues, but 3.5G (aka HSDPA/HSUPA or together just HSPA) has made a huge breakthrough in cellular latency.
I have used data services via 2G (9600bps), PHS (32-128kbps), 3G (384kbps), and now 3.5G (3.6-12mbps). While the bandwidth has gone way up and monthly charges have gone way down, everything before 3.5G had horrible latency (400-900ms), not to mention ridiculous fees (think $20/MB or more).
Now I use a 3.5G (HSDPA) cellular data service called eMobile which sprung up just over the past few months. I get about 300KB/s (bytes not bits) down and 100ms latency, unlimited use for about $50/month. Not quite as fast as the gigabit fiber I have at home for $40/month, but it certainly works well enough for a snappy browsing experience, and WoW and FPS games are perfectly playable.
http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/en/product/3g/708sc/index .html
This phone is REALLY small, has 3G+GSM+Bluetooth, and the battery life is not bad at all. Granted it doesn't have a large screen or fast CPU, but the fact that they can put all that (and TWO cameras, the front one being for video calls) into this tiny form factor and still have good battery life prety much disproves the power excuse...
In 2003 I visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia, travelling by taxi from the Thailand border to Siam Reap where most of the temples are located (you can fly from Bangkok but it was too expensive for me and my backpacking friends). It was a 4hr drive down the worst roads I have ever experienced in my life. For most of the trip it was unpaved and unmaintained soft dirt roads heavily pitted and potholed by heavy rains, farm equipment, oversized trucks and livestock traffic. The car we rode in (as were all the other taxis) was an early-80s Toyota Camry with a half-broken windshield, cardboard covers for the worn-away seat cushions, and a trunk full of soda bottles filled with gasoline. I swear, that thing WAS a tank. I can't imagine someone trying to make the journey even in the hardiest of American SUVs or pickups, those cars would fall apart after the first 10km or so, but those 80s Camrys were surviving the trip 6-8 times a day for years, likely with sub-standard maintenance. Incidentally, our driver had a scary-looking fresh 8" scar on his neck from a recent carjacking attempt. Fun times!
Unfortunately it has been confirmed not to work on any current MB/MBP, but we will see about the new Merom ones...
If you check this thread http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=38176 on the site you linked to, you will see that indeed, the newer Matsushita drives (830-850 series) used in all MB/MBPs can NOT be flashed to RPC1 or read discs from outside its own region, and all attempts at working on a firmware hack have been abandoned due to the issues I mentioned in my earlier post. Of course there are still many RPC1-flashable drives being made by other companies, but none which will fit in the slimmer slot-load form-factor of the MB/MBPs.
Also note that this behavior is NOT normal for a region locked drive. With most locked drives, you can still use DeCSS-based software such as AnyDVD, DVD Region Free, DVD Decrypter, mplayer, VLC, etc. even if a RPC1 hack is not available. OTOH, only the newest Matsushita drives will flat-out refuse to read encrypted sectors (even in raw/direct mode) when the regions don't match. Software cannot get around this problem because these Matsushita drives won't even attempt to read data from the disc unless the region code matches.
So, unless Apple has dumped Matsushita in the new MBP revision, the only possibility for region-free on a MB/MBP at this time is to use an external drive, and for me that is not an acceptable option.
All of the previous MB/MBPs use Matsushita drives with extremely strict region control, and since I have a large collection of both R1 and R2 DVDs, this rules out a Mac for me. The Matsushita firmware will flat-out refuse to read a disc (even raw sectors) if the region doesn't match, so software tools like AnyDVD and DeCSS-based players like mplayer/VLC don't work. Also the drives' firmware code is encrypted and signed with high strength public-key crypto, which makes a RPC1 firmware hack virtually impossible (some hackers tried but gave up after multiple expensive mistakes because the drives brick themselves if any attempt to read or modify the firmware is made).
I'm most interested in finding out who makes the new 6x DL burner used in the 15" MBPs. If the new drives are NOT Matsushita then it looks like I'm getting a MBP... otherwise no way.
I don't think this technology will ever be useful to typical snapshooters or photographers. For the former, just stick an f16 lens on a small-sensor digicam and you'll have near-infinite DOF for most shots, and the latter generally prefer narrow DOF and know where they will be focusing before pressing the shutter.
However, I imagine this might be useful for some kinds of analysis photography, especially when dealing with high-speed motion. Those kinds of shots usually require a large aperture to gather enough light (due to the very high shutter speed), meaning a very narrow DOF. If you're shooting something which is very expensive or happens only once (say, explosion anaylsis, freezing bullet-time action, etc.) and getting the right focus or wide DOF is critical, this could be very useful.
Actually, it doesn't even do that all that well. The iPods (except for the shuffles) are somewhat infamous for having the worst audio quality of any mainstream mp3 player. You'd think that a company with so much experience in audio products could finally solve the problems after being well known for the past 4 hardware revisions. These aren't subtle "audiophile-only" issues either... they are pretty obvious to anyone.
Known audio flaws...
1) All iPods: distortion/crackling when using any EQ settings. Wouldn't be so bad, except the bass rolloff problem means you pretty much need EQ to get good bass. Other mp3 players with the same CPU as the iPod don't have this problem, so its either in the software or the analog audio circuitry. Only workaround is to turn off EQ and live with flat sound.
2) Color iPods: All of the iPods with tv-out have a serious buzzing/ringing distortion problem when using headphones with impedance of less than 32 Ohm (including Apple's in-ear phones). It can most easily be heard in piano solos, but exists in all music. There is NO way Apple could have missed this in testing, since it happens even with their own headphones! It is believed that the problem is due to bad grounding in the new 4-contact headphone jack which is needed to support tv-out. Headphones with impedance over 32Ohm (mostly large "can" types) mask the problem, but since they are less efficient, you have to crank up the volume on the iPod, which increases hiss and distortion.
(not to mention all of the software bugs such as magically disappearing playlists, songs, and album art; the lack of serious on-the-go playlist editing capabilities that most other mp3 players have; the recent firmware update that killed smart playlist auto-updating without syncing first; and the iTunes 5 bugs that erased many people's collections and make their PCs unstable)
Ironically, the shuffles are the only iPods with decent sound quality, because they use a 3rd-party integrated chip with no Apple customizations. I sincerely hope Apple gets tough on these issues when they design their next generation hardware, but based on their continuing to ignore these problems after many hardware and software updates, I have the feeling they just don't care. I certainly won't be buying any of the current iPods until Apple opens up and gets these issues fixed.
(I expect to get modded troll for this...)
Hmm... my Japanese celphone isn't much bigger than an iPod mini, and yet it can both record and playback 320x240 30fps MPEG-4 videos with its 2x optical zoom 2MP digital camera (or from any video source via a composite cable) and QVGA LCD, in addition to AAC audio and, you know, being a celphone. :) You can download music videos and short tv clips right on the phone at 2.4mbps, or download them via PC to a memory card and then just have the phone authorize & decrypt them.
So I see no reason why an iPod mini-sized device would have any trouble playing back MPEG-4 (divx/xvid), and could possibly even record to it.
I'm living abroad and bittorrent was the only was I had to view my favorite shows from home. Since I have a residence in the US where I pay for cable TV, I don't feel like I was doing anything unethical by watching the shows I would be watching if I lived there. Is it really any different from my friends sending me tapes?
Anyway, now I'm looking for a replacement. I figured one option would be to set up a server at home with a web interface and capture card (possibly 2), that lets me select shows to record, transcode them to a low bitrate format, and then make them available on secure ftp. I don't think MythTV is capable of all of this out-of-the-box, so does anyone have any suggestions for Windows or Linux software that can handle this kind of setup easily?
No, the "select" is for 2 players. "UUDDLRLRBA Start" is for 1 player, "UUDDLRLRBA Select Start" for 2.
IIRC, the original owner of this patent really did create the JPEG format (or at least came up with the basics involved) but they filed this patent defensively, just so someone couldn't come along later and do this. But when Forgent bought the patent, they decided not to keep its defensive stance.
IMHO, public remarks about a patent being defensive-only should be enforced strictly, that is, put a comment in the patent record that definitively marks this patent as defensive-only and not eligible for actively suing anyone, and which cannot be removed for the entire life of the patent or any extensions based on it.
Yep... and it's the second time Patrick Stewart has been stabbed by a Nausicaan. ;-D
Anyone else notice that NONE of these laptops had visible scroll wheels or 3rd mouse buttons? I consider those to be absolutely essential, and it boggles my mind that so few laptops include them, even when you pretty much can't buy a new mouse without one.
Hehe I remember that... :)
Me and another guy on the TI-85 assembly ML figured out how to display grayscale on the 1-bit screen by rapidly flipping video pages while adjusting the contrast. I fondly remember looking at 4-bit grayscale nudie pics in 10th grade math class.