The better way to look at a lot of the SCM systems boils down to:
- How technical are your users?
- Do you want something centralized or decentralized or a mix?
- What tools do you have and do they play nicely with the SCM?
- Does the SCM play nicely in your environment?
- Is the product worth the licensing cost (vs a free solution)?
For instance, SVN is definitely better then CVS, but it's centralized. Which has some advantages and disadvantages. It has very nice tools (TortoiseSVN, FSVS) and is easy for end-users to wrap their heads around it. Merging works, is undergoing constant improvement, but may not be suitable to all styles of development.
For our particular shop, SVN simply works. Couple that with being able to use FSVS to version-control our servers (mostly for tracking changes to the file system), and I'm happy enough that it's not worth moving. (Considering our prior SCM was SourceSafe on top of VSS, nearly any SCM was a better choice. SVN was the natural upgrade path back in the 2004-2006 timeframe. They were there, the tools were ready, and it played nicely with our environment.)
If we needed decentralized repositories, then we'd go look at git, Mercurial or one of the others.
At the end of the day, it's more important that you use at least some sort of SCM, rather then which SCM you use.
Every news outlet had some expert on blabbing their mouth about how it was wrestling, video games, depression, lack of strict gun laws, lack of loose gun laws, etc, etc, no one was just blaming the gun man as being crazy and it was his fault.
Crazy gun man has no money.
If we can shift the blame to parties with money and wealth, we can sue them and get money/wealth for our own.
Because it has become easy to create 2 plaintexts that both hash out to the same SHA-1 value. See the section titled "SHA-1" which talks about attacks on the hash function.
This means that SHA-1 and MD5 are not suitable for "signing" usage where you have a plaintext where you want to prove that the original has not been changed. It's too easy for an attacker to alter the plaintext in a easily hidden manner so that the hash stays the same.
Is it still useful for the storage of passwords? Yes, but the writing has been on the wall for SHA-1 and MD5 for close to a decade now. When one weakness is discovered in an algorithm, it's the safe bet to assume that future weaknesses will be discovered and those make make the hash algorithm unsuitable for storing passwords. Better to move to one of the newer, more complex, algorithms while you have time to plan over the course of a few years rather then have to switch suddenly in the space of a month or three after an attack is discovered.
Pretty much, if you're letting Javascript/Flash run from every site you visit (and the dozen or so "associated" sites that the original site pulls content from), you're going to get hacked... monthly. Depending on your luck and whether any ad networks on sites you frequent are serving up malicious ads. The wider variety of sites that you visit, the riskier it gets. But even the big mainstream news sites have served up malware.
NoScript + FlashBlock = the only sane way to browse any more
(with a very small, as small as you can make it and still access the sites, whitelist)
The bad actors are getting closer to completely destroying the rich ad ecosystem. It's gotten continually worse for a few years now. Makes one wonder how much worse it can get before either the users revolt or browser makers are forced to switch to run-only-if-whitelisted.
(I've had a few people this month inquire into learning NoScript/FlashBlock after their machines got infected multiple times in the course of a month.)
8 character passwords (even complete gibberish), where the attacker can grab the hash, are easily cracked within a day or three. Even if salted. Possibly hours if they have a few thousand dollars to throw at the problem. The only defense is to restrict / rate-control attempts and not let them peek at the hashes.
Every character past that point multiples the time by about 50x to 64x. It can be as little as 16x increase per letter if the password is based on dictionary words.
9 or 10 characters is a far better choice at a minimum, and 12-15 is pretty decent against all but the most determined attackers with significant resources. But minimum password length should definitely be somewhere north of 8 characters.
From what I recall, the king of the hill at the moment is NVIDIA CUDA. Which is probably a bit faster then the PS3 and you can stuff 3 or 4 of them into a single box. Not that expensive either for a week's worth of computing time on a small cluster of them. But someone would have to *really* hate you enough to spend a few thousand attempting to break-in. Or they have a bot-net at their disposal to calculate hashes. But real quick you get into the realm of "it's cheaper to install key-logging software".
35 hours is rather quick for New Vegas. You had to have sped through the main quest chain and ignored all the side spots. Even at 70 hours in on my current save, I'm still probably 10-12 hours of gameplay away from the ending. And I still haven't been through places like North Vegas, Vault 22, and a handful of other locations.
Unfortunately, the game is full of bugs. And a lot of it is just sloppiness on the part of the designers. Things like placing objects, then not looking at the GECK 3D window to make sure they're not floating a meter off the ground. Or laying down NavMesh, then placing large rocks/models that interfere with an actor's ability to navigate (which is where all the "critter hiding in a rock" errors come from).
So, combine Bethesda's notoriously buggy engine and Obsidian's lack of attention to detail and you have something of a mess. Enjoyable, but it could have been a whole lot better if care was taken.
There's obviously too many people at Obsidian and Bethesda that just don't give a rat's ass about doing things properly.
Anything less than 10GB for a movie looks like CRAP.
With what codec? The inefficient MPEG1? The better, but still not that great MPEG2? Or one of the newer MPEG4 codecs?
MPEG2 generally did 480p (720x480p, stretched to fit) in 3-5Mbps. h.264 can do 720p easily in 3-6Mbps and 1080p would be in the 4-8Mbps range (maybe as high as 10-12Mbps for really busy features).
For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB.
Mmmm... 720p clips in h.264 run anywhere between 1.5Mbps (tends to end up rather blocky) and as high as 7.5Mbps for more complicated clips. All depends on scene detail, how clean the source is, whether you have a lot of random elements in the background (blowing trees, ocean/lake water with lots of reflections). The middle of the range tends to be in the 3.0-4.5Mbps range for 720p and about double that for 1080p.
So, for a 2 hour film, 1.5Mbps is about 1.2GB, but it could be as much as 5x that if it's a 7.5Mbps clip. The middle of the range would be something around 2.4GB-3.6GB for 720p or 3.6-4.8GB for 1080p for a 2-hour film.
It has pretty decent implications for vehicles. Even with a lead-acid battery, a small amp positive trickle charge will go a long way to making your battery last longer before it's in need of replacement.
Yeah, I have a Coleman solar charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter in the dash. It's about 10cm wide and 40-50cm long.
During the winter months when I don't go anywhere for a week or two at a time, it's the difference between a dead battery and one that will still start the car after two weeks. (If I don't *have* to go out on snowy/icy roads, I won't. And generally, I don't need to unless something comes up. I don't go stir crazy unless the internet stops working.)
Handy little thing. Excellent for any vehicle that you don't drive at least weekly. I just wish it was wired permanently into the system and mounted somewhere.
Neither did a lot of other people. I used it (and developed for it) back in the late-90s and here's my take on Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes is an excellent platform for distributing documents/forms across a wide geographic area, allowing you to work disconnected from the network, with built-in encryption. That's it. It's pretty darned good at letting you work offline and stay in sync with the server.
If you have workers who are constantly disconnected from the network, that need to fill out forms or documents and exchange them with each other. Lotus Notes is a very decent solution, because you get that as part of the base product. So you don't have to spend the time figuring out replication, conflict handling, secure storage and transmission, and an authentication system.
Don't try to treat it as a database, it's not relational and it's not good at that. I've seen that attempted at multiple companies where they try to use it to track inventory, or employees, or attendance, or other weird things and it never works out well. It's document-centric.
As an email client, it was so-so. Good for handling of the actual emails, but not so good for tasks / meetings. Other pure email clients were more standards compliant and much better at handling the PIM features of email / calendar / tasks / addresses.
But with the advent of more widely deployed access to TCP/IP networks (3G, WiFi, ethernet), web server applications are really encroaching on what Lotus Notes was traditionally good at. And the local storage in HTML5 might deal with the disconnected issue (but I'm not certain). So it's a lot harder now then it was 10 years ago to justify a Lotus Notes ecosystem in your company. You can do the same with web server applications or local Java apps or applets for your smart phones that don't require you to pay a per-seat license fee.
My vote is that either someone kicked it, or they had a power issue.
4-way RAID1 is interesting... I thought I was being paraoid at 3-way RAID1. I figure, if I've got a 3-drive unit and the option of going 2-way RAID1 with a hot-spare vs 3-way RAID1 with no spare, I'll go for the latter. Which keeps my data safer instead of it being sitting on a single spindle while the hot-spare spins up and synchronizes. Things have to go really pear-shaped to lose 3 drives at once.
After further research. It appears that Oracle/Sun latest version of Java addressed these issues for the Windows and Linux platforms. This looks like a case of people not updating their Java JRE.
Probably because the Java updater is a piece of garbage that constantly tries to get you to install toolbars from Bing! or Yahoo! or whoever else is attempting to line their pockets this month.
An update tool should not attempt to install additional software.
if you get up over a couple gigs of email Thunderbird starts to die a slow death. It's good for personal use, but for business it's not there yet.
Lies and slander.
I have a 3.3GB IMAP mailbox in Thunderbird. Works just fine. With a 2nd 4.64GB mailbox that holds all my mailing list subscriptions and message history. Plus a few other accounts that brings the total for my IMAP mailboxes up to 10GB.
Where Thunderbird 3 *does* fall down is that a lot of the drag-n-drop actions, where you select more then 2000-3000 messages were pretty much broken in 3.0. It's gotten better in 3.1, but still nowhere as speedy as it was in the 2.x line. Whenever I select > 3000 messages, I make sure to use the right-click menu to move them rather then trying to drag/drop.
(In comparison, Outlook pretty much chokes at the 2GB mark. Unless you have converted to the newer 2003+ PST files. And even then, it's still one big file that is prone to corruption. Thunderbird's biggest issue in comparison is index corruption which either auto-fixes itself or can be easily fixed on a folder-by-folder basis.)
In addition to just resolution, there is also a much higher bitrate. BluRay can hold 25GB per layer - DVD can only hold just over 4GB per layer. Having 5-6 higher data-rate influences video quality. Finally, BluRay uses a more advanced codec than DVD, even at similar BitRates and resolution to DVD, the codec should generate a higher quality video.
Close, but not quite.
You can easily fit a 720p movie on a DVD-R - if you use an advanced codec like h.264 (x264). And probably a 1080p as well, but you wouldn't have room for extras. Traditional DVD MPEG2 encoding bitrate was typically somewhere in the 3-6Mbps range for 480p. To get the same quality with h.264 on 480p, you only need about 1.5-2.5Mbps. Any 720p footage typically can be compressed into about 3-4Mbps and 4-6Mbps for 1080p. Which would still enable you to fit most movies on a dual-layer DVD.
The reason that MPEG2 bitrates for 720p and 1080i are so much higher is because MPEG2 simply does not scale well. Broadcast hi-def is typically MPEG2 at anywhere from 10-20Mbps. To do the same with h.264, you'd only need 1/3 to 1/2 the bitrate. But MPEG2 is the ATSC standard (sigh) and a lot of the set-top box hardware can't handle h.264 yet.
Early Bluray releases used MPEG2 encoding, but more recent releases have finally switched over to MPEG4/h.264/AVC.
We passed "good enough" a long time back and many folks just ain't interested in the latest whizz bang. Hell we have had dual core for...what? 6 years or so now?
While multi-core was available back in '05 and '06 - it wasn't affordable until about mid-year in 2007. That's when the first AMD Athlon X2 CPUs dropped below $200. Once that happened, Intel was forced to hurry up their multi-core offerings and get the price below $200.
I remember it fairly well, because that was the kick-off point for a major round of PC upgrades at the office. We specifically delayed roll-out until we could get inexpensive dual-core machines with 2GB RAM.
I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for a single player linear story that allows me to teleport to any point in the world (negating the world part of the game.)
I'm betting that's aimed at WoW's dungeon finder where it assembles a group from everyone available from multiple servers/realms, transports you to the dungeon, then puts you back where you started.
Realistic? Hell no. Immersion breaking? Hell yes. Enjoyable? Beats the pants off spending an hour or two in LFG trying to get a party together for some of the less popular dungeons. Queue up, go about your business (questing, shopping, talking with friends, looking for resources, sorting your bank), and within 10-20 minutes you'll get a pop-up notification that a group has been put together and off you go. If you're a healer/tank, you can probably shorten that wait to under 2 minutes.
So, it's a mixed blessing. But ends up working better then the old manual LFG system given that people are people. Spend an hour putting a group together. Then wait another 30 minutes for everyone to either get to the summoning stone and/or finish doing whatever they were doing. Whoever gets to the stone first gets to waste the most time waiting. I'm finding that I don't mind the auto-teleportation because it lets me do other things while we wait. I queue up almost all the time when I have an hour or so to play and usually manage 1-2 dungeon runs. Before, I would be lucky to see 2-3 dungeons per week, and mostly on the weekend when I'd have 3-4 hours to play at a stretch.
That being said... I personally think that you should have to find the summoning stone at the entrance to the dungeon before you can queue up for that dungeon. And that's basically what is going to happen in the expansion. A lot of the dungeons supposedly have pre-quests, or have to be found before you can queue up for them. We'll see how well it works out in practice.
Don't assume, check. That's what the Sony controller looks like to me, but not the Kinect. It uses multiple video cameras to build a stereo image of the playing space, identifies actors in it, and does skeletal mapping of their whole bodies. It does facial recognition. It does voice recognition. Watch some of the demo footage, or talk to someone who's played with it themselves. It's considerably closer to "Dream Park" than anything I've heard coming out of Sony or Nintendo.
It's also pretty close to "Creepy Crawly Avenue" with the video cameras that are always running coupled with a machine that is almost always hooked up to the internet.
Sort of, but you can't equip any of it until you're 85. How does one get time to level to max AND grind up a bunch of points in only seven days?
Well, if WotLK is any guideline... people will find where the infinitely respawning mobs that give XP are, then convince other players with healers to sit there and power level them. Which got people from 70 to 80 in WotLK in under 2 days. (There was also a bit of account sharing going on.)
In Wrath, my benchmark for leveling was that 8 hours of/played per level was fast with my less DPS-oriented characters (like my holy priest) taking more like 12-14 hours per level. So if we assume that leveling speed is the same, that's only 40 hours of/played to get to 85 in Cata, probably with an upper end of 60 hours. That's nothing to a dedicated, no-life, player who has a lot of free time.
The PvP points will probably come from battlegrounds, although I don't recall whether rated BGs will launch on Dec 7th or not until Dec 14th.
(I'm fuzzy on the BG/PvP stuff... because the whole "you must have X+ rating" to buy the top tier gear was insulting. It meant that unless you were ahead of the curve, you would be forced to fight against better geared players in the 2nd half of the season. Which would trash your rating, preventing you from buying the better gear. Which was a vicious circle-jerk. So I haven't bothered to Arena it up or even go play Battlegrounds because the gear disparity basically makes you nothing more then roadkill.)
The Heirlooms that they introduced with Wrath, and are continuing with Cata, have put an interesting spin on this, actually. Your main character's efforts can now directly result in alts leveling faster through the content you've already seen. There's XP in the battlegrounds now, too, and PvP heirlooms make that a lot easier to get into.
I still think AoC did it better, or at least different at getting you to the level cap. Life in AoC really doesn't start until you hit 80 because probably 95% of the players are level 80, with multiple alts at 80. (It's also a very small population.)
I played AoC over the summer. When I signed up, I was able to pay an extra $5 or $6 for a "Tortage Starter Pack" which came with (10) 2 or 4 hour double-XP potions. Nice little perk and got me to level 80 in about 3-4 weeks before I had time to get bored. I still had 2 potions left by the time I hit 80.
In addition, they also have a feature called "offline levels". Every 3 or 4 days, as long as your account is paid up, you earn 1 free level. You can save them up, or use them as you go, or whatever. They can be applied to any character over level 30 on that account. So a lot of players grind a character up to about level 60 or 65 or 70, then use free levels to get instantly to 80.
You can also, once you have a character past a certain level (50? 80?) start a 2nd character at level 50 instead of level 1.
(In WoW, I have both the heirloom shoulders and chest for all the characters that I expect to be playing in Cata. As well as the heirloom weapons and a few of the 2% mana/health trinkets.)
- The recession/depression that we've been suffering with for the past 2+ years.
- Multi-core CPUs hit mainstream back in '07 when dual-core chips dropped below $200-$300. A multi-core machine simply runs circles around most single-core machines, especially when it comes to staying responsive to the user. This responsiveness also gives them better longevity, because it takes a lot longer for the user to say "this is too slow".
- Longer time period between CPU power doubling. In the early 90s, a machine that was 3 years old would be about 6-8x as slow as a brand new one. This decreased to about a 15-18 month doubling cycle by 2000 and other then dual-core, things have slowed down that single-core CPU power really only doubles every 24-30 months now. So a brand new single-core machine is only maybe twice as fast (and sometimes only 50-70% faster) as one that is three years old.
- Enough power to get things done. This started to happen back around 2002-2003 with the advent of the 2GHz machines and the ability to pack 1GB RAM into a WinXP box.
Hell, right now, I'm more interested in a dual-core Atom or ARM CPU then I am in a 8-core desktop CPU. Because other then boosting the speed of individual cores, the 4-core CPU that I have now is plenty for my needs. It's memory that is often the limiting factor (even with 4GB). And after more memory, a SSD is probably second on my list for upgrades. The O/S and CPU are way down in 3rd/4th place.
PCs now last longer, since the exploding capacitor problem was solved. The result is a dip in sales of new machines and therefore a dip in whatever new junkware comes with new PCs...
Funny you should mention that. As we lose a part or motherboard or PSU about once a quarter from that fiasco. In fact, I just swapped out a video card this weekend that went belly-up due to the goo leaking out the top of the capacitors.
This is hardware that's been running for probably 3 years without issues. So the cap issue can be extremely well hidden and may only show up after a few years.
That is highly amusing. The panicked "quick grab water block, throw water block" was funny. The even more panicked attempt to destroy everything that's on fire with the tool was funnier.
(Not quite enough to make me want to play it, although it's slightly intriguing.)
(sigh) No, I looked at OOBase as well (last look was OO.org 3.1).
Frankly, they're still 5+ years behind MSAccess - or rather, they don't understand the things that MSAccess is good at.
There are a lot of situations where the heft and bulk of putting a short-lived data set in pgsql or Oracle is a bad idea. Situations where the data doesn't need to stay on a live server after a few short weeks, but needs to be kept in a format where you can easily query or produce reports months or years later - without having to reload the data into some central DB server. I can stuff that binary blob into a version control system or other file sharing system and be assured that the person on the other end can open it up and run quick ad-hoc queries against the data set.
OOBase does not yet cope well with that. Or rather, it comes closest here.
OOBase also sucks as a central meeting point for your data. If you need to pull data from another OOBase file while simultaneously pulling data down from a DB server and then do a bit of local table massaging to get output, OOBase fails because OOBase can only have a single data source. Unless you decide to make all of your OOBase files global data sources. I've seen Access used for almost 2 decades now as a way to move data from point A to point B, with a bit of massaging along the way.
Lastly... in 2010 - OOBase still cannot easily import/export from CSV - without going through OOCalc. Hell, this applies to just about all the braindead and missing import/export functionality in OOBase. A database tool that can't help me get data in/out of the system is useless and a toy.
I'd love to replace MSAccess - it would let us get off of Microsoft Windows. But there's nothing in the open-source world that fits the niche. And we're not even using things like macros, forms or code (or very little) as we move stuff like that up to an application/web server.
Slashdot Mirror
The better way to look at a lot of the SCM systems boils down to:
- How technical are your users?
- Do you want something centralized or decentralized or a mix?
- What tools do you have and do they play nicely with the SCM?
- Does the SCM play nicely in your environment?
- Is the product worth the licensing cost (vs a free solution)?
For instance, SVN is definitely better then CVS, but it's centralized. Which has some advantages and disadvantages. It has very nice tools (TortoiseSVN, FSVS) and is easy for end-users to wrap their heads around it. Merging works, is undergoing constant improvement, but may not be suitable to all styles of development.
For our particular shop, SVN simply works. Couple that with being able to use FSVS to version-control our servers (mostly for tracking changes to the file system), and I'm happy enough that it's not worth moving. (Considering our prior SCM was SourceSafe on top of VSS, nearly any SCM was a better choice. SVN was the natural upgrade path back in the 2004-2006 timeframe. They were there, the tools were ready, and it played nicely with our environment.)
If we needed decentralized repositories, then we'd go look at git, Mercurial or one of the others.
At the end of the day, it's more important that you use at least some sort of SCM, rather then which SCM you use.
Every news outlet had some expert on blabbing their mouth about how it was wrestling, video games, depression, lack of strict gun laws, lack of loose gun laws, etc, etc, no one was just blaming the gun man as being crazy and it was his fault.
Crazy gun man has no money.
If we can shift the blame to parties with money and wealth, we can sue them and get money/wealth for our own.
Why is SHA1 deprecated?...
Because it has become easy to create 2 plaintexts that both hash out to the same SHA-1 value. See the section titled "SHA-1" which talks about attacks on the hash function.
This means that SHA-1 and MD5 are not suitable for "signing" usage where you have a plaintext where you want to prove that the original has not been changed. It's too easy for an attacker to alter the plaintext in a easily hidden manner so that the hash stays the same.
Is it still useful for the storage of passwords? Yes, but the writing has been on the wall for SHA-1 and MD5 for close to a decade now. When one weakness is discovered in an algorithm, it's the safe bet to assume that future weaknesses will be discovered and those make make the hash algorithm unsuitable for storing passwords. Better to move to one of the newer, more complex, algorithms while you have time to plan over the course of a few years rather then have to switch suddenly in the space of a month or three after an attack is discovered.
Firefox is not immune.
Pretty much, if you're letting Javascript/Flash run from every site you visit (and the dozen or so "associated" sites that the original site pulls content from), you're going to get hacked... monthly. Depending on your luck and whether any ad networks on sites you frequent are serving up malicious ads. The wider variety of sites that you visit, the riskier it gets. But even the big mainstream news sites have served up malware.
NoScript + FlashBlock = the only sane way to browse any more
(with a very small, as small as you can make it and still access the sites, whitelist)
The bad actors are getting closer to completely destroying the rich ad ecosystem. It's gotten continually worse for a few years now. Makes one wonder how much worse it can get before either the users revolt or browser makers are forced to switch to run-only-if-whitelisted.
(I've had a few people this month inquire into learning NoScript/FlashBlock after their machines got infected multiple times in the course of a month.)
The short-answer...
8 character passwords (even complete gibberish), where the attacker can grab the hash, are easily cracked within a day or three. Even if salted. Possibly hours if they have a few thousand dollars to throw at the problem. The only defense is to restrict / rate-control attempts and not let them peek at the hashes.
Every character past that point multiples the time by about 50x to 64x. It can be as little as 16x increase per letter if the password is based on dictionary words.
9 or 10 characters is a far better choice at a minimum, and 12-15 is pretty decent against all but the most determined attackers with significant resources. But minimum password length should definitely be somewhere north of 8 characters.
From what I recall, the king of the hill at the moment is NVIDIA CUDA. Which is probably a bit faster then the PS3 and you can stuff 3 or 4 of them into a single box. Not that expensive either for a week's worth of computing time on a small cluster of them. But someone would have to *really* hate you enough to spend a few thousand attempting to break-in. Or they have a bot-net at their disposal to calculate hashes. But real quick you get into the realm of "it's cheaper to install key-logging software".
35 hours is rather quick for New Vegas. You had to have sped through the main quest chain and ignored all the side spots. Even at 70 hours in on my current save, I'm still probably 10-12 hours of gameplay away from the ending. And I still haven't been through places like North Vegas, Vault 22, and a handful of other locations.
Unfortunately, the game is full of bugs. And a lot of it is just sloppiness on the part of the designers. Things like placing objects, then not looking at the GECK 3D window to make sure they're not floating a meter off the ground. Or laying down NavMesh, then placing large rocks/models that interfere with an actor's ability to navigate (which is where all the "critter hiding in a rock" errors come from).
So, combine Bethesda's notoriously buggy engine and Obsidian's lack of attention to detail and you have something of a mess. Enjoyable, but it could have been a whole lot better if care was taken.
There's obviously too many people at Obsidian and Bethesda that just don't give a rat's ass about doing things properly.
Anything less than 10GB for a movie looks like CRAP.
With what codec? The inefficient MPEG1? The better, but still not that great MPEG2? Or one of the newer MPEG4 codecs?
MPEG2 generally did 480p (720x480p, stretched to fit) in 3-5Mbps. h.264 can do 720p easily in 3-6Mbps and 1080p would be in the 4-8Mbps range (maybe as high as 10-12Mbps for really busy features).
For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB.
Mmmm... 720p clips in h.264 run anywhere between 1.5Mbps (tends to end up rather blocky) and as high as 7.5Mbps for more complicated clips. All depends on scene detail, how clean the source is, whether you have a lot of random elements in the background (blowing trees, ocean/lake water with lots of reflections). The middle of the range tends to be in the 3.0-4.5Mbps range for 720p and about double that for 1080p.
So, for a 2 hour film, 1.5Mbps is about 1.2GB, but it could be as much as 5x that if it's a 7.5Mbps clip. The middle of the range would be something around 2.4GB-3.6GB for 720p or 3.6-4.8GB for 1080p for a 2-hour film.
It has pretty decent implications for vehicles. Even with a lead-acid battery, a small amp positive trickle charge will go a long way to making your battery last longer before it's in need of replacement.
Yeah, I have a Coleman solar charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter in the dash. It's about 10cm wide and 40-50cm long.
During the winter months when I don't go anywhere for a week or two at a time, it's the difference between a dead battery and one that will still start the car after two weeks. (If I don't *have* to go out on snowy/icy roads, I won't. And generally, I don't need to unless something comes up. I don't go stir crazy unless the internet stops working.)
Handy little thing. Excellent for any vehicle that you don't drive at least weekly. I just wish it was wired permanently into the system and mounted somewhere.
Microsoft never did understand Lotus Notes.
Neither did a lot of other people. I used it (and developed for it) back in the late-90s and here's my take on Lotus Notes.
Lotus Notes is an excellent platform for distributing documents/forms across a wide geographic area, allowing you to work disconnected from the network, with built-in encryption. That's it. It's pretty darned good at letting you work offline and stay in sync with the server.
If you have workers who are constantly disconnected from the network, that need to fill out forms or documents and exchange them with each other. Lotus Notes is a very decent solution, because you get that as part of the base product. So you don't have to spend the time figuring out replication, conflict handling, secure storage and transmission, and an authentication system.
Don't try to treat it as a database, it's not relational and it's not good at that. I've seen that attempted at multiple companies where they try to use it to track inventory, or employees, or attendance, or other weird things and it never works out well. It's document-centric.
As an email client, it was so-so. Good for handling of the actual emails, but not so good for tasks / meetings. Other pure email clients were more standards compliant and much better at handling the PIM features of email / calendar / tasks / addresses.
But with the advent of more widely deployed access to TCP/IP networks (3G, WiFi, ethernet), web server applications are really encroaching on what Lotus Notes was traditionally good at. And the local storage in HTML5 might deal with the disconnected issue (but I'm not certain). So it's a lot harder now then it was 10 years ago to justify a Lotus Notes ecosystem in your company. You can do the same with web server applications or local Java apps or applets for your smart phones that don't require you to pay a per-seat license fee.
My vote is that either someone kicked it, or they had a power issue.
4-way RAID1 is interesting... I thought I was being paraoid at 3-way RAID1. I figure, if I've got a 3-drive unit and the option of going 2-way RAID1 with a hot-spare vs 3-way RAID1 with no spare, I'll go for the latter. Which keeps my data safer instead of it being sitting on a single spindle while the hot-spare spins up and synchronizes. Things have to go really pear-shaped to lose 3 drives at once.
After further research. It appears that Oracle/Sun latest version of Java addressed these issues for the Windows and Linux platforms. This looks like a case of people not updating their Java JRE.
Probably because the Java updater is a piece of garbage that constantly tries to get you to install toolbars from Bing! or Yahoo! or whoever else is attempting to line their pockets this month.
An update tool should not attempt to install additional software.
if you get up over a couple gigs of email Thunderbird starts to die a slow death. It's good for personal use, but for business it's not there yet.
Lies and slander.
I have a 3.3GB IMAP mailbox in Thunderbird. Works just fine. With a 2nd 4.64GB mailbox that holds all my mailing list subscriptions and message history. Plus a few other accounts that brings the total for my IMAP mailboxes up to 10GB.
Where Thunderbird 3 *does* fall down is that a lot of the drag-n-drop actions, where you select more then 2000-3000 messages were pretty much broken in 3.0. It's gotten better in 3.1, but still nowhere as speedy as it was in the 2.x line. Whenever I select > 3000 messages, I make sure to use the right-click menu to move them rather then trying to drag/drop.
(In comparison, Outlook pretty much chokes at the 2GB mark. Unless you have converted to the newer 2003+ PST files. And even then, it's still one big file that is prone to corruption. Thunderbird's biggest issue in comparison is index corruption which either auto-fixes itself or can be easily fixed on a folder-by-folder basis.)
In addition to just resolution, there is also a much higher bitrate. BluRay can hold 25GB per layer - DVD can only hold just over 4GB per layer. Having 5-6 higher data-rate influences video quality. Finally, BluRay uses a more advanced codec than DVD, even at similar BitRates and resolution to DVD, the codec should generate a higher quality video.
Close, but not quite.
You can easily fit a 720p movie on a DVD-R - if you use an advanced codec like h.264 (x264). And probably a 1080p as well, but you wouldn't have room for extras. Traditional DVD MPEG2 encoding bitrate was typically somewhere in the 3-6Mbps range for 480p. To get the same quality with h.264 on 480p, you only need about 1.5-2.5Mbps. Any 720p footage typically can be compressed into about 3-4Mbps and 4-6Mbps for 1080p. Which would still enable you to fit most movies on a dual-layer DVD.
The reason that MPEG2 bitrates for 720p and 1080i are so much higher is because MPEG2 simply does not scale well. Broadcast hi-def is typically MPEG2 at anywhere from 10-20Mbps. To do the same with h.264, you'd only need 1/3 to 1/2 the bitrate. But MPEG2 is the ATSC standard (sigh) and a lot of the set-top box hardware can't handle h.264 yet.
Early Bluray releases used MPEG2 encoding, but more recent releases have finally switched over to MPEG4/h.264/AVC.
We passed "good enough" a long time back and many folks just ain't interested in the latest whizz bang. Hell we have had dual core for...what? 6 years or so now?
While multi-core was available back in '05 and '06 - it wasn't affordable until about mid-year in 2007. That's when the first AMD Athlon X2 CPUs dropped below $200. Once that happened, Intel was forced to hurry up their multi-core offerings and get the price below $200.
I remember it fairly well, because that was the kick-off point for a major round of PC upgrades at the office. We specifically delayed roll-out until we could get inexpensive dual-core machines with 2GB RAM.
I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for a single player linear story that allows me to teleport to any point in the world (negating the world part of the game.)
I'm betting that's aimed at WoW's dungeon finder where it assembles a group from everyone available from multiple servers/realms, transports you to the dungeon, then puts you back where you started.
Realistic? Hell no. Immersion breaking? Hell yes. Enjoyable? Beats the pants off spending an hour or two in LFG trying to get a party together for some of the less popular dungeons. Queue up, go about your business (questing, shopping, talking with friends, looking for resources, sorting your bank), and within 10-20 minutes you'll get a pop-up notification that a group has been put together and off you go. If you're a healer/tank, you can probably shorten that wait to under 2 minutes.
So, it's a mixed blessing. But ends up working better then the old manual LFG system given that people are people. Spend an hour putting a group together. Then wait another 30 minutes for everyone to either get to the summoning stone and/or finish doing whatever they were doing. Whoever gets to the stone first gets to waste the most time waiting. I'm finding that I don't mind the auto-teleportation because it lets me do other things while we wait. I queue up almost all the time when I have an hour or so to play and usually manage 1-2 dungeon runs. Before, I would be lucky to see 2-3 dungeons per week, and mostly on the weekend when I'd have 3-4 hours to play at a stretch.
That being said... I personally think that you should have to find the summoning stone at the entrance to the dungeon before you can queue up for that dungeon. And that's basically what is going to happen in the expansion. A lot of the dungeons supposedly have pre-quests, or have to be found before you can queue up for them. We'll see how well it works out in practice.
And they don't track JavaScript infection vectors (only Java, Flash, Adobe PDF, and IE).
Unless they're confusing Java with JavaScript.
Don't assume, check. That's what the Sony controller looks like to me, but not the Kinect. It uses multiple video cameras to build a stereo image of the playing space, identifies actors in it, and does skeletal mapping of their whole bodies. It does facial recognition. It does voice recognition. Watch some of the demo footage, or talk to someone who's played with it themselves. It's considerably closer to "Dream Park" than anything I've heard coming out of Sony or Nintendo.
It's also pretty close to "Creepy Crawly Avenue" with the video cameras that are always running coupled with a machine that is almost always hooked up to the internet.
Sort of, but you can't equip any of it until you're 85. How does one get time to level to max AND grind up a bunch of points in only seven days?
/played per level was fast with my less DPS-oriented characters (like my holy priest) taking more like 12-14 hours per level. So if we assume that leveling speed is the same, that's only 40 hours of /played to get to 85 in Cata, probably with an upper end of 60 hours. That's nothing to a dedicated, no-life, player who has a lot of free time.
Well, if WotLK is any guideline... people will find where the infinitely respawning mobs that give XP are, then convince other players with healers to sit there and power level them. Which got people from 70 to 80 in WotLK in under 2 days. (There was also a bit of account sharing going on.)
In Wrath, my benchmark for leveling was that 8 hours of
The PvP points will probably come from battlegrounds, although I don't recall whether rated BGs will launch on Dec 7th or not until Dec 14th.
(I'm fuzzy on the BG/PvP stuff... because the whole "you must have X+ rating" to buy the top tier gear was insulting. It meant that unless you were ahead of the curve, you would be forced to fight against better geared players in the 2nd half of the season. Which would trash your rating, preventing you from buying the better gear. Which was a vicious circle-jerk. So I haven't bothered to Arena it up or even go play Battlegrounds because the gear disparity basically makes you nothing more then roadkill.)
The Heirlooms that they introduced with Wrath, and are continuing with Cata, have put an interesting spin on this, actually. Your main character's efforts can now directly result in alts leveling faster through the content you've already seen. There's XP in the battlegrounds now, too, and PvP heirlooms make that a lot easier to get into.
I still think AoC did it better, or at least different at getting you to the level cap. Life in AoC really doesn't start until you hit 80 because probably 95% of the players are level 80, with multiple alts at 80. (It's also a very small population.)
I played AoC over the summer. When I signed up, I was able to pay an extra $5 or $6 for a "Tortage Starter Pack" which came with (10) 2 or 4 hour double-XP potions. Nice little perk and got me to level 80 in about 3-4 weeks before I had time to get bored. I still had 2 potions left by the time I hit 80.
In addition, they also have a feature called "offline levels". Every 3 or 4 days, as long as your account is paid up, you earn 1 free level. You can save them up, or use them as you go, or whatever. They can be applied to any character over level 30 on that account. So a lot of players grind a character up to about level 60 or 65 or 70, then use free levels to get instantly to 80.
You can also, once you have a character past a certain level (50? 80?) start a 2nd character at level 50 instead of level 1.
(In WoW, I have both the heirloom shoulders and chest for all the characters that I expect to be playing in Cata. As well as the heirloom weapons and a few of the 2% mana/health trinkets.)
It's a combination of:
- The recession/depression that we've been suffering with for the past 2+ years.
- Multi-core CPUs hit mainstream back in '07 when dual-core chips dropped below $200-$300. A multi-core machine simply runs circles around most single-core machines, especially when it comes to staying responsive to the user. This responsiveness also gives them better longevity, because it takes a lot longer for the user to say "this is too slow".
- Longer time period between CPU power doubling. In the early 90s, a machine that was 3 years old would be about 6-8x as slow as a brand new one. This decreased to about a 15-18 month doubling cycle by 2000 and other then dual-core, things have slowed down that single-core CPU power really only doubles every 24-30 months now. So a brand new single-core machine is only maybe twice as fast (and sometimes only 50-70% faster) as one that is three years old.
- Enough power to get things done. This started to happen back around 2002-2003 with the advent of the 2GHz machines and the ability to pack 1GB RAM into a WinXP box.
Hell, right now, I'm more interested in a dual-core Atom or ARM CPU then I am in a 8-core desktop CPU. Because other then boosting the speed of individual cores, the 4-core CPU that I have now is plenty for my needs. It's memory that is often the limiting factor (even with 4GB). And after more memory, a SSD is probably second on my list for upgrades. The O/S and CPU are way down in 3rd/4th place.
PCs now last longer, since the exploding capacitor problem was solved. The result is a dip in sales of new machines and therefore a dip in whatever new junkware comes with new PCs...
Funny you should mention that. As we lose a part or motherboard or PSU about once a quarter from that fiasco. In fact, I just swapped out a video card this weekend that went belly-up due to the goo leaking out the top of the capacitors.
This is hardware that's been running for probably 3 years without issues. So the cap issue can be extremely well hidden and may only show up after a few years.
That is highly amusing. The panicked "quick grab water block, throw water block" was funny. The even more panicked attempt to destroy everything that's on fire with the tool was funnier.
(Not quite enough to make me want to play it, although it's slightly intriguing.)
(sigh) No, I looked at OOBase as well (last look was OO.org 3.1).
Frankly, they're still 5+ years behind MSAccess - or rather, they don't understand the things that MSAccess is good at.
There are a lot of situations where the heft and bulk of putting a short-lived data set in pgsql or Oracle is a bad idea. Situations where the data doesn't need to stay on a live server after a few short weeks, but needs to be kept in a format where you can easily query or produce reports months or years later - without having to reload the data into some central DB server. I can stuff that binary blob into a version control system or other file sharing system and be assured that the person on the other end can open it up and run quick ad-hoc queries against the data set.
OOBase does not yet cope well with that. Or rather, it comes closest here.
OOBase also sucks as a central meeting point for your data. If you need to pull data from another OOBase file while simultaneously pulling data down from a DB server and then do a bit of local table massaging to get output, OOBase fails because OOBase can only have a single data source. Unless you decide to make all of your OOBase files global data sources. I've seen Access used for almost 2 decades now as a way to move data from point A to point B, with a bit of massaging along the way.
Lastly... in 2010 - OOBase still cannot easily import/export from CSV - without going through OOCalc. Hell, this applies to just about all the braindead and missing import/export functionality in OOBase. A database tool that can't help me get data in/out of the system is useless and a toy.
I'd love to replace MSAccess - it would let us get off of Microsoft Windows. But there's nothing in the open-source world that fits the niche. And we're not even using things like macros, forms or code (or very little) as we move stuff like that up to an application/web server.
licensed at no charge
Only if your machine is strictly used for personal use.
Can't use it in a small business or corporation or any other situation where you make money (not sure where non-profits fall on the licensing).