Here here! On my first android phone with them I saw that they had bundled some crappy NFL sports app, nascar bs, as well as Sprint TV and a couple others. They autostart at boot, were difficult to remove. They were the reason one of the first android apps I went looking for was a task manager to kill them with.
Just upgraded my phone last weekend, those are still bundled, although I haven't done an update yet and gotten hit with blockbuster (seriously? just f'in die already, your customers hate you and nobody cares... It's because of them I've been using netflix since '99) & their nova shooter. Now I have to keep an eye out and reject firmware until their new 'removal tool' is released.
This would have been easier to put together 20 years ago, I think they tried to do a movie a couple of times already but it fell apart.
Nowadays, this is going trying to take the 'futuristic' concepts of global spanning data networks and present them to people that pretty much grew up with them in place, minus the neural interfaces... It was a great book, and I remember in the late 80's was excited to see they were working on a movie. Now, well, I don't think they're going to be able to pull it off.
Next up, Snow Crash? Why not, these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.
Years back I remember a symantec app on windows that would pop up a dialogue box when it was trying to shut down that just said:
Should not see this.
with a big red X on the left and a cancel button on it. I had a screenshot of it somewhere, it was my favorite error message to date. I was always thinking ok... you took the time to have it pop a box with that message in it, but couldn't actually put any useful info in it?
That's what I was going to ask, how do they even have money anymore? What do they actually do? Do people still pay them for some kind of portal service or is it all ad based revenue from aim or something?
Having spent close to 10 years working in Gaming Systems (back end accounting, marketing & reporting systems, real time concurrent data collection for 4-5k+ nodes), I don't think there's really a stigma attached at least here in the us. I've never worked at casino property directly though, staying more with the companies that provide them software/hardware.
I've worked as an FTE and as a contractor for a couple of the larger international players in the space and I think overall it was good experience, casino marketing can be a moral issue for you as you're essentially trying to get people to give you their money praying on their hopes that they can get something for nothing, but that's how all gambling works.
I've since moved out of that industry, from there to direct marketing & data mining/warehousing from there into ecommerce focused, and now onto commercial services (printing, transaction management etc).
I saw a couple people point out travel, depending on what your specific role is and who you're working for you can pretty much end up anywhere. Just in North America, from Indian gaming, to Riverboat gaming & established "legalized gaming zones (ie. Vegas, AC etc) and state run (Winnipeg/Quebec/Sudbury) you could end up all over the continent, then internationally there's large markets in europe, asia, australia, even south africa.
I say go for it. You'll learn some things and collect a check, just like any other job.
The first Mechwarrior was what caused me to buy my first EGA card.
Mechwarrior 2 pushed me to buy my first 3D accelerator (was a voodoo). I think also a 3 axis force feedback joystick for that one too.
3 I don't remember much, although I have the cd still, 4 was pretty good although I really missed the just being able totally overhaul a mech however you wanted and the keep going forever contract model from 1.
Anyway, this should be sweet, it's about time for a new version.
If you're stuck on windows, have no control of the link, need to guarantee delivery, need encryption options, are stuck in specific delivery timeframes, and need it scriptable with triggering etc. there's quite a few commercial options.
Connect direct is geared more towards highly distributed delivery channels, where you've got lots of ingress/egress points to different locations (think multi site, multi customer distribution) so it could be a bit overkill, but aspera is great at utilizing a link to it's peak (it'll udp flood a pipe and guarantee delivery), in fact if you don't watch what you're doing you can pretty much storm everyone else off the link, but your data will get there >;)
That's true, not sure if sony is going to open it up in the future or not.
Also that yellow dog ppc distro that's officially supported has a long way to go. They don't pack the current release with an mp3 decoder or flash support (which is turning away a lot of people that try it), but at least it ships with gcc.
More like JFS2 or GPFS for solaris and I don't have to buy SF or Cluster Filesystem from Symantec anymore.
Also, I won't have to wait for those things in ZFS that Sun keeps saying "oh, uhm, yeah we know about that but we don't have a development ETA yet." (non-mpxio multipath imports (SDD), path fail timing issues, the 'hot spare' trick etc.)
Over the last few years, your primary fiction writing focus has changed substantially. From early works such as 'Snow Crash' which fall into the more hard core genra of science fiction, to the recent release of 'System of the World' which along with the 'Cryptonomicon' and the rest of the Baroque cycle lead more towards a historical period when technology was just beginning to enter the age we know today. What caused this change? Are future works going to stay in this current type of setting or will they return to the near future with the grim outlook you seemed to hold in earlier years?
I'm so happy that there are so many people out there like this, otherwise a lot of us would have to go out and get real jobs...
Have one, no problems with it.
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've got one of the plextor PX-708a's and have been using it for about a month and a half now. I've been very impressed with this unit for a couple of reasons.
When I purchased it, it was the same price as 4x dvd burner/combo burner drives at the time. Covered all formats (like a good combo drive should. DVD_+R/RW, CD-R/RW). Still had a high burn speed for cd's (40x), quite a few of the high speed combo burners I was looking at would only cut a cd at around 24x. It's offered with a white or black faceplate (I picked black to match the new pc I had just built):P
This is the first plextor drive i've owned, usually staying in the yamaha camp. It came with 1-8x DVD+R and my attempts to purchase more at fry's/staples/compusa all failed miserably. Once that one was gone, I started trying to burn 4x rated dvd+r's at 8x and have gone through a couple of 10 packs with no problems. I use this unit in a winxp machine, with Nero Ultra to burn it (I didin't even look at the software that came with it, I think it was a plextor branded app) and have been very happy with it overall.
I started reading this thread and started seeing the usual "But why, 8x is too fast" bla bla bla type stuff, but until we get to the generation 4+ of these devices speed is still going to be the selling point of dvd burners. Remember when the 4x cd burners came out? People were saying they're a waste of money and you don't need something that fast then too. But now, we're at the point where you can pretty much just go and buy a new cd burner without checking the speed and you've still got something screaming fast and rock solid. So stop bitching about device enhancements.
Try doing it at 3:00am on a detacenter floor with a leatherman on a pair of quantum atlas 10k u3 160 drives. Somehow 2 drives in a raid5 array failed within 6 hours of each other and the customer needed to get back data from changes they made that day.
I did it, it worked, but I never expected to see a headline about someone doing it.
Technologies like this are complementary to each other.
As someone previously pointed out, one of the major problems facing device manufacturers is transferring the heat out of the die. When improvements are made in this area, then the problem will still be transferring the heat away from the die where it can be dissipated by however (water cooled slug, air cooled sink, etc. etc.) once the heat can be effectively moved away from the die-face at 99.999% efficiency there's still the issue of radiating the heat away from the assembly altogether. Then there is still the ambient air temp (have you priced out a redundant 10+ ton HVAC system for a datacenter lately?)...
It's all a catch 22 but anytime a significant improvement is made in one of these areas is leads to higher performance and lower costs (tolerances can come down or stay at the same level for a bit while increasing performance), which by themselves may seem minor, but when they are all taken together make a significant improvement.
1) No, because it still uses a chemical propellant to accelerate a jacketed lead slug to an appropriate velocity where it will damage it's intended target, vs. a focused light projection device... And it doesn't go phew!:P
2) The article states that the device uses biometric comparisons, where the unique electrical signature generated by the human body is compared against the one that is stored. The students were proving that fingerprint comparison (essentially mathematically comparing points in a pattern) can be (semi) easily faked.
The primary problems I see here are:
1. OS stability (Bmw 745, Windows, anyone?). People (myself included) rely on firearms as a last resort in a situation where lives are at risk. Do you really want your last chance dependant on a piece of software (Insert offshore coding joke here)?
2. Magazine replacement. Most of the pre-loaded barrel designs the have been brought to market have either fallen into an extremely tight niche, or have failed altogether. I.E.: H&K P11 Underwater Pistol Pancor Jackhammer
Major exception is Metal Storm Tech
3. As someone pointed out you can cover up the camera hole, also what happens at night? Dark, muzzle flash, white balance etc. etc.
4. Planning GPS? GPS reception inside sucks (Urban ops/home defense). Especially if you're trying to make this thing as compact as possible and keep it balanced. You're going to have to sacrifice antenna and component placement and size.
5. Battery life... Yeah, watch batteries last a long time, but you're not running sensors, camera's, etc. etc. with them.
6. Memory capacity. I know when I go to the range I usually drop about 200+ rounds through a couple of handguns... How many pictures, at what res, + time info, + gps info is this thing going to store, and if it does keep a few then overwrite the oldest, people can just take it to the range after they did something bad with it and kill (hehe) the evidence.
7. Accuracy - I don't even want to touch this one until after I shoot one... Firearms have longer barrels for a reason.
8. Programming - Dealers are going to have to be able to reprogram the signature it accepts for operation, and probably gunsmiths as well. It's not hard to get gunsmithing tools.
We're all geeks here, how long do you think any type of data security will really hold up on one of these?
I can't remember the rest of them but I had a couple more as well... I'm too tired I guess.
For some reason I'm having flashbacks to IBM's Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and it's failure to become a widespread standard when it was put up against FC-AL for a scsi drive interconnect... I used to use SSA quite a bit and was happy with it at the time. Nice small 4-wire connectors, redundant pathing to the drives by default (serial looping). Good throughput, high number of devices per chain, etc. etc.
Actually I just checked and IBM still sells the 7133's. The product line has to be pushing 5+ years old now and it's still only running at 160MB/s as well. Maybe with these new drives coming out they will reintroduce a modified version of SSA to fit new standards...
Ok, well not having ever really used a mac I can't say much about the double S key (or those keys with pictures of fruit on them, I mean what are those for? Ordering lunch?), but I pretty much use every key on my board regularly (even ^'s!)...
I'm looking over the design, and pretty much eveything is useful &| required. I think I use ~90% of the key's on this board >50% of the time; "What can you really drop?!". Ok, maybe pause/break has lost a little functionality now, and I might not use that one as much as I used to, but I'd rather have that than those windoze keys, you can still pause scrolling bios screens with it if you need to see something pre-boot.
I guess if I had to vote, I'd drop:
1. The caps lock key (when's the last time you typed a whole sentance in caps, or used the caps lock key to do it?)
2. The windows keys (all three of the little buggars)
3. I *might* give up my pause/break.
I cannot say I love this layout though. I do think we need to relook at what keys are where, and the ergo keyboards are kind of annoying (I used them for about 3 years at my job and home, and ended up going back to a flat one).
And just so the rest of the keys don't feel left out... 4678qx#_=+\{}[]
I was going to post a thread about how crappy the new logo looked and how pathetic some of these marketing ideas are but you beat me to it:(
I'm still mixed over this one.
on
Pattern Recognition
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I read this over last weekend, and I have to agree with some of the reviews here, the first 1/3 is pretty slow, but then it moves back into the old Gibson style breakneck speed where you can't stop until you put it down.
The only thing about this latest offering is that it seems to be moving in a trend away from sci-fi and they 'cyberpunk' related themes that really hooked me on Gibson's earlier writings (i.e. Neuromancer etc. etc.). I think that if instead of reading those more hard edge technology based stories I had read the later books first (Pattern Recognition/All tomorrow's parties) I'm not sure if I would have lumped him into the same category and not sure if I would have been anticipating his new releases as much as I usually do.
Honestly, every card *has* to have a UID embedded in it for basic level 1 counterfit protection.
IE. Load card with $1000, whip out the smart card reader/encoder, copy the current image off the chip, go spend the money, reinsert card and burn the original image back to it and you've got your $1000 back. If there's no backend tracking on this thing france's economy is going to go from #5 straight into the toilet.
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My dog would go nuts over this, he'd never get tired of chasing a flying cat around the yard. I want one just to see how he'd react to it.
& stop accepting bitcoin articles to be greenlit for the front page. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Here here! On my first android phone with them I saw that they had bundled some crappy NFL sports app, nascar bs, as well as Sprint TV and a couple others. They autostart at boot, were difficult to remove. They were the reason one of the first android apps I went looking for was a task manager to kill them with.
Just upgraded my phone last weekend, those are still bundled, although I haven't done an update yet and gotten hit with blockbuster (seriously? just f'in die already, your customers hate you and nobody cares... It's because of them I've been using netflix since '99) & their nova shooter. Now I have to keep an eye out and reject firmware until their new 'removal tool' is released.
This would have been easier to put together 20 years ago, I think they tried to do a movie a couple of times already but it fell apart.
Nowadays, this is going trying to take the 'futuristic' concepts of global spanning data networks and present them to people that pretty much grew up with them in place, minus the neural interfaces... It was a great book, and I remember in the late 80's was excited to see they were working on a movie. Now, well, I don't think they're going to be able to pull it off.
Next up, Snow Crash? Why not, these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.
too true.
Years back I remember a symantec app on windows that would pop up a dialogue box when it was trying to shut down that just said:
Should not see this.
with a big red X on the left and a cancel button on it. I had a screenshot of it somewhere, it was my favorite error message to date. I was always thinking ok... you took the time to have it pop a box with that message in it, but couldn't actually put any useful info in it?
That's what I was going to ask, how do they even have money anymore? What do they actually do? Do people still pay them for some kind of portal service or is it all ad based revenue from aim or something?
I was thinking about getting a new pet, at least this one I wont have to clean up after!
I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George, then drink all his beer'y goodness
Having spent close to 10 years working in Gaming Systems (back end accounting, marketing & reporting systems, real time concurrent data collection for 4-5k+ nodes), I don't think there's really a stigma attached at least here in the us. I've never worked at casino property directly though, staying more with the companies that provide them software/hardware.
I've worked as an FTE and as a contractor for a couple of the larger international players in the space and I think overall it was good experience, casino marketing can be a moral issue for you as you're essentially trying to get people to give you their money praying on their hopes that they can get something for nothing, but that's how all gambling works.
I've since moved out of that industry, from there to direct marketing & data mining/warehousing from there into ecommerce focused, and now onto commercial services (printing, transaction management etc).
I saw a couple people point out travel, depending on what your specific role is and who you're working for you can pretty much end up anywhere. Just in North America, from Indian gaming, to Riverboat gaming & established "legalized gaming zones (ie. Vegas, AC etc) and state run (Winnipeg/Quebec/Sudbury) you could end up all over the continent, then internationally there's large markets in europe, asia, australia, even south africa.
I say go for it. You'll learn some things and collect a check, just like any other job.
The first Mechwarrior was what caused me to buy my first EGA card.
Mechwarrior 2 pushed me to buy my first 3D accelerator (was a voodoo). I think also a 3 axis force feedback joystick for that one too.
3 I don't remember much, although I have the cd still, 4 was pretty good although I really missed the just being able totally overhaul a mech however you wanted and the keep going forever contract model from 1.
Anyway, this should be sweet, it's about time for a new version.
If you're stuck on windows, have no control of the link, need to guarantee delivery, need encryption options, are stuck in specific delivery timeframes, and need it scriptable with triggering etc. there's quite a few commercial options.
The 2 I've used the most are the following:
Aspera FASP - http://www.asperasoft.com/
Sterling Connect:Direct http://www.sterlingcommerce.com/products/managed-file-transfer/connect-direct/
Connect direct is geared more towards highly distributed delivery channels, where you've got lots of ingress/egress points to different locations (think multi site, multi customer distribution) so it could be a bit overkill, but aspera is great at utilizing a link to it's peak (it'll udp flood a pipe and guarantee delivery), in fact if you don't watch what you're doing you can pretty much storm everyone else off the link, but your data will get there >;)
I just went to espn360.com for the first time ever hoping my isp is not paying for their crap, but alas what do I get?
A slideshow about their Bass fishing and Poker tournament coverage. But no message saying that my isp refuses to be extorted :(
Now I want to call my ISP and tell them to tell disney to fsck off.
Has anyone actually played around with this? This looks like it has potential for some sandbox stuff I've been thinking about on workstations.
That's true, not sure if sony is going to open it up in the future or not.
Also that yellow dog ppc distro that's officially supported has a long way to go. They don't pack the current release with an mp3 decoder or flash support (which is turning away a lot of people that try it), but at least it ships with gcc.
More like JFS2 or GPFS for solaris and I don't have to buy SF or Cluster Filesystem from Symantec anymore.
Also, I won't have to wait for those things in ZFS that Sun keeps saying "oh, uhm, yeah we know about that but we don't have a development ETA yet." (non-mpxio multipath imports (SDD), path fail timing issues, the 'hot spare' trick etc.)
Over the last few years, your primary fiction writing focus has changed substantially. From early works such as
'Snow Crash' which fall into the more hard core genra of science fiction, to the recent release of 'System of the World' which along with the 'Cryptonomicon' and the rest of the Baroque cycle lead more towards a historical period when technology was just beginning to enter the age we know today. What caused this change? Are future works going to stay in this current type of setting or will they return to the near future with the grim outlook you seemed to hold in earlier years?
I'm so happy that there are so many people out there like this, otherwise a lot of us would have to go out and get real jobs...
I've got one of the plextor PX-708a's and have been using it for about a month and a half now. I've been very impressed with this unit for a couple of reasons.
:P
When I purchased it, it was the same price as 4x dvd burner/combo burner drives at the time.
Covered all formats (like a good combo drive should. DVD_+R/RW, CD-R/RW).
Still had a high burn speed for cd's (40x), quite a few of the high speed combo burners I was looking at would only cut a cd at around 24x.
It's offered with a white or black faceplate (I picked black to match the new pc I had just built)
This is the first plextor drive i've owned, usually staying in the yamaha camp. It came with 1-8x DVD+R and my attempts to purchase more at fry's/staples/compusa all failed miserably. Once that one was gone, I started trying to burn 4x rated dvd+r's at 8x and have gone through a couple of 10 packs with no problems. I use this unit in a winxp machine, with Nero Ultra to burn it (I didin't even look at the software that came with it, I think it was a plextor branded app) and have been very happy with it overall.
I started reading this thread and started seeing the usual "But why, 8x is too fast" bla bla bla type stuff, but until we get to the generation 4+ of these devices speed is still going to be the selling point of dvd burners. Remember when the 4x cd burners came out? People were saying they're a waste of money and you don't need something that fast then too. But now, we're at the point where you can pretty much just go and buy a new cd burner without checking the speed and you've still got something screaming fast and rock solid. So stop bitching about device enhancements.
Try doing it at 3:00am on a detacenter floor with a leatherman on a pair of quantum atlas 10k u3 160 drives. Somehow 2 drives in a raid5 array failed within 6 hours of each other and the customer needed to get back data from changes they made that day.
I did it, it worked, but I never expected to see a headline about someone doing it.
Technologies like this are complementary to each other.
As someone previously pointed out, one of the major problems facing device manufacturers is transferring the heat out of the die. When improvements are made in this area, then the problem will still be transferring the heat away from the die where it can be dissipated by however (water cooled slug, air cooled sink, etc. etc.) once the heat can be effectively moved away from the die-face at 99.999% efficiency there's still the issue of radiating the heat away from the assembly altogether. Then there is still the ambient air temp (have you priced out a redundant 10+ ton HVAC system for a datacenter lately?)...
It's all a catch 22 but anytime a significant improvement is made in one of these areas is leads to higher performance and lower costs (tolerances can come down or stay at the same level for a bit while increasing performance), which by themselves may seem minor, but when they are all taken together make a significant improvement.
1) No, because it still uses a chemical propellant to accelerate a jacketed lead slug to an appropriate velocity where it will damage it's intended target, vs. a focused light projection device... And it doesn't go phew! :P
2) The article states that the device uses biometric comparisons, where the unique electrical signature generated by the human body is compared against the one that is stored. The students were proving that fingerprint comparison (essentially mathematically comparing points in a pattern) can be (semi) easily faked.
The primary problems I see here are:
1. OS stability (Bmw 745, Windows, anyone?). People (myself included) rely on firearms as a last resort in a situation where lives are at risk. Do you really want your last chance dependant on a piece of software (Insert offshore coding joke here)?
2. Magazine replacement. Most of the pre-loaded barrel designs the have been brought to market have either fallen into an extremely tight niche, or have failed altogether. I.E.:
H&K P11 Underwater Pistol
Pancor Jackhammer
Major exception is Metal Storm Tech
3. As someone pointed out you can cover up the camera hole, also what happens at night? Dark, muzzle flash, white balance etc. etc.
4. Planning GPS? GPS reception inside sucks (Urban ops/home defense). Especially if you're trying to make this thing as compact as possible and keep it balanced. You're going to have to sacrifice antenna and component placement and size.
5. Battery life... Yeah, watch batteries last a long time, but you're not running sensors, camera's, etc. etc. with them.
6. Memory capacity. I know when I go to the range I usually drop about 200+ rounds through a couple of handguns... How many pictures, at what res, + time info, + gps info is this thing going to store, and if it does keep a few then overwrite the oldest, people can just take it to the range after they did something bad with it and kill (hehe) the evidence.
7. Accuracy - I don't even want to touch this one until after I shoot one... Firearms have longer barrels for a reason.
8. Programming - Dealers are going to have to be able to reprogram the signature it accepts for operation, and probably gunsmiths as well. It's not hard to get gunsmithing tools.
We're all geeks here, how long do you think any type of data security will really hold up on one of these?
I can't remember the rest of them but I had a couple more as well... I'm too tired I guess.
For some reason I'm having flashbacks to IBM's Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and it's failure to become a widespread standard when it was put up against FC-AL for a scsi drive interconnect... I used to use SSA quite a bit and was happy with it at the time. Nice small 4-wire connectors, redundant pathing to the drives by default (serial looping). Good throughput, high number of devices per chain, etc. etc.
Actually I just checked and IBM still sells the 7133's. The product line has to be pushing 5+ years old now and it's still only running at 160MB/s as well. Maybe with these new drives coming out they will reintroduce a modified version of SSA to fit new standards...
Ok, well not having ever really used a mac I can't say much about the double S key (or those keys with pictures of fruit on them, I mean what are those for? Ordering lunch?), but I pretty much use every key on my board regularly (even ^'s!)...
I'm looking over the design, and pretty much eveything is useful &| required. I think I use ~90% of the key's on this board >50% of the time; "What can you really drop?!". Ok, maybe pause/break has lost a little functionality now, and I might not use that one as much as I used to, but I'd rather have that than those windoze keys, you can still pause scrolling bios screens with it if you need to see something pre-boot.
I guess if I had to vote, I'd drop:
1. The caps lock key (when's the last time you typed a whole sentance in caps, or used the caps lock key to do it?)
2. The windows keys (all three of the little buggars)
3. I *might* give up my pause/break.
I cannot say I love this layout though. I do think we need to relook at what keys are where, and the ergo keyboards are kind of annoying (I used them for about 3 years at my job and home, and ended up going back to a flat one).
And just so the rest of the keys don't feel left out...
4678qx#_=+\{}[]
I was going to post a thread about how crappy the new logo looked and how pathetic some of these marketing ideas are but you beat me to it :(
I read this over last weekend, and I have to agree with some of the reviews here, the first 1/3 is pretty slow, but then it moves back into the old Gibson style breakneck speed where you can't stop until you put it down.
The only thing about this latest offering is that it seems to be moving in a trend away from sci-fi and they 'cyberpunk' related themes that really hooked me on Gibson's earlier writings (i.e. Neuromancer etc. etc.). I think that if instead of reading those more hard edge technology based stories I had read the later books first (Pattern Recognition/All tomorrow's parties) I'm not sure if I would have lumped him into the same category and not sure if I would have been anticipating his new releases as much as I usually do.
Honestly, every card *has* to have a UID embedded in it for basic level 1 counterfit protection.
IE. Load card with $1000, whip out the smart card reader/encoder, copy the current image off the chip, go spend the money, reinsert card and burn the original image back to it and you've got your $1000 back. If there's no backend tracking on this thing france's economy is going to go from #5 straight into the toilet.