No they don't, the flaw in your logic assumes they pay more for their contract than they would if they didn't have a subsidized phone.
The actual truth is that if you don't go for your contract subsidy, you get no discount whatsoever.
The only thing you gain with BYOD is the ability to pay month-to-month - but many providers won't even let you do that, or you will pay MORE in service fees alone for month-to-month service with BYOD than you will for a contract that includes a subsidy for your equipment.
95%+ of the population doesn't have a problem with being locked into a contract for two years in order to save a few hundred on a phone, especially since no provider gives any significant plan discounts to those who "bring their own device" in the USA.
So a non-subsidized phone is dead in the water from the beginning unless it offers something that's so unique as to be worth the price. (For me, if the N1 had a physical keyboard, I would have paid the money for it. Once they released the version that supported AT&T 3G, it was the only device that had a recent Android release on AT&T. However, it had no keyboard.)
There is no "onetime" traffic data integrated in any map I know of. There are two sources of traffic information used by GPS receivers today: 1) Live traffic data from traffic services (TomTom Traffic, Garmin TMC receivers, etc.) 2) Averaged data collected by GPS users and periodically reported back to the map creator (TomTom iQ routes)
Neither of these data sources would be affected significantly by a single traffic spike situation.
If you don't use a receiver with TomTom iQ Routes or live traffic capability, then there is no traffic data in the map, only: 1) Road type (usually based on the US Census TIGER dataset and then cleaned up by TeleAtlas/Navteq) 2) Turn restrictions (sometimes these are wrong, the TomTom maps in the Navigator 5 era were AWFUL in this regard) 3) Actual road speed limit
My guess is that for some reason, 1) or 3) have an error in your region. Which GPS unit are you referring to?
Most microcontrollers have eFuses now for various purposes. For example Atmel AVRs have them for clock selection and (optionally) final lockdown of the chip to protect someone from reading back the program inside it (RSTDISBL, SPIEN)
In most Qualcomm processors (The MSM series used in most smartphones/PDA phones), there are dual ARM cores. This isn't a "dual core" system in the traditional sense, the cores are NOT identical and one is designed to handle radio functions and one is designed to handle application functions. On every phone I've seen, the radio is very well protected and the application side far less so. (Which is why, for example, WinMo phones tend to be "SuperCID" unlocked long before they get SIM-unlocked.) The dual-CPU nature makes this kind of protection approach (one side heavily protected, one far less so) much easier than trying to protect only certain code within a single CPU.
However, the Droid X apparently uses a TI OMAP. I'm not sure if these have the same dual-core architecture that the Qualcomm MSMs do. For this reason it may be much harder to be confident about locking down the radio side to enforce SIMlocks and FCC rules without locking down the application side too.
I guess the question is - can the eFuse state be read back using a JTAG verify/read operation, or will an attempt to do this be treated as a "brickable" operation?
"Written in JTAG" implies a program written in a language called JTAG.
The problem is that JTAG is a standardized electrical communications protocol used to support debugging of ICs, and often also used to program them.
Nothing can be "written in JTAG" because it isn't a programming language. I question whether the poster on that forum has any clue what's really going on. So far the only evidence of this is one forum post that has very little detail and has some glaring technical/grammatical errors (see above). I'll believe it when I see a more in-depth analysis.
I believe that's also why it had a graphite moderator.
Its primary design was for producing nuclear weapons materials, and had a side effect of producing power. (I believe later RBMK installations were solely for power production, but reusing the existing design that had different primary goals.)
Thanks for the info. Did the reactor also have a positive MTC (even though that wasn't the primary contributor, it's just yet another reason the reactor was unsafe.)?
Yeah, Chernobyl could never have happened in the United States: 1) Numerous aspects of reactor design (netative MTC, negative void coefficient) make US reactors inherently safer than Chernobyl's reactor (which had, IIRC, positive MTC and positive void coefficient. Void coefficient is the effect that bubbles of steam in the coolant have on reactor power.) 2) General operational procedures. At the point the Chernobyl accident occurred, at least 2-3 points where the reactor should have SCRAMed itself and the operators overrode the safety mechanism had been passed. 3) Reactor materials and design. Chernobyl had a graphite moderator, i.e. superheated flammable radioactive material in its core. It also had no proper containment building - when it blew its lid, the core was basically exposed to the outdoors. A US-based reactor could likely handle a power excursion like that without significant contamination of the environment - no graphite to burn, and a reinforced containment building to keep the mess inside.
Yeah, I'd like to see the citation. The only thing Toyota did is add an additional safety interlock to make the brakes have priority over throttle. Some other manufacturers already had this in their DBW systems. However: 1) For the first 6-8 decades of motoring, electronic safety interlocks like this weren't possible. There was also no mechanical equivalent. 2) Some people feel that this particular interlock shouldn't be there as it interferes with certain driving techniques. (Admittedly, ones only 1-2% of the more skilled drivers in the country use.)
Yeah, it pretty much fucks Colorado and a few other states to favor Utah. The old Constellation program included, guess what, a government funded/designed heavy lifter.
MythTV has a DLNA (aka UPnP AV) server built in, and MediaTomb works great for other stuff.
If this doesn't do Netflix, Pandora, or Amazon on demand, what does it do? It seems like it offers very little for $130 compared to slightly cheaper devices (like the WD TV)
This looks like a Slashvertisement for a pretty dull product to me. I've seen some comments that this might be based on Open Source with hackable firmware, but there's nothing about that in the article summary.
Because Google has pretty much said "fuck you" (in far more polite terms) to a major world superpower when most world governments are afraid to do so.
Let's face it - The one thing the Chinese really didn't want was unfiltered search results, and Google is still providing that, just in a somewhat indirect manner.
I think he would have been fine if he had not used their name.
(Note: His code would still have infringed, but a company who asks for a blog post to be taken down because "it might lead to infringement" is dumb and completely failing to understand the patent system.)
Preemptively stopping someone from using your patent is pretty dumb - it means you'll never get licensing fees from them. (At the other end of the spectrum, "submarine patents" are douchebaggy.)
The solution hotels/hospitals use (massive tuner banks + RF modulators + RF combiner hiding in a rack somewhere) is only economical for large scale (hundreds of TVs) installations. Usually where num_TVs > 2*total_tunable_channels or so.
Plus most hotels I have been in recently had custom boxes designed for the TV system in use at the hotel (to support all the shiny VOD/PPV stuff.)
Of all the objections to make, this one is silly: 'Do you know how much electricity is going to be needed for each box?'
Cable boxes run pretty warm, but nothing compared to almost any sized CRT TV.
I'm assuming you don't have LCDs or plasmas hung on the walls, since most of them have included Clear QAM support since their prices became reasonable.
If you want encrypted channels (basically anything other than the broadcast networks), you need a cable box, period. (Yeah there is CableCard, but CableCard was an epic failure and CC-ready TVs are rare. You still need to rent the card anyway.)
If you want to have your TVs able to individually tune channels, you either need to switch to Clear-QAM-capable TVs (and forgo encrypted channels) or give in and get boxes. If you don't need individual tuning, a single box and then an analog distribution network will do the job. However this might prove more expensive than just getting a bunch of boxes until the TVs get replaced.
I should have thought of ebay - that's a great link. 2000 1% metal film resistors for about the same price as Digikey/Mouser want for 240 5% resistors and that other link wanted for about 1000. ($7 for 480 -> $15/1000)
In terms of filters, at most I might need a CP filter. Not only does my kit lens (Pentax DA 18-55, the first generation, not the improved AL II) have a filter thread, it has a little slot in the lens hood you can remove so you can stick your finger in and spin a CP filter even when the hood is on.
If you're trying to capture oil sheen, my guess is that a high angle is the LAST thing you want.
Plus if you're just trying to capture sheen/mass spillage, you want to find a spot that has a high vantage point of lots of oil - not a closeup of a boom.
That's why I have 1000 each of 100 and 220 ohm resistors. I needed 50 or so of each, but the price breaks were such that: 50 would have been $2.50 (5 cents each) 200 would have been $3.40 (1.7 cents each) 1000 was $8.00 (0.8 cents each)
Got a recommended source for a multivalue resistor kit? I could use one of those for initial stock.
I think for almost any hobbyist, it will be difficult for any software based solution to match the simple approach of physical organization with transparent labeled bins. Lowes sells some good ones at reasonable prices with slide-out drawers, other people use compartmented boxes designed for fishing lures/bait/flies/etc. These are more economical for "lots of small stuff" but a little harder to access since the compartments are top-access.
Or, maybe, be a pro and do what you should have from the beginning - ASK THE COAST GUARD FOR PERMISSION BEFORE POTENTIALLY INTERFERING WITH A CRITICAL OPERATION.
Now if the CG consistently denies permission to everyone, including seasoned pros with lots of credentials (think Joe McNally, Dave Hobby, or people of that caliber), then it's a story. If they deny requests from 95% of "photographers", half of whom are from the "mom picked up an SLR and now she's starting a photography business with it despite no knowledge of shutter speed and aperture", I'm still all for it.
I was going to post the same myself. For photography of an oil boom, even my kit lens could achieve enough zoom at a distance of 65 feet to take picture of something large like a skimming boom.
Personally, I'd be afraid to get within 65 feet of an active boom unless I were escorted by an expert boom operator. This rule is designed for photographers too stupid to stay away from dangerous objects.
The headline is misleading, it implies photographing of the booms is not allowed, but in reality, you're just not permitted to get ridiculously close to them. Ideally ANYONE should be banned from getting within that distance of an active skimming boom. It probably specifically specifies photographers because photographers were the only people trying to get stupidly close to the booms. (And most likely, true professionals were getting escorted close-in with the appropriate permits rather than just trying to sneak up without asking first.)
The article summary was quite harshly worded against Hayabusa.
If you read some of the links provided by another commenter, the basic standard for mission success was whether the ion drives worked continuously for 1000 hours, which they did. It was the first time that such a drive had EVER been used in a probe for any mission.
The mini-lander was experimental by nature, and even by name. Shit happens, sometimes experiments are a success, sometime they are a failure. That's the whole point of an experiment - even the failures can often gain you valuable data.
The best way I can summarize the mission is "Great success until exposure to an unknown environment that equipment has never been operated in before." The fact that they were able to recover the probe means that they'll be able to learn a lot about the comet's environment even just by doing failure analysis of the stuff that broke, which may likely have been due to unexpected environmental exposure aspects.
Slashdot Mirror
No they don't, the flaw in your logic assumes they pay more for their contract than they would if they didn't have a subsidized phone.
The actual truth is that if you don't go for your contract subsidy, you get no discount whatsoever.
The only thing you gain with BYOD is the ability to pay month-to-month - but many providers won't even let you do that, or you will pay MORE in service fees alone for month-to-month service with BYOD than you will for a contract that includes a subsidy for your equipment.
95%+ of the population doesn't have a problem with being locked into a contract for two years in order to save a few hundred on a phone, especially since no provider gives any significant plan discounts to those who "bring their own device" in the USA.
So a non-subsidized phone is dead in the water from the beginning unless it offers something that's so unique as to be worth the price. (For me, if the N1 had a physical keyboard, I would have paid the money for it. Once they released the version that supported AT&T 3G, it was the only device that had a recent Android release on AT&T. However, it had no keyboard.)
Which GPS?
There is no "onetime" traffic data integrated in any map I know of. There are two sources of traffic information used by GPS receivers today:
1) Live traffic data from traffic services (TomTom Traffic, Garmin TMC receivers, etc.)
2) Averaged data collected by GPS users and periodically reported back to the map creator (TomTom iQ routes)
Neither of these data sources would be affected significantly by a single traffic spike situation.
If you don't use a receiver with TomTom iQ Routes or live traffic capability, then there is no traffic data in the map, only:
1) Road type (usually based on the US Census TIGER dataset and then cleaned up by TeleAtlas/Navteq)
2) Turn restrictions (sometimes these are wrong, the TomTom maps in the Navigator 5 era were AWFUL in this regard)
3) Actual road speed limit
My guess is that for some reason, 1) or 3) have an error in your region. Which GPS unit are you referring to?
http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbugencontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12316&contentId=4629 - There isn't a separate e-fuse chip, it's almost surely built into the OMAP.
Most microcontrollers have eFuses now for various purposes. For example Atmel AVRs have them for clock selection and (optionally) final lockdown of the chip to protect someone from reading back the program inside it (RSTDISBL, SPIEN)
In most Qualcomm processors (The MSM series used in most smartphones/PDA phones), there are dual ARM cores. This isn't a "dual core" system in the traditional sense, the cores are NOT identical and one is designed to handle radio functions and one is designed to handle application functions. On every phone I've seen, the radio is very well protected and the application side far less so. (Which is why, for example, WinMo phones tend to be "SuperCID" unlocked long before they get SIM-unlocked.) The dual-CPU nature makes this kind of protection approach (one side heavily protected, one far less so) much easier than trying to protect only certain code within a single CPU.
However, the Droid X apparently uses a TI OMAP. I'm not sure if these have the same dual-core architecture that the Qualcomm MSMs do. For this reason it may be much harder to be confident about locking down the radio side to enforce SIMlocks and FCC rules without locking down the application side too.
I guess the question is - can the eFuse state be read back using a JTAG verify/read operation, or will an attempt to do this be treated as a "brickable" operation?
"Written in JTAG" implies a program written in a language called JTAG.
The problem is that JTAG is a standardized electrical communications protocol used to support debugging of ICs, and often also used to program them.
Nothing can be "written in JTAG" because it isn't a programming language. I question whether the poster on that forum has any clue what's really going on. So far the only evidence of this is one forum post that has very little detail and has some glaring technical/grammatical errors (see above). I'll believe it when I see a more in-depth analysis.
I believe that's also why it had a graphite moderator.
Its primary design was for producing nuclear weapons materials, and had a side effect of producing power. (I believe later RBMK installations were solely for power production, but reusing the existing design that had different primary goals.)
Thanks for the info. Did the reactor also have a positive MTC (even though that wasn't the primary contributor, it's just yet another reason the reactor was unsafe.)?
Yeah, Chernobyl could never have happened in the United States:
1) Numerous aspects of reactor design (netative MTC, negative void coefficient) make US reactors inherently safer than Chernobyl's reactor (which had, IIRC, positive MTC and positive void coefficient. Void coefficient is the effect that bubbles of steam in the coolant have on reactor power.)
2) General operational procedures. At the point the Chernobyl accident occurred, at least 2-3 points where the reactor should have SCRAMed itself and the operators overrode the safety mechanism had been passed.
3) Reactor materials and design. Chernobyl had a graphite moderator, i.e. superheated flammable radioactive material in its core. It also had no proper containment building - when it blew its lid, the core was basically exposed to the outdoors. A US-based reactor could likely handle a power excursion like that without significant contamination of the environment - no graphite to burn, and a reinforced containment building to keep the mess inside.
Yeah, I'd like to see the citation. The only thing Toyota did is add an additional safety interlock to make the brakes have priority over throttle. Some other manufacturers already had this in their DBW systems. However:
1) For the first 6-8 decades of motoring, electronic safety interlocks like this weren't possible. There was also no mechanical equivalent.
2) Some people feel that this particular interlock shouldn't be there as it interferes with certain driving techniques. (Admittedly, ones only 1-2% of the more skilled drivers in the country use.)
Yeah, it pretty much fucks Colorado and a few other states to favor Utah. The old Constellation program included, guess what, a government funded/designed heavy lifter.
No it isn't.
MythTV has a DLNA (aka UPnP AV) server built in, and MediaTomb works great for other stuff.
If this doesn't do Netflix, Pandora, or Amazon on demand, what does it do? It seems like it offers very little for $130 compared to slightly cheaper devices (like the WD TV)
This looks like a Slashvertisement for a pretty dull product to me. I've seen some comments that this might be based on Open Source with hackable firmware, but there's nothing about that in the article summary.
Because Google has pretty much said "fuck you" (in far more polite terms) to a major world superpower when most world governments are afraid to do so.
Let's face it - The one thing the Chinese really didn't want was unfiltered search results, and Google is still providing that, just in a somewhat indirect manner.
I think he would have been fine if he had not used their name.
(Note: His code would still have infringed, but a company who asks for a blog post to be taken down because "it might lead to infringement" is dumb and completely failing to understand the patent system.)
Preemptively stopping someone from using your patent is pretty dumb - it means you'll never get licensing fees from them. (At the other end of the spectrum, "submarine patents" are douchebaggy.)
The solution hotels/hospitals use (massive tuner banks + RF modulators + RF combiner hiding in a rack somewhere) is only economical for large scale (hundreds of TVs) installations. Usually where num_TVs > 2*total_tunable_channels or so.
Plus most hotels I have been in recently had custom boxes designed for the TV system in use at the hotel (to support all the shiny VOD/PPV stuff.)
Of all the objections to make, this one is silly:
'Do you know how much electricity is going to be needed for each box?'
Cable boxes run pretty warm, but nothing compared to almost any sized CRT TV.
I'm assuming you don't have LCDs or plasmas hung on the walls, since most of them have included Clear QAM support since their prices became reasonable.
If you want encrypted channels (basically anything other than the broadcast networks), you need a cable box, period. (Yeah there is CableCard, but CableCard was an epic failure and CC-ready TVs are rare. You still need to rent the card anyway.)
If you want to have your TVs able to individually tune channels, you either need to switch to Clear-QAM-capable TVs (and forgo encrypted channels) or give in and get boxes. If you don't need individual tuning, a single box and then an analog distribution network will do the job. However this might prove more expensive than just getting a bunch of boxes until the TVs get replaced.
I should have thought of ebay - that's a great link. 2000 1% metal film resistors for about the same price as Digikey/Mouser want for 240 5% resistors and that other link wanted for about 1000. ($7 for 480 -> $15/1000)
Free shipping too. Thanks for the link!
In maritime shipping, I believe even a few hundred feet is considered a "near miss" that warrants an incident investigation.
In terms of filters, at most I might need a CP filter. Not only does my kit lens (Pentax DA 18-55, the first generation, not the improved AL II) have a filter thread, it has a little slot in the lens hood you can remove so you can stick your finger in and spin a CP filter even when the hood is on.
If you're trying to capture oil sheen, my guess is that a high angle is the LAST thing you want.
Plus if you're just trying to capture sheen/mass spillage, you want to find a spot that has a high vantage point of lots of oil - not a closeup of a boom.
That's why I have 1000 each of 100 and 220 ohm resistors. I needed 50 or so of each, but the price breaks were such that:
50 would have been $2.50 (5 cents each)
200 would have been $3.40 (1.7 cents each)
1000 was $8.00 (0.8 cents each)
Got a recommended source for a multivalue resistor kit? I could use one of those for initial stock.
I think for almost any hobbyist, it will be difficult for any software based solution to match the simple approach of physical organization with transparent labeled bins. Lowes sells some good ones at reasonable prices with slide-out drawers, other people use compartmented boxes designed for fishing lures/bait/flies/etc. These are more economical for "lots of small stuff" but a little harder to access since the compartments are top-access.
Or, maybe, be a pro and do what you should have from the beginning - ASK THE COAST GUARD FOR PERMISSION BEFORE POTENTIALLY INTERFERING WITH A CRITICAL OPERATION.
Now if the CG consistently denies permission to everyone, including seasoned pros with lots of credentials (think Joe McNally, Dave Hobby, or people of that caliber), then it's a story. If they deny requests from 95% of "photographers", half of whom are from the "mom picked up an SLR and now she's starting a photography business with it despite no knowledge of shutter speed and aperture", I'm still all for it.
I was going to post the same myself. For photography of an oil boom, even my kit lens could achieve enough zoom at a distance of 65 feet to take picture of something large like a skimming boom.
Personally, I'd be afraid to get within 65 feet of an active boom unless I were escorted by an expert boom operator. This rule is designed for photographers too stupid to stay away from dangerous objects.
The headline is misleading, it implies photographing of the booms is not allowed, but in reality, you're just not permitted to get ridiculously close to them. Ideally ANYONE should be banned from getting within that distance of an active skimming boom. It probably specifically specifies photographers because photographers were the only people trying to get stupidly close to the booms. (And most likely, true professionals were getting escorted close-in with the appropriate permits rather than just trying to sneak up without asking first.)
The article summary was quite harshly worded against Hayabusa.
If you read some of the links provided by another commenter, the basic standard for mission success was whether the ion drives worked continuously for 1000 hours, which they did. It was the first time that such a drive had EVER been used in a probe for any mission.
The mini-lander was experimental by nature, and even by name. Shit happens, sometimes experiments are a success, sometime they are a failure. That's the whole point of an experiment - even the failures can often gain you valuable data.
The best way I can summarize the mission is "Great success until exposure to an unknown environment that equipment has never been operated in before." The fact that they were able to recover the probe means that they'll be able to learn a lot about the comet's environment even just by doing failure analysis of the stuff that broke, which may likely have been due to unexpected environmental exposure aspects.
Or ensure that it gets sent to a landfill in China... :(
Apparently a lot of stuff destined for "recycling" winds up in one of the most polluted towns in the world instead.