I was interested in the XV6800 (an HTC Windows Mobile device), but Verizon was delaying it for months and months after Sprint released the same device for "network certification issues".
I learned my lesson the hard way what "network certification issues" means from Verizon delaying the Treo 650 by 6-9 months from Sprint release - It means "the phone's software hasn't been crippled to our satisfaction yet".
So if the phone you want is released on Sprint but Verizon is delaying it for "network certification issues", find another phone or switch providers, because the phone you get from Verizon will NOT have the features and functionality that the Sprint variant has.
I have seen few (if any) LD providers that provide the deep discounts during off-peak periods that call providers do.
Pretty much every service provider has either unlimited nights/weekends or virtually unlimited. (For example, AT&T's lowest voice plan gives you "only" 5000 night/weekend minutes instead of unlimited.)
He's effectively saying that they are the same because their APIs are (mostly) the same.
This is true, but not because Linux is a copy of UNIX, but because Linux and UNIX both conform to a published API standard (POSIX). One can easily implement something that behaves like UNIX without looking at a single line of code, because the API (POSIX) is documented, standardized, and published.
It's pretty well known that botnet creators are selling their net (and perhaps the bots) to paying clients that want to set up a botnet for nefarious purposes.
The line "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." makes me think this EULA is targeted at those customers, not the zombie victims. The second sentence basically says to me: "We have customized your bot so it is not currently detected by antivirus software. If you violate our EULA, a sample of your customized bot will get sent to antivirus companies so that your bot becomes detectable and far less useful for setting up your spam network."
Yeah, but it is Wal-Mart who chooses to carry only the Full Screen version when both are available.
While they probably exist, I have never seen a movie that was available as FS but not WS. Usually it's the other way around if anything. (WS available but not FS.) At WalMart it is the exact opposite of every other retailer I've been to.
The root problem with the USPTO is that while they make a LOT of money for the government in terms of patent fees, that money goes to a "generic" budget pool, from which the USPTO has to fight for a chunk just like everyone else.
Guess what? They usually get shafted.
The end result is that patent examiners are overworked due to understaffing and they are also vastly underpaid. There's a huge amount of churn at the USPTO (I know of two people that started there with a desire to become IP lawyers eventually and since then have gotten as far away from it as they can - in fact one completely left engineering and started a catering business!)
Without giving the USPTO more funding to retain employees (instead of driving them so far away they leave their area of expertise completely), the quality of the examination process will continue to suffer.
The USPTO would be vastly improved if licensing fees were reduced significantly but all income went back into the USPTO, but that'll never happen because the people who make the decisions are those who have pet programs leeching off of the USPTO's income.
About the only place I see "Full Screen" (what a misleading name!) movies is WalMart. They've lost out on quite a few sales due to only having the FS version of a particular movie, while most other stores will only have the WS version.
The OP accused manufacturers of going widescreen to save money, but the truth is that the market wants widescreen because there is now so much widescreen content. 4:3 laptops just don't sell any more except to niche markets (pretty much corporate-only). Most corporate users are happy to receive a widescreen laptop or display nowadays for the "pseudo-dualhead" effect of being able to stack windows side by side.
It is news not because of any new temperature records, but because of the fact that these are the first superconductors outside of the cuprate family to exhibit high critical temperatures.
This is an entirely new family from the cuprates. The cuprates started much lower too. Also, even if this family never compares to the cuprates in performance, the behavior of this new family could shed light on the (relatively unknown) mechanisms of cuprate superconductivity, allowing for that family to be developed further.
The only way I can see "working with" P2P software developers would be:
CC: "Is there anything we could provide you that would allow you to reduce your impact on our network?" P2P Author: "Multicast please." CC: "We don't do multicast because no applications support it." P2P Author: "If you build it, they will come."
I find it hard to believe that this is the justification for glossy screens, because for a while, only the "high end" screen options (better contrast, wider viewing angle, higher resolution, etc) were available from manufacturers in glossy. (And yes, I realize this is somewhat counterproductive, as the glossy reduces the niceness of an otherwise great screen)
For example, when I bought my Dell E1705 two years ago, the options were: WXGA matte WUXGA matte WUXGA "UltraSharp" glossy (significantly better brightness, contrast, and viewing angle compared to the WUXGA matte)
"And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?"
The rash of stories from multiple standards bodies says otherwise.
The problem MS is having here is that nearly every standards body they are trying to subvert has members who are not only on the up-and-up, but are proud of their work and their contributions to the standards process - Nearly every one of these stories has not been a secondhand rumor, but a first-hand account from one of the committee members.
If you mean being able to replace the fuel but not the conversion hardware and shielding - almost surely not.
If you mean being able to replace the whole fuel + conversion stuff + shielding assembly - possibly. This whole assembly would be very expensive, but could potentially be sent back to a facility for recycling. (i.e. replacing the fuel inside the assembly)
Keep in mind that depending on the type of fuel used, a low power density (large and heavy for its power output) device could potentially have a life of 10,000+ years...
Some of the wording scares me, because, to be honest, treating all protocols equally during peak periods could do really bad things to protocols that are latency/throughput critical such as VoIP, gaming, and videoconferencing.
BT is bulk traffic, so it's really not a big deal if it has a lower priority than other packets, AS LONG AS no extra throttling is done. That is to say - If BT runs fast during offpeak periods when no one is using the network, but slows down significantly during peak times of the day in favor of VoIP, web browsing, gaming, etc, that's fine. The problem is that many ISPs have been "overkilling" P2P protocols by explicitly throttling them to a very low fixed and pre-set bandwidth (instead of dropping their priority) or in Comcast's case, specifically taking action to outright stop them, regardless of time of day or network conditions. That's extremely bad. Also, Comcast's approach was so aggressive that other protocols were negatively affected, moreso than BT. If a BT connection gets RSTed, the client just tries again in not too long, and is able to resume a broken connection where it left off. Other protocols can't resume and so may be completely unable to complete certain tasks. (See the reports that Comcast's RST injection scheme completely broke Lotus Notes for some people.)
This is false. EM remains perfectly predictable as you approach a point source.
The problem is that at close range, no source can be modeled as a point source. Non-point sources, on the other hand, are a nightmare to model.
The general rule of thumb in such situations is that effective gain of a directional antenna begins dropping as you get close to an antenna (specifically, when it can no longer be approximated as a point source).
If I recall correctly, the quantities of saccharine fed to the rats in that study were so large that if they had been fed an equivalent amount of sugar, there is no chance that they would have developed cancer - because something can't develop cancer if it is already dead! (That amount of sugar would have been lethal.)
I didn't say it couldn't be thin. I was saying it couldn't be: Thin AND long-lived AND 3G AND have a powerful CPU like the iPhone does.
Until UMTS chipsets improve significantly in power consumption, it's "pick 3 of 4".
The SE W910i and W880i appear to both be relatively feature-complete, but still not "smartphones" like the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. So they picked Thin, Long-Lived, 3G, relatively weak CPU.
Except that even basic housekeeping functionality eats lots of power when in 3G mode.
When in a 3G service area, battery life is affected significantly compared to in a GSM service area, even if all the phone does is idle nearly the entire time.
My AT&T Tilt seems to eat through battery at least twice as fast in standby if it is in a UMTS service area than it does when in a 2G GSM-only area, or when I force it into GSM mode for improved battery life.
The iPhone is an extremely thin device - there is no way they could have implemented 3G with the current crop of 3G chipsets without either making the device much thicker or reducing battery life significantly, both more "non-Appley" traits than slower data service.
Disclaimer: This applies to 3G GSM, aka UMTS. 3G CDMA2000 (aka 1xEV-DO) doesn't carry the same battery life penalty in comparison to 2G/2.5G cdmaOne/CDMA2000 - Partly because the base modulation scheme has not changed significantly. If Woz is a Verizon or Sprint customer he won't see much battery penalty for an EV-DO phone. Something about UMTS makes it very hard to optimize for power efficiency compared to CDMA2000, even for the CDMA experts at Qualcomm. (UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme, but with different parameters and a completely different protocol suite than CDMA2000.) UMTS is notorious for bad battery life/handset heat generation, even when implemented in a Qualcomm chipset such as the MSM7k series.
Yeah, given that they are targeting Windows Mobile as a destination platform, I don't see why they care about negotiating with network operators.
Nothing prevents users from installing third-party apps on 95%+ of WinMo phones out there.
Strangely enough, almost all of the Linux-based phones on the market (Most are Motorola phones) are incredibly locked-down, probably more so than anything except for the most proprietary manufacturer-specific platforms. Nokia's Linux-based devices aren't actually phones, and the TrollTech and OpenMoko stacks don't have much market penetration at all.
Agreed. While some of the outages described by the article submitter are "backend" outages that are probably avoidable (such as the Blackberry ones), some are just a fundamental aspect of the technology used:
"Mobile phone companies compare who has the fewest dropped calls (after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?)" - It would be prohibitively expensive (and in some cases impossible) to achieve 100% rock-solid cellular coverage over the entire country. There are some areas where all the money in the world won't get a carrier extra coverage. To put in a cell site, a carrier needs a location for that cell site - Sometimes such locations are simply not available for whatever reason (often NIMBY - amusingly enough the same people who fight the placement of cell towers are often the first to complain about bad service.) Carriers have gotten quite good at hiding cell sites on buildings. One example are the almost invisible sector antennas painted to match a church steeple - church gets paid good rent money, carrier gets a site, and usually the antennas are not noticeable unless someone is looking for them. Barton Hall on Cornell's campus is another such example, it's almost impossible to identify the Verizon antennas unless you're looking for them. (Admittedly, the Cornell Amateur Radio Club's gigantic Force12 HF antenna makes a good distraction from those particular antennas...)
Cable TV and cable Internet - RF cables require much more precision and are degraded more rapidly by corrosion and such than the POTS twisted pair used for voice lines. CATV providers already spend a LOT on weatherproofed connectors and outdoor equipment, but often it is not enough and going to the "next level" would be prohibitively expensive and make cable unaffordable for most customers.
"How many dual core chips are really four core chips with two failed cores? Do you know? Face it, it's just the number three which bugs you, and that's pretty childish..."
Probably few if none.
As another poster said, most if not all of Intel's current quad offerings are two dual core dies stitched together in a package. Duals with a failed single core will likely become solos, and are probably not worth ever creating a triple.
AMD's quads are single-die units. Thus it makes sense to be able to sell units with a single core failure.
As to two cores dead on a single die being marketed as a dual - that's highly unlikely. If, for example, one core in 100 is a dud due to a dust particle or whatever during manufacturing (Pfail = 0.01), then the chances of two cores on a single die being duds at the same time is one in 10,000 (Pfail = (0.01)^2 = 0.0001). Such two-failure dies will be so rare that there won't be any point in making plans for them, especially since if you have two dead cores, even if the other two initially pass testing their reliability might be called into question.
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That's why I'm an AT&T customer now.
I was interested in the XV6800 (an HTC Windows Mobile device), but Verizon was delaying it for months and months after Sprint released the same device for "network certification issues".
I learned my lesson the hard way what "network certification issues" means from Verizon delaying the Treo 650 by 6-9 months from Sprint release - It means "the phone's software hasn't been crippled to our satisfaction yet".
So if the phone you want is released on Sprint but Verizon is delaying it for "network certification issues", find another phone or switch providers, because the phone you get from Verizon will NOT have the features and functionality that the Sprint variant has.
I have seen few (if any) LD providers that provide the deep discounts during off-peak periods that call providers do.
Pretty much every service provider has either unlimited nights/weekends or virtually unlimited. (For example, AT&T's lowest voice plan gives you "only" 5000 night/weekend minutes instead of unlimited.)
He's effectively saying that they are the same because their APIs are (mostly) the same.
This is true, but not because Linux is a copy of UNIX, but because Linux and UNIX both conform to a published API standard (POSIX). One can easily implement something that behaves like UNIX without looking at a single line of code, because the API (POSIX) is documented, standardized, and published.
First thing I thought was pretty specifically, "Metacity edge flipping (or lack thereof)".
It's pretty well known that botnet creators are selling their net (and perhaps the bots) to paying clients that want to set up a botnet for nefarious purposes.
The line "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." makes me think this EULA is targeted at those customers, not the zombie victims. The second sentence basically says to me:
"We have customized your bot so it is not currently detected by antivirus software. If you violate our EULA, a sample of your customized bot will get sent to antivirus companies so that your bot becomes detectable and far less useful for setting up your spam network."
Except that many of these music stores (unlike Apple) have DRM flags set with the "Do not allow burning to CD" flag.
MS won't provide a utility (too easy to apply to DRM from other stores), but plenty of utilities already exist to achieve this goal.
That sounds like a task for some reverse engineering and an Arduino...
Yeah, but it is Wal-Mart who chooses to carry only the Full Screen version when both are available.
While they probably exist, I have never seen a movie that was available as FS but not WS. Usually it's the other way around if anything. (WS available but not FS.) At WalMart it is the exact opposite of every other retailer I've been to.
The root problem with the USPTO is that while they make a LOT of money for the government in terms of patent fees, that money goes to a "generic" budget pool, from which the USPTO has to fight for a chunk just like everyone else.
Guess what? They usually get shafted.
The end result is that patent examiners are overworked due to understaffing and they are also vastly underpaid. There's a huge amount of churn at the USPTO (I know of two people that started there with a desire to become IP lawyers eventually and since then have gotten as far away from it as they can - in fact one completely left engineering and started a catering business!)
Without giving the USPTO more funding to retain employees (instead of driving them so far away they leave their area of expertise completely), the quality of the examination process will continue to suffer.
The USPTO would be vastly improved if licensing fees were reduced significantly but all income went back into the USPTO, but that'll never happen because the people who make the decisions are those who have pet programs leeching off of the USPTO's income.
About the only place I see "Full Screen" (what a misleading name!) movies is WalMart. They've lost out on quite a few sales due to only having the FS version of a particular movie, while most other stores will only have the WS version.
The OP accused manufacturers of going widescreen to save money, but the truth is that the market wants widescreen because there is now so much widescreen content. 4:3 laptops just don't sell any more except to niche markets (pretty much corporate-only). Most corporate users are happy to receive a widescreen laptop or display nowadays for the "pseudo-dualhead" effect of being able to stack windows side by side.
It is news not because of any new temperature records, but because of the fact that these are the first superconductors outside of the cuprate family to exhibit high critical temperatures.
This is an entirely new family from the cuprates. The cuprates started much lower too. Also, even if this family never compares to the cuprates in performance, the behavior of this new family could shed light on the (relatively unknown) mechanisms of cuprate superconductivity, allowing for that family to be developed further.
That liability issue is huge - multicast is more transparent, and also probably does a better job of reducing upstream load.
The only way I can see "working with" P2P software developers would be:
CC: "Is there anything we could provide you that would allow you to reduce your impact on our network?"
P2P Author: "Multicast please."
CC: "We don't do multicast because no applications support it."
P2P Author: "If you build it, they will come."
I find it hard to believe that this is the justification for glossy screens, because for a while, only the "high end" screen options (better contrast, wider viewing angle, higher resolution, etc) were available from manufacturers in glossy. (And yes, I realize this is somewhat counterproductive, as the glossy reduces the niceness of an otherwise great screen)
For example, when I bought my Dell E1705 two years ago, the options were:
WXGA matte
WUXGA matte
WUXGA "UltraSharp" glossy (significantly better brightness, contrast, and viewing angle compared to the WUXGA matte)
"And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower?"
The rash of stories from multiple standards bodies says otherwise.
The problem MS is having here is that nearly every standards body they are trying to subvert has members who are not only on the up-and-up, but are proud of their work and their contributions to the standards process - Nearly every one of these stories has not been a secondhand rumor, but a first-hand account from one of the committee members.
Good point. It seemed to me that, in general, nearly every company in the tech sector fell significantly.
Guess it depends on your definition.
If you mean being able to replace the fuel but not the conversion hardware and shielding - almost surely not.
If you mean being able to replace the whole fuel + conversion stuff + shielding assembly - possibly. This whole assembly would be very expensive, but could potentially be sent back to a facility for recycling. (i.e. replacing the fuel inside the assembly)
Keep in mind that depending on the type of fuel used, a low power density (large and heavy for its power output) device could potentially have a life of 10,000+ years...
Some of the wording scares me, because, to be honest, treating all protocols equally during peak periods could do really bad things to protocols that are latency/throughput critical such as VoIP, gaming, and videoconferencing.
BT is bulk traffic, so it's really not a big deal if it has a lower priority than other packets, AS LONG AS no extra throttling is done. That is to say - If BT runs fast during offpeak periods when no one is using the network, but slows down significantly during peak times of the day in favor of VoIP, web browsing, gaming, etc, that's fine. The problem is that many ISPs have been "overkilling" P2P protocols by explicitly throttling them to a very low fixed and pre-set bandwidth (instead of dropping their priority) or in Comcast's case, specifically taking action to outright stop them, regardless of time of day or network conditions. That's extremely bad. Also, Comcast's approach was so aggressive that other protocols were negatively affected, moreso than BT. If a BT connection gets RSTed, the client just tries again in not too long, and is able to resume a broken connection where it left off. Other protocols can't resume and so may be completely unable to complete certain tasks. (See the reports that Comcast's RST injection scheme completely broke Lotus Notes for some people.)
This is false. EM remains perfectly predictable as you approach a point source.
The problem is that at close range, no source can be modeled as a point source. Non-point sources, on the other hand, are a nightmare to model.
The general rule of thumb in such situations is that effective gain of a directional antenna begins dropping as you get close to an antenna (specifically, when it can no longer be approximated as a point source).
If I recall correctly, the quantities of saccharine fed to the rats in that study were so large that if they had been fed an equivalent amount of sugar, there is no chance that they would have developed cancer - because something can't develop cancer if it is already dead! (That amount of sugar would have been lethal.)
I didn't say it couldn't be thin. I was saying it couldn't be:
Thin AND long-lived AND 3G AND have a powerful CPU like the iPhone does.
Until UMTS chipsets improve significantly in power consumption, it's "pick 3 of 4".
The SE W910i and W880i appear to both be relatively feature-complete, but still not "smartphones" like the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. So they picked Thin, Long-Lived, 3G, relatively weak CPU.
Except that even basic housekeeping functionality eats lots of power when in 3G mode.
When in a 3G service area, battery life is affected significantly compared to in a GSM service area, even if all the phone does is idle nearly the entire time.
My AT&T Tilt seems to eat through battery at least twice as fast in standby if it is in a UMTS service area than it does when in a 2G GSM-only area, or when I force it into GSM mode for improved battery life.
The iPhone is an extremely thin device - there is no way they could have implemented 3G with the current crop of 3G chipsets without either making the device much thicker or reducing battery life significantly, both more "non-Appley" traits than slower data service.
Disclaimer: This applies to 3G GSM, aka UMTS. 3G CDMA2000 (aka 1xEV-DO) doesn't carry the same battery life penalty in comparison to 2G/2.5G cdmaOne/CDMA2000 - Partly because the base modulation scheme has not changed significantly. If Woz is a Verizon or Sprint customer he won't see much battery penalty for an EV-DO phone. Something about UMTS makes it very hard to optimize for power efficiency compared to CDMA2000, even for the CDMA experts at Qualcomm. (UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme, but with different parameters and a completely different protocol suite than CDMA2000.) UMTS is notorious for bad battery life/handset heat generation, even when implemented in a Qualcomm chipset such as the MSM7k series.
Yeah, given that they are targeting Windows Mobile as a destination platform, I don't see why they care about negotiating with network operators.
Nothing prevents users from installing third-party apps on 95%+ of WinMo phones out there.
Strangely enough, almost all of the Linux-based phones on the market (Most are Motorola phones) are incredibly locked-down, probably more so than anything except for the most proprietary manufacturer-specific platforms. Nokia's Linux-based devices aren't actually phones, and the TrollTech and OpenMoko stacks don't have much market penetration at all.
Agreed. While some of the outages described by the article submitter are "backend" outages that are probably avoidable (such as the Blackberry ones), some are just a fundamental aspect of the technology used:
"Mobile phone companies compare who has the fewest dropped calls (after decades of mobile phones, why do we even still have dropped calls?)" - It would be prohibitively expensive (and in some cases impossible) to achieve 100% rock-solid cellular coverage over the entire country. There are some areas where all the money in the world won't get a carrier extra coverage. To put in a cell site, a carrier needs a location for that cell site - Sometimes such locations are simply not available for whatever reason (often NIMBY - amusingly enough the same people who fight the placement of cell towers are often the first to complain about bad service.) Carriers have gotten quite good at hiding cell sites on buildings. One example are the almost invisible sector antennas painted to match a church steeple - church gets paid good rent money, carrier gets a site, and usually the antennas are not noticeable unless someone is looking for them. Barton Hall on Cornell's campus is another such example, it's almost impossible to identify the Verizon antennas unless you're looking for them. (Admittedly, the Cornell Amateur Radio Club's gigantic Force12 HF antenna makes a good distraction from those particular antennas...)
Cable TV and cable Internet - RF cables require much more precision and are degraded more rapidly by corrosion and such than the POTS twisted pair used for voice lines. CATV providers already spend a LOT on weatherproofed connectors and outdoor equipment, but often it is not enough and going to the "next level" would be prohibitively expensive and make cable unaffordable for most customers.
"How many dual core chips are really four core chips with two failed cores? Do you know? Face it, it's just the number three which bugs you, and that's pretty childish..."
Probably few if none.
As another poster said, most if not all of Intel's current quad offerings are two dual core dies stitched together in a package. Duals with a failed single core will likely become solos, and are probably not worth ever creating a triple.
AMD's quads are single-die units. Thus it makes sense to be able to sell units with a single core failure.
As to two cores dead on a single die being marketed as a dual - that's highly unlikely. If, for example, one core in 100 is a dud due to a dust particle or whatever during manufacturing (Pfail = 0.01), then the chances of two cores on a single die being duds at the same time is one in 10,000 (Pfail = (0.01)^2 = 0.0001). Such two-failure dies will be so rare that there won't be any point in making plans for them, especially since if you have two dead cores, even if the other two initially pass testing their reliability might be called into question.