The Dixie Chicks are the perfect example. They made comments that offended people, those people stopped buying records. Radio stations stopped playing them because people were mad at them.
If it were as simple as local broadcasters individually being responsive to their local communities that would likely be a good thing. And perhaps what you described with the Dixie Chicks could have happened that way. But it didn't. Broadcasting in the U.S. has strayed far from the concept of local broadcasters acting as trustees of the public interest. We're given a "choice" of canned broadcast formats, with the playlist decisions generally made on a national level. When the largest owner of broadcast stations, Clear Channel, makes a national level decision not to play Dixie Chicks, it was definately not an example of local-level responsiveness. Supposedly marketplace forces and competition were to result in the public interest being served without regulation. The poor content of much broadcast programming, whole blocks of time sold for infomercials, white-house produced pieces being passed of as news coverage, generic news pieces passed off as local news, increased promotion of all sorts of bad things, and ratings-oriented psuedo-news, are all strong indicators of the public interest not being well served.
Whether or not one agrees with political statements made by the Dixie Chicks, censorship at the national level is not the sort of responsiveness to local community needs that we should expect from broadcasters. Was it right to keep "Imagine" by John Lenon off the air too?
While it is easy for many to dismiss broadcaster behavior as being relatively unimportant, consider how different things might be if all political airtime were provided in some fair way for free as a community service. We might not have so many in office selling their souls to pay for advertising campaigns.
The whole satellite radio thing made more sense in a pre-iPod era. News and talk formats could be heard in most areas well enough on AM radio. Some may still like the idea of pay radio, but I suspect many wouldn't want to have anything to do with XM if they realized that Clear Channel had a share of it, and understood negative impact of Clear Channel.
I tried using the Vista (Excremento Grande Edition) Humanoid Output Analyzer on G.W.B.
It has had some luck figuring out what he ate from the smell of his secondary gaseous output port but it has not revealed any intelligence from the verbally-modulated primary hot air datastream.
I haven't done serious gaming, so perhaps I'm missing something. Having familiar territory within a game strikes me as being a good thing, since it would make it easier for players to navigate.
I would think that more important than the location of the game is what goes on in the game. If it's about doing harm of some sort then that's something to examine the issues of whether the location is a familiar one or not.
Surely games, movies, and television can be interesting and challenging without the emphasis being on killing something?
Somehow, DOUBLECLICK is the biggest concern? Not a chance. This is media hype perpetuated by the competition crying foul. I really wish people would concern themselves with actual privacy issues. It's just advertising data, people.
It's kinda funny how marketing-speak changed the name "web bugs" to the almost religiously enlightened sounding "web beacons" that help track what you've read, and through your IP, where. They say you can opt out. That sets a cookie! Web bugs can be in email, web pages, even some documents.
The combination of web bugs and other techniques can still mine considerable data even with cookies off or frequently deleted.
I generally have liked Google, but it seems this is not the only instance of them connecting with slime.
Just as with your hardware/software vendors, users here need to know exactly what you are dealing with to be able to help you effectively. We should be given a link to download a sample file, information on the codecs/software and settings used to create it, and details of all testing done..mov is a container format that supports many different codecs. Does it play using the same (unspecified) version of QuickTime on XP or OS X? Did you bother to try? Other than agreeing that your system handles the error poorly, we can only speculate on what's wrong. We have no way to tell if you have file corruption, some kind of DRM hell, a flavor of h.264 that QuickTime doesn't like, or an.mp3 that someone renamed to.mov so they could see the picture...
Absent essential troubleshooting details, the suggestion to try VLC or another player that has its own codec support is probably more likely to help you than anything else. You might also consider using ffmpeg or other software to transcode the file. Keep an eye out for updates to your application, driver and OS software. Test your RAM.
Who uses the right-alt button for anything anyway? The article's suggestion of using rt-alt+F2 to bring up the run dialog is just silly.
For many users, the key is probably more useful left as assigned in Ubuntu. IIRC it is then functioning the same way as the "option" modifier key on Macintosh(TM) keyboards. One of the better known uses is access of other characters in fonts.
The JMicron controller isn't on a PCI card, so the support needed has to be in the motherboard BIOS (or EFI) if the interface is to function at boot time. There is SOME support there, but it has issues. Hopefully these can and will be addressed with BIOS updates. Let your motherboard vender/manufacturer know these things matter to you and check for available updates.
I've also seen other ugly behavior on some boards, such as external SATA ports not working if RAID is enabled internally.
I haven't dealt with it personally, but it appears that some issues people are seeing are dependent on which features are selected in the BIOS.
It seems those running OS X on non-Apple hardware have also had similar issues. Life is simpler with boards based on the 945 or 975x and ICH7. (945 gives a lot of bang for the buck, the 975x generally allows the bus speed to be pushed much higher which is needed for overclocking with a locked CPU multiplier) The lack of PATA support in the ICH8 chip normally paired with the 965 is what leads to addition of the JMicrom IDE controllers for PATA. If a board can't talk to the PATA drives without added drivers, you can't boot from it. That's a major pain for people wanting to install the OS from a PATA CD or DVD drive. People end up resorting to using things like USB to PATA adaptor cables to do an install.
I was once given a batch of defective radio frequency power transistors. Many had base-emitter shorts. On breaking off the top of the case I saw that they had multiple emitter sites (something to help even the current distribution and avoid a sort of localized thermal runaway where one part of a chip hogs the current). I thought maybe I could connect a power supply and blow-out the short, leaving the rest of the sites functional. It worked. I first tried it on a device with the chip exposed. I was surprised to get some light from the chip after the short was gone.
I was outdoors part of the time examining some of the chips with a magnifying glass, and comparing readings with an ohmmeter. After noticing the readings varying when I moving things around I realized light was affecting the chip. I switched to meter to voltage and current and saw the transistor was acting as a solar cell. If focused sunlight on the chip with the magnifying glass I got a fair amount of current. (I don't remember how much now, but I believe it was over 100 milliamperes.)
Hopefully this will scale sufficiently to be useful. The summary mentions 4 Watts per cubic cm, but what they've done so far is extremely small. The output currents they're getting are in the nanoamperes. I takes a billion nanoamperes to make 1 ampere.
Meanwhile, consider microturbine-driven generators in the urinary tract...
The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 and contains a very verbose standard...
That's part of the problem. Its way toooo verbose. There's no reason why public documents should give MS a huge headstart on everyone else as far as supporting a format goes, and there's no reason why everyone else should be stuck supporting MS feature-bloat either.
Excessive complexity should be avoided. It gives us things like laws only lawyers can understand.
In addition to the cost/complexity of supporting the variety of phones people would have, there is still the issue of preventing direct signals from taxing equipment on the ground. With a plane being metal it would probably be suffcient to put screening in all of the windows making the plane function as a Faraday shield, but then phones couldn't directly reach the outside in an emergency when it could make sense to bypass the no-use rules. As long as the openings in the window shields are small enough as compared to the wavelength of the signals to be blocked, they should be effective. What I'm suggesting is the same idea as the shield that lets one see into a microwave oven.
The signal from a phone can be enough to affect some equipment adversely. A friend used to like hold his hand-held radio up near some monitors and computer equipment. Sometimes it would cause a crash, or a wild display if enough signal got into the wrong places. In one case a monitor quit and started smoking. Current cell-phones generally put out less power than his hand-held radio did, but the frequencies are so high it takes very little (length) to make an effective receive antenna. Also, when far from cell sites phones normally automatically put out more power increasing the likelyhood of a problem.
I went on Newegg and spec'd out components similar to the "entry-level" $4000 Mac Pro... for about $2000.
Really. I call BS on this one. Show links to 3 GHz Quad-core Xeon Clovertown CPUs (these can be used in pairs) and a motherboard that can support a pair of them.
Just the dual-core 3 GHz versions of the Xeon (5160) run $871 each ($1742 a pair) at New Egg. It is very doubtful that you could find even a pair of the right quad-core processors alone for $2000.
If you're not trolling, perhaps you are confused. Remember, the quad-core variant of the cheaper Core 2 Duo (qx6700 etc) can't be used in pairs.
Let me get this right... It's considered "out of the box" to enable OS 9.2.2 Classic web sharing inside of OS X 10.4.x (which has it's own, also off by default), even though the current and previous generation of Intel Macs don't support running Classic at all?
To really get a feel for the validity of their results, get a load of this OS 9 Classic high-risk vulnerability:
I knew Macs could do many things, but having an Oracle vulnerability without having Oracle is impressive indeed.
Some things just make you say WOW
If they wanted to find OS 9 / Classic vulnerabilities, they could at least actually test for something real instead of going by questionable out-of-date nonsense in a database. It is very likely that the old unsupported version of Internet Explorer on OS 9 does have some real vulnerabilities. They didn't even check for that. Of course anyone still using that is probably also vulnerable to eating food from the 90's hiding in the back of their refrigerator.
Their whole approach of using a scanner to compare security of OSes is deeply flawed. While it can be helpful for spotting issues with a machine that just sits there, like a server, it is nearly useless in the case of a desktop system where many of the undesirable events depend heavily on the behavior of the local user. Use of a scanner also neglects little things like browser vulnerabilities!
We're given nearly useless results, and more vulnerabilities for OS X than for XP and Vista combined. Another MS funded "study" perhaps? It is Vista hype season after all.
Yes, but it requires a wired Internet connection. I only have Wifi. Thus the Catch-22. It's impossible for me to get Internet with Ubuntu unless I already have Internet.
Here are a couple of ways to use that wireless access:
If you have access to a Mac laptop with wireless and it is running OS X, you can go to the Sharing preferences panel and share the wireless connection it is using back out the ethernet port. The Mac will handle address translation, DHCP etc, just plug it in and it should work. (turn off the firewall, IIRC that causes problems with DNS lookup). I believe the ability to share the net connection was introduced in OS 10.2.x, but it didn't remember the settings through restarts until 10.3.x. (Add an ethernet hub or switch and run all of your machines from the laptops net connection if you like)
If you have an extra Linksys WRT54G router with wireless, flashed the Sveasoft firmware and put in Client Mode, it can effectively function in reverse as an external wireless adaptor. I've seen these routers turn up for as little as $1 U.S. at thrift stores.
...what happens when one configures a browser to identify itself as I.E. on Windows and goes to their site?
Would anyone higher up hear about it if a bunch of us went into Walmart, filled carts full, then asked someone in customer in the video department about the online videos browser/platform support, and then just walked out on getting an unsatisfactory answer?
Since the detectives/prosecutors involved seem to be so exceptionally talented at finding evil dangers hidden from public view, I propose we send them where they're really needed - Iraq.
When a record is new, and all the 13 year olds want it, they should pay top dollar. The artist's gotta eat.
Where is the logic in that?
If all the 13 year olds want it, that artist will see MORE sales (and be less likely than other artists to be short on food money)
Normal free-market economics don't apply either - one can't expect a supply/demand curve to push price up with increased demand, when there is essentially no limit to the supply. (heavily downloaded tracks aren't any less available than unpopular ones, if anything they would be MORE available due to being more likely to be in server cache RAM)
While I agree that artists should be paid for their work, does their having to eat actually have anything to do with the price? If so, wouldn't the least popular artists be the ones you should be paying since they're the mostly likely to be hungry? And if being hungry is a basis for payment, why would we pay anything for works of artists that have died? They don't eat!
The whole system is far from fair. Per-listener compensation makes sense for physical media and distribution costs, but should what artists and composers get scale linearly? Considering than it may take no added effort on the artists part when something is heard by 50 million people versus 5, should they really be paid 10 times as much? Should an artist that's heard less not because of less talent but because of discrimination in the distribution/broadcast system really get so much less?
My feeling is that the costs (per listener per song) for music should be FAR lower than they are. If we get a bigger library and have more variety, we actually should be hearing each song less of the time, so it seems fair to pay less per song but perhaps the same in total.
It would actually be far more fair to all involved, if compensation was a bit more like the system used for broadcasters to pay composers. A flat fee is paid (amount depends on market size and share), then "logging weeks" are used to sample what is actually played and use that to weigh the distribution of the money among the composers. A radio station with broadcasting a good variety of music does not pay more than one that plays the same few songs over and over. Why should we? We could do something similar if paid an annual fee (or one for the life of a playback device) and periodically voted how the payment was to be divided among the artists/composers in our libraries. Under such a system, sharing of music would be benificial to both artists and consumers. Artists would get more exposure and payments would be divided more evenly among them, and consumers would be more likely to be hearing the artists they actually enjoy most instead of what's hyped by the media.
Even with the current system, I think DRM that imposes technical obsticles to music playback could be avoided. Simply embedding info about the purchaser in each downloaded song (and having it periodically show on players), should be enough to discourage the average consumer from wide-scale file sharing. In theory, music could be purchased with different types of imbedded ID/license info. There could be personal licenses, family licenses, campus licenses, dance/dj public licenses etc...
Obviously the record industry would be opposed to most of what I've said. They're all about forcing their ancient business models on us.
Not sure if I still have a working VCR, but this has given me the urge to dust off the old Twilight Zone tape containing "The Obsolete Man"
The summary mentions modern PCs but it seems to be about gaming PCs.
That's for sure, the power consumption I see on a general-purpose Core 2 Duo desktop system built last fall (excluding display) maxes out at about 93 Watts, much lower than their examples. That's including 4 Watts for when the USB Eye-TV Hybrid NTSC/ATSC tuner is active, and with both cores of the E6300 kept maxed out (BOINC client always running) and the 1.86 GHz CPU overclocked to about 2.25 GHz by pushing the FSB speed a bit. The CPU runs cool with the stock Intel heatsink/fan. Fairly fast memory was used so the voltage to it did not need to be increased at the faster settings. It is using an AS Rock Conroe 945G DVI motherboard. There's a single 400 gig SATA drive, and just the GMA-950 graphics provided by the Intel chipset. It's definately not for serious gaming, but it works great for HDTV and general use. The OS X effects work. The BOINC benchmark shows about 1800 MIPS floating point, 4780 MIPS integer (per core). After 4 months, BOINC combined stats show world rank at 94.25% for total credit, 99.1% for recent average credit (scores are even higher for the individual project). I believe the MacBook uses essentially the same 945G/ICH7 chipset, except the mobile version is designed for lower FSB speeds.
Assembly was considered based on an Asus board with the Intel 975x chipset which could have handled overclocking the FSB (and thus the CPU) much higher than the 945G allows, but saving $200 on a cheaper board, avoiding the cost of a high-end graphics card, avoiding the cost of enhanced cooling, and keeping power consumption low were all factors.
The rule of thumb I use for power cost is $1 a month for every 10 Watts (continuous). That is based on about $.14 per kilowatt/hr
Saving 100 Watts full time works out to $600 over 5 years!
For installers needing additional data files, a second CD or USB drive ought to be usable.
For BIOS updates, vendors really should provide downloadable bootable CD images instead of floppy images. Those could be easily burned from Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. A friend wanted to update his AS Rock motherboard BIOS and was hit by the updates being some sort of Windows burnable floppy images. He's running Ubuntu and (JAS-patched) OS X on a system that has never booted Windows.
Although it is a waste to burn a CD for one-time use, one could still use RW media to avoid that.
I don't want an iPhone if I have to use a carrier that puts adware on my stuff.
Considering that most others also despise adware, I think it is fair to expect that Apple will put some additional pressure on Cingular to clean up their act. Apple can be demanding of those they do business with. Apple is more likely to have some effect than us lowly consumers.
Apple has shown itself to be one of the more sensitive companies when it comes to anticipating and paying attention to what consumers like (and hate). Such behavior really makes good business sense, but the larger telecommunications companies (phone/cellular/ISP/cable etc) seem to feel they're big enough that it doesn't matter.
An example of where Apple stood out ahead of the pack comes to mind in the case of banner ads. Some sites run movieclips or animation (usually Flash) that start playing on their own and are often very annoying (especially those with audio). Ads containing an Apple video were among the first I saw that used a PLAY button, actually giving me a choice if I wanted them to play. They also don't repeat endlessly. While I've never seen the annoying buzzing "swat the fly, win a prize" type ads on Slashdot, there have been some of those Flash animations that run endlessly. Left with such a page open, my older laptop gets hot, turns on the fan, and runs the battery down noticeably faster. That isn't the way to endear me to a product or site.
Of course, with the changes in Washington, it is a good time for all of us to whine loudly to our elected officials about every form of tech-related injustice, whether it be restraint of trade/competition in the cellular business through unreasonable use of long contracts, opt-out practices in selling personal info, or FCC regulatory changes that brought us infomercials, drug ads, reduced diversity and depth in local news... and continued PAID political ads (without which most of the soul-selling campaign finance behaviour wouldn't occur).
Is that why it's not going to allow 3rd party applications on it ? They don't want me finding the adware they've put on it ?
Apple is likely having to fight AT&T over offering some functionality, but I expect they'll be able to go beyond what others have been able to do. For reasons of stability a phone shouldn't be a totally open platform. Odds are good we'll see some well-tested Apple blessed enhancements made available, perhaps in a way similar to the games offered for recent iPods. If there is adware, I don't see why you'd need a 3rd party app to find it. Adware would likely find YOU. Macs certainly are no haven for adware, there isn't any reason to believe Apple would choose to make it a problem in any of their other products. More ligitimate exposure, perhaps through Google and under user control, is what the iPhone demo suggested. There's nothing wrong with making it easy to locate and call your local Starbucks or pizza shop.
(I wonder if anyone has ever patented the idea of having a phone let out trace scents of pizza or other foods to motivate users that are near a vendor... hmmmm. All this talk about evil deeds leads to some evil ideas I guess.)
There are piles of them where I live. I ran into a guy bringing back two he didn't manage to resell. I wish I had a picture of the look on his face as they told him he'd have to pay a restocking fee... priceless. I talked to him briefly. He said he tried to sell them on Craigslist, but kept getting bumped off as spam.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dixie Chicks are the perfect example. They made comments that offended people, those people stopped buying records. Radio stations stopped playing them because people were mad at them.
If it were as simple as local broadcasters individually being responsive to their local communities that would likely be a good thing. And perhaps what you described with the Dixie Chicks could have happened that way. But it didn't. Broadcasting in the U.S. has strayed far from the concept of local broadcasters acting as trustees of the public interest. We're given a "choice" of canned broadcast formats, with the playlist decisions generally made on a national level. When the largest owner of broadcast stations, Clear Channel, makes a national level decision not to play Dixie Chicks, it was definately not an example of local-level responsiveness. Supposedly marketplace forces and competition were to result in the public interest being served without regulation. The poor content of much broadcast programming, whole blocks of time sold for infomercials, white-house produced pieces being passed of as news coverage, generic news pieces passed off as local news, increased promotion of all sorts of bad things, and ratings-oriented psuedo-news, are all strong indicators of the public interest not being well served.
Whether or not one agrees with political statements made by the Dixie Chicks, censorship at the national level is not the sort of responsiveness to local community needs that we should expect from broadcasters. Was it right to keep "Imagine" by John Lenon off the air too?
While it is easy for many to dismiss broadcaster behavior as being relatively unimportant, consider how different things might be if all political airtime were provided in some fair way for free as a community service. We might not have so many in office selling their souls to pay for advertising campaigns.
The whole satellite radio thing made more sense in a pre-iPod era. News and talk formats could be heard in most areas well enough on AM radio. Some may still like the idea of pay radio, but I suspect many wouldn't want to have anything to do with XM if they realized that Clear Channel had a share of it, and understood negative impact of Clear Channel.
I tried using the Vista (Excremento Grande Edition) Humanoid Output Analyzer on G.W.B.
It has had some luck figuring out what he ate from the smell of his secondary gaseous output port but it has not revealed any intelligence from the verbally-modulated primary hot air datastream.
I haven't done serious gaming, so perhaps I'm missing something. Having familiar territory within a game strikes me as being a good thing, since it would make it easier for players to navigate.
I would think that more important than the location of the game is what goes on in the game. If it's about doing harm of some sort then that's something to examine the issues of whether the location is a familiar one or not.
Surely games, movies, and television can be interesting and challenging without the emphasis being on killing something?
Klaatu barada nikto
Somehow, DOUBLECLICK is the biggest concern? Not a chance. This is media hype perpetuated by the competition crying foul. I really wish people would concern themselves with actual privacy issues. It's just advertising data, people.
Ti you it make seem like just advertising data, but it qualifies as stalking in Texas.
It's interesting that Homeland Security looked to someone from doubleclick to protect personal privacy.
It's kinda funny how marketing-speak changed the name "web bugs" to the almost religiously enlightened sounding "web beacons" that help track what you've read, and through your IP, where. They say you can opt out. That sets a cookie!
Web bugs can be in email, web pages, even some documents.
The combination of web bugs and other techniques can still mine considerable data even with cookies off or frequently deleted.
I generally have liked Google, but it seems this is not the only instance of them connecting with slime.
I'll do you 50% faster and 20% harder than your date last week, and promise not to cost you more.
But marry me soon baby, I need the money
SSE4? Please, don't get distracted over little things like whether or not I can cook!
Just as with your hardware/software vendors, users here need to know exactly what you are dealing with to be able to help you effectively. We should be given a link to download a sample file, information on the codecs/software and settings used to create it, and details of all testing done. .mov is a container format that supports many different codecs. Does it play using the same (unspecified) version of QuickTime on XP or OS X? Did you bother to try? .mp3 that someone renamed to .mov so they could see the picture...
Other than agreeing that your system handles the error poorly, we can only speculate on what's wrong. We have no way to tell if you have file corruption, some kind of DRM hell, a flavor of h.264 that QuickTime doesn't like, or an
Absent essential troubleshooting details, the suggestion to try VLC or another player that has its own codec support is probably more likely to help you than anything else. You might also consider using ffmpeg or other software to transcode the file. Keep an eye out for updates to your application, driver and OS software. Test your RAM.
Who uses the right-alt button for anything anyway? The article's suggestion of using rt-alt+F2 to bring up the run dialog is just silly.
For many users, the key is probably more useful left as assigned in Ubuntu. IIRC it is then functioning the same way as the "option" modifier key on Macintosh(TM) keyboards.
One of the better known uses is access of other characters in fonts.
Bueno?
The JMicron controller isn't on a PCI card, so the support needed has to be in the motherboard BIOS (or EFI) if the interface is to function at boot time. There is SOME support there, but it has issues. Hopefully these can and will be addressed with BIOS updates.
Let your motherboard vender/manufacturer know these things matter to you and check for available updates.
I've also seen other ugly behavior on some boards, such as external SATA ports not working if RAID is enabled internally.
I haven't dealt with it personally, but it appears that some issues people are seeing are dependent on which features are selected in the BIOS.
It seems those running OS X on non-Apple hardware have also had similar issues. Life is simpler with boards based on the 945 or 975x and ICH7. (945 gives a lot of bang for the buck, the 975x generally allows the bus speed to be pushed much higher which is needed for overclocking with a locked CPU multiplier)
The lack of PATA support in the ICH8 chip normally paired with the 965 is what leads to addition of the JMicrom IDE controllers for PATA.
If a board can't talk to the PATA drives without added drivers, you can't boot from it. That's a major pain for people wanting to install the OS from a PATA CD or DVD drive. People end up resorting to using things like USB to PATA adaptor cables to do an install.
I was once given a batch of defective radio frequency power transistors. Many had base-emitter shorts. On breaking off the top of the case I saw that they had multiple emitter sites (something to help even the current distribution and avoid a sort of localized thermal runaway where one part of a chip hogs the current). I thought maybe I could connect a power supply and blow-out the short, leaving the rest of the sites functional. It worked. I first tried it on a device with the chip exposed. I was surprised to get some light from the chip after the short was gone.
I was outdoors part of the time examining some of the chips with a magnifying glass, and comparing readings with an ohmmeter.
After noticing the readings varying when I moving things around I realized light was affecting the chip. I switched to meter to voltage and current and saw the transistor was acting as a solar cell. If focused sunlight on the chip with the magnifying glass I got a fair amount of current.
(I don't remember how much now, but I believe it was over 100 milliamperes.)
Hopefully this will scale sufficiently to be useful. The summary mentions 4 Watts per cubic cm, but what they've done so far is extremely small.
The output currents they're getting are in the nanoamperes. I takes a billion nanoamperes to make 1 ampere.
Meanwhile, consider microturbine-driven generators in the urinary tract...
Keep the sodas and coffee coming!
Oh great, now we'll have hardware as crappy as software
But think of the potential. Perhaps even malware could rewire the hardware? Wouldn't that be extra special...
The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 and contains a very verbose standard...
That's part of the problem. Its way toooo verbose. There's no reason why public documents should give MS a huge headstart on everyone else as far as supporting a format goes, and there's no reason why everyone else should be stuck supporting MS feature-bloat either.
Excessive complexity should be avoided. It gives us things like laws only lawyers can understand.
In addition to the cost/complexity of supporting the variety of phones people would have, there is still the issue of preventing direct signals from taxing equipment on the ground. With a plane being metal it would probably be suffcient to put screening in all of the windows making the plane function as a Faraday shield, but then phones couldn't directly reach the outside in an emergency when it could make sense to bypass the no-use rules.
As long as the openings in the window shields are small enough as compared to the wavelength of the signals to be blocked, they should be effective. What I'm suggesting is the same idea as the shield that lets one see into a microwave oven.
The signal from a phone can be enough to affect some equipment adversely. A friend used to like hold his hand-held radio up near some monitors and computer equipment. Sometimes it would cause a crash, or a wild display if enough signal got into the wrong places. In one case a monitor quit and started smoking. Current cell-phones generally put out less power than his hand-held radio did, but the frequencies are so high it takes very little (length) to make an effective receive antenna. Also, when far from cell sites phones normally automatically put out more power increasing the likelyhood of a problem.
I went on Newegg and spec'd out components similar to the "entry-level" $4000 Mac Pro... for about $2000.
Really. I call BS on this one.
Show links to 3 GHz Quad-core Xeon Clovertown CPUs (these can be used in pairs) and a motherboard that can support a pair of them.
Just the dual-core 3 GHz versions of the Xeon (5160) run $871 each ($1742 a pair) at New Egg. It is very doubtful that you could find even a pair of the right quad-core processors alone for $2000.
If you're not trolling, perhaps you are confused. Remember, the quad-core variant of the cheaper Core 2 Duo (qx6700 etc) can't be used in pairs.
Let me get this right... It's considered "out of the box" to enable OS 9.2.2 Classic web sharing inside of OS X 10.4.x (which has it's own, also off by default), even though the current and previous generation of Intel Macs don't support running Classic at all?
l e&id=10654
To really get a feel for the validity of their results, get a load of this OS 9 Classic high-risk vulnerability:
"Nessus: The web server tested positive for an Oracle9i crash through an incorrectly crafted, long URL."
http://www.nessus.org/plugins/index.php?view=sing
I knew Macs could do many things, but having an Oracle vulnerability without having Oracle is impressive indeed.
Some things just make you say WOW
If they wanted to find OS 9 / Classic vulnerabilities, they could at least actually test for something real instead of going by questionable out-of-date nonsense in a database.
It is very likely that the old unsupported version of Internet Explorer on OS 9 does have some real vulnerabilities. They didn't even check for that. Of course anyone still using that is probably also vulnerable to eating food from the 90's hiding in the back of their refrigerator.
Their whole approach of using a scanner to compare security of OSes is deeply flawed. While it can be helpful for spotting issues with a machine that just sits there, like a server, it is nearly useless in the case of a desktop system where many of the undesirable events depend heavily on the behavior of the local user. Use of a scanner also neglects little things like browser vulnerabilities!
We're given nearly useless results, and more vulnerabilities for OS X than for XP and Vista combined.
Another MS funded "study" perhaps? It is Vista hype season after all.
Yes, but it requires a wired Internet connection. I only have Wifi. Thus the Catch-22. It's impossible for me to get Internet with Ubuntu unless I already have Internet.
Here are a couple of ways to use that wireless access:
If you have access to a Mac laptop with wireless and it is running OS X, you can go to the Sharing preferences panel and share the wireless connection it is using back out the ethernet port. The Mac will handle address translation, DHCP etc, just plug it in and it should work. (turn off the firewall, IIRC that causes problems with DNS lookup). I believe the ability to share the net connection was introduced in OS 10.2.x, but it didn't remember the settings through restarts until 10.3.x.
(Add an ethernet hub or switch and run all of your machines from the laptops net connection if you like)
If you have an extra Linksys WRT54G router with wireless, flashed the Sveasoft firmware and put in Client Mode, it can effectively function in reverse as an external wireless adaptor. I've seen these routers turn up for as little as $1 U.S. at thrift stores.
(Credit for the last tidbit goes to the I. Cringely PBS column)
Grocery stores benefit from pirates eating food, film at 11!
...what happens when one configures a browser to identify itself as I.E. on Windows and goes to their site?
Would anyone higher up hear about it if a bunch of us went into Walmart, filled carts full, then asked someone in customer in the video department about the online videos browser/platform support, and then just walked out on getting an unsatisfactory answer?
Since the detectives/prosecutors involved seem to be so exceptionally talented at finding evil dangers hidden from public view, I propose we send them where they're really needed - Iraq.
When a record is new, and all the 13 year olds want it, they should pay top dollar. The artist's gotta eat.
Where is the logic in that?
If all the 13 year olds want it, that artist will see MORE sales (and be less likely than other artists to be short on food money)
Normal free-market economics don't apply either - one can't expect a supply/demand curve to push price up with increased demand, when there is essentially no limit to the supply. (heavily downloaded tracks aren't any less available than unpopular ones, if anything they would be MORE available due to being more likely to be in server cache RAM)
While I agree that artists should be paid for their work, does their having to eat actually have anything to do with the price?
If so, wouldn't the least popular artists be the ones you should be paying since they're the mostly likely to be hungry?
And if being hungry is a basis for payment, why would we pay anything for works of artists that have died? They don't eat!
The whole system is far from fair. Per-listener compensation makes sense for physical media and distribution costs, but should what artists and composers get scale linearly? Considering than it may take no added effort on the artists part when something is heard by 50 million people versus 5, should they really be paid 10 times as much? Should an artist that's heard less not because of less talent but because of discrimination in the distribution/broadcast system really get so much less?
My feeling is that the costs (per listener per song) for music should be FAR lower than they are. If we get a bigger library and have more variety, we actually should be hearing each song less of the time, so it seems fair to pay less per song but perhaps the same in total.
It would actually be far more fair to all involved, if compensation was a bit more like the system used for broadcasters to pay composers. A flat fee is paid (amount depends on market size and share), then "logging weeks" are used to sample what is actually played and use that to weigh the distribution of the money among the composers. A radio station with broadcasting a good variety of music does not pay more than one that plays the same few songs over and over. Why should we?
We could do something similar if paid an annual fee (or one for the life of a playback device) and periodically voted how the payment was to be divided among the artists/composers in our libraries. Under such a system, sharing of music would be benificial to both artists and consumers. Artists would get more exposure and payments would be divided more evenly among them, and consumers would be more likely to be hearing the artists they actually enjoy most instead of what's hyped by the media.
Even with the current system, I think DRM that imposes technical obsticles to music playback could be avoided. Simply embedding info about the purchaser in each downloaded song (and having it periodically show on players), should be enough to discourage the average consumer from wide-scale file sharing. In theory, music could be purchased with different types of imbedded ID/license info. There could be personal licenses, family licenses, campus licenses, dance/dj public licenses etc...
Obviously the record industry would be opposed to most of what I've said. They're all about forcing their ancient business models on us.
Not sure if I still have a working VCR, but this has given me the urge to dust off the old Twilight Zone tape containing "The Obsolete Man"
The summary mentions modern PCs but it seems to be about gaming PCs.
That's for sure, the power consumption I see on a general-purpose Core 2 Duo desktop system built last fall (excluding display) maxes out at about 93 Watts, much lower than their examples.
That's including 4 Watts for when the USB Eye-TV Hybrid NTSC/ATSC tuner is active, and with both cores of the E6300 kept maxed out (BOINC client always running) and the 1.86 GHz CPU overclocked to about 2.25 GHz by pushing the FSB speed a bit.
The CPU runs cool with the stock Intel heatsink/fan. Fairly fast memory was used so the voltage to it did not need to be increased at the faster settings. It is using an AS Rock Conroe 945G DVI motherboard. There's a single 400 gig SATA drive, and just the GMA-950 graphics provided by the Intel chipset. It's definately not for serious gaming, but it works great for HDTV and general use. The OS X effects work.
The BOINC benchmark shows about 1800 MIPS floating point, 4780 MIPS integer (per core). After 4 months, BOINC combined stats show world rank at 94.25% for total credit, 99.1% for recent average credit (scores are even higher for the individual project).
I believe the MacBook uses essentially the same 945G/ICH7 chipset, except the mobile version is designed for lower FSB speeds.
Assembly was considered based on an Asus board with the Intel 975x chipset which could have handled overclocking the FSB (and thus the CPU) much higher than the 945G allows, but saving $200 on a cheaper board, avoiding the cost of a high-end graphics card, avoiding the cost of enhanced cooling, and keeping power consumption low were all factors.
The rule of thumb I use for power cost is $1 a month for every 10 Watts (continuous).
That is based on about $.14 per kilowatt/hr
Saving 100 Watts full time works out to $600 over 5 years!
For installers needing additional data files, a second CD or USB drive ought to be usable.
For BIOS updates, vendors really should provide downloadable bootable CD images instead of floppy images.
Those could be easily burned from Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. A friend wanted to update his AS Rock motherboard BIOS and was hit by the updates being some sort of Windows burnable floppy images. He's running Ubuntu and (JAS-patched) OS X on a system that has never booted Windows.
Although it is a waste to burn a CD for one-time use, one could still use RW media to avoid that.
Time to bug AS Rock to update their downloads...
I don't want an iPhone if I have to use a carrier that puts adware on my stuff.
Considering that most others also despise adware, I think it is fair to expect that Apple will put some additional pressure on Cingular to clean up their act. Apple can be demanding of those they do business with. Apple is more likely to have some effect than us lowly consumers.
Apple has shown itself to be one of the more sensitive companies when it comes to anticipating and paying attention to what consumers like (and hate). Such behavior really makes good business sense, but the larger telecommunications companies (phone/cellular/ISP/cable etc) seem to feel they're big enough that it doesn't matter.
An example of where Apple stood out ahead of the pack comes to mind in the case of banner ads. Some sites run movieclips or animation (usually Flash) that start playing on their own and are often very annoying (especially those with audio).
Ads containing an Apple video were among the first I saw that used a PLAY button, actually giving me a choice if I wanted them to play. They also don't repeat endlessly. While I've never seen the annoying buzzing "swat the fly, win a prize" type ads on Slashdot, there have been some of those Flash animations that run endlessly. Left with such a page open, my older laptop gets hot, turns on the fan, and runs the battery down noticeably faster. That isn't the way to endear me to a product or site.
Of course, with the changes in Washington, it is a good time for all of us to whine loudly to our elected officials about every form of tech-related injustice, whether it be restraint of trade/competition in the cellular business through unreasonable use of long contracts, opt-out practices in selling personal info, or FCC regulatory changes that brought us infomercials, drug ads, reduced diversity and depth in local news... and continued PAID political ads (without which most of the soul-selling campaign finance behaviour wouldn't occur).
Is that why it's not going to allow 3rd party applications on it ?
They don't want me finding the adware they've put on it ?
Apple is likely having to fight AT&T over offering some functionality, but I expect they'll be able to go beyond what others have been able to do. For reasons of stability a phone shouldn't be a totally open platform. Odds are good we'll see some well-tested Apple blessed enhancements made available, perhaps in a way similar to the games offered for recent iPods.
If there is adware, I don't see why you'd need a 3rd party app to find it. Adware would likely find YOU.
Macs certainly are no haven for adware, there isn't any reason to believe Apple would choose to make it a problem in any of their other products. More ligitimate exposure, perhaps through Google and under user control, is what the iPhone demo suggested. There's nothing wrong with making it easy to locate and call your local Starbucks or pizza shop.
(I wonder if anyone has ever patented the idea of having a phone let out trace scents of pizza or other foods to motivate users that are near a vendor... hmmmm. All this talk about evil deeds leads to some evil ideas I guess.)
There are piles of them where I live. I ran into a guy bringing back two he didn't manage to resell.
I wish I had a picture of the look on his face as they told him he'd have to pay a restocking fee... priceless.
I talked to him briefly. He said he tried to sell them on Craigslist, but kept getting bumped off as spam.