Yawn. Wake me when they're doing the space science we're doing. Where are their versions of just the stuff we've done in the past decade? When are they launcing a hubble or a Stardust or an LCROSS or a Spirit or a Cassini or a Mars Global Surveyor or Deep Space 1? What part of the ISS have they built or ferried? Where is their competitive private industry changing the face of space exploration?
I love how the haters keep brining up the moon like its this great prize. Err, it a big universe out there.
Let me guess, you're just another pissant whiner who doesn't care two shits about space science or exploration, but has this NASCAR-like menality of "vroom vroom, machines go fast!!! USA #1!!' Guess what? Expect to be disappointed from now on. Go watch a monster truck show and leave space to the adults. Thanks.
Better base? The garbage that HTC and Sumsung are pulling is not better, not by a long shot.
Lets see, my Vibrant has random 5 second lag because of some boneheaded decision to make a custom filesystem that sucks. The gallery app freezes randomly. It does this weird super loud beep when the battery is fully charged that wakes me almost every night.
My old EVO had similar issues and they both are behind the latest version of android for months because of these custom crap enhancements.
Of course, when I play with a G2, it has none of these problems. Yes, the UI is a little uglier, but its rock-solid and the google developed apps are light years ahead of the nonsense Samsung and HTC and the rest are doing.
More control is fine with me. I won't be buying modified android anymore anyway. Nesus S or better from now on. I feel sorry for Android users in the Android ghetto. All AT&T phones, most Samsung phones, most HTC phones, etc all have significant problems brought on by either the carrier or phone manufacturer.
Google is also running scared from the potential of Win7 mobile. MS is controling the platform just like Apple does with the iphone. Google is the only one with little to no control and it must be heartwrenching to watch other companies fuck up their product.
I'm not sure how this become the "biggest mystery in astrophysics." Maybe to the ADD addled tech crowd and other casual people who were using it as code for "hey, maybe aliens." It was like a "god of the gaps" argument. Well, "alien of the gaps."
I think it has to do more with the war on terror. A lot of these iRobot bots are seeing service as IED disarming and cleaning paths. I'm not surprised to learn the US has radiation hardened ones too as disarming a dirty bomb probably will become a necessity some day.
These are radiation hardened industrial robots. Not grandma diaper changing, go playing, receptionist robots.
The iRobot 710 Warrior isn't interested in managing your manga collection or cooking you ramen noodles.
iRobot also sent a 510 packbot. In fact, the 710 can carry 510 packbots on its back and deploy they through openings (windows, holes, etc). A little Skynety, but fun.
Actually, gestures are on the roadmap for Win8. Tacking on the kinect isn't appropriate. You'll have better detection of fine movements (hands, fingers, etc) and a cheaper price.
I suspect the gesture genie has been released, we just are waiting for it to be properly integrated into new services.
> Give me my $500 tablet that I can stick in a pouch and carry without hardly noticing it.
Gestures are going to kill the tablet. Why hold this expensive and delicate thing that's too big to fit into my pocket when I should just be able to gesture and say what I want to my TV or PC?
The Kinect tech is geared towards games, but there's no reason why it can't be used to see smaller movements like wrist or finger movement. Combine that with surface tech and you can use any surface (your couch, your belly, etc) to pinch/zoom/tap, but I suspect pinch/zoom/tap will be made obsolete by proper gesture tech.
You're not as cutting edge as you think. The tablet touchscreen is old, old news. Gestures are the future. Wait until Apple releases their own Kinect-like tech. I could see it in the AppleTV. Or MS releases gestures in Win8.
I already just command my Xbox to do stuff with very easy movements to go through menus. I don't need to hold my arm out for 10 seconds like some shittily coded Harmonix game. There's a lot of potential here and its obvious to anyone with an imagination. Hell, visit the kinect mod scene sometime. Incredible things are happening.
If I'm allowed to make a prediction, I'd say the age of carrying around specialized gadgets is coming to an end. I don't want to lug around a smartphone, a netbook, a tablet, a keyboard, 5 chargers, etc. I just want to gesture at the machine I own and *maybe* carry a decent smartphone to make phone calls.
The real problem (other than morons who love conspiracy theories) is that hotmail https is a mess. I use the hotmail plugin in Outlook and because of that I can't enable https. It breaks the plugin. Yet, my phone can do ssl-based activesync with hotmail.
MS needs to up their game and start fixing https issues. Heck, they should make https the default and stop letting people use weak passwords. I think a live account can have a 4 character password with just letters.
Actually, he turned out to be right. I don't think he or MS was claiming to stop all SMTP traffic that you might call spam, but to have filtering technologies that worked well enough where it wasn't a problem for the end user.
I remember the late 90s and early 00's. Spam was a big issue. You could randomly get 100+ spam emails in an hour. No one had good filters. It was all client-side and big mess. By the mid 00's it was just this thing to worry about when you checked your quarantine and only the occasional message got through instead of 100+ a day. Of course, it wasnt MS that did all the work. Postini, spamassassin, barracuda, various server-side technologies, blacklists, greylisting, etc.
And, as anyone who travels abroad knows, the supposed "benefits" of competition don't seem so good: in those awful socialist countrys like france, they have, and have had for many years, superior telecoms.
In the 90s and later we see Asian and European telcos moving to ADSL2+, VDSL, fiber, etc while the US was stuck on granny's vanilla DSL until fairly recently moving on towards FIOS or VDSL.
So, the big defense is that ma bell managed to hold down her network? Those crappy little analog phones were easy to maintain because they were simple machines. American business has a lot to learn from our European and Asian pals, epsecially when it comes to cell phones and broadband. Unfortunately, providing a good product with good service cuts into profit.
Caching solutions are always poor. No system is smart enough to cache everything and there's a cost to caching - misses, reading the first time, etc that produce lag and the characteristic disk churn of mechanical drives.
I find in everyday usage, most users are disk bound. CPU and RAM are just sitting around waiting for the disk. I've only put in 3 SSDs and the difference is night and day. The low seek times and transfer speeds make the computer feel completely different. Once Joe Average gets to see one of these in person, he'll be demanding one. Unfortunately, computer marketing is built around CPU speed, which is useless past a certain point for most users eg paying $150 for a.1 ghz uptick.
Ironically, gamers probably dont get as large of a boost as a general user. Your game is doing big reads and occasional little writes. You don't get all the benefits from SSDs in that scenario.
Toss in the power savings and you'll find that SSDs are ready for the mainstream. Not to mention the average user uses something like 30 or 40gigs of the drive, most of which is the OS and binaries and only has couple of gigs of personal files. Power users will just tack on 1TB drives and be on their way.
Once 120gb drives hit $100, mech hard drives in laptops are dead. I'm already seeing people complimenting the Macbook Air on how fast it, when its a pretty meager CPU, but they don't know that, they just see it runs quick because of the SSD.
Or the motion of always reaching for your phone the same way might cause some odd twist in the hip that could explain this. It isn't always "ZOMG RADIATION!!!"
This. I have a 13" aluminum macbook, put in a 60gb SSD, and tossed in a OEM Windows 7 license. $120 for the SSD and $90 for the windows license.
Best laptop I've ever owned. The SSD makes it crazy fast and gives me a little battery boost. Not to mention its 100% silent. Now that all my machines are SSD based except my mediapc, I can't stand HD noise. Everytime I watch something on my mediapc I'm shocked at how loud hard drives are how they all sound like they're about to die.
Whats wrong with comcast? I get 250gig per month. Their tools are accurate as far as I can tell. Their prices are competitive with equally fast providers (dont compare grandmas 1.5mbps dsl with my 15/3 line). Since the bitorrent throttling controversy they've been very open about their cap. When I call I get a human and support is good enough.
When I called AT&T about uverse they refused to sell me it without video service until I yelled at them, and then refused to coordinate my DSL shutoff with my uverse install unless I got video service. Their support is abysmal and often just refer me to other clueless departments. When I tell them something is wrong, they pretend to understand, and then send over a clueless tech. "Yes, its a new building so he'll need to put the line in to the demarc and also connect it to the right outlet. The outlets are not wired to the demarc." To them I'm speaking greek. A home DSL install in a new condo shouldn't take 6 days of work.
Comcast comes to my house, installs the line, and leaves. No fuss no muss.
Comcast Business gives me a reliable 22/5 line for $99 a month. That's cheaper than Verizon or ATT's shit business DSL that syncs at maybe 5m/768k if you're lucky. T1s are outdated and borderline useless nowadays. For T1 pricing I get fiber 10/10 or 100/100 to my building in most markets. The only thing these telecoms are good for are legacy services or backup lines.
My only complaint is that I'm on T-mobile and now the awful AT&T empire is going to get me by buying them. I fled AT&T only to be recaptured by them. Americans are just too pro-corporate and anti-consumer. As a nation we need to wake up and start regulating these companies accordingly.
That's not true. Many publishers apply their own DRM on top of Steamworks. Try your suggestion with BC2. You'll need to get EA involved to make it work. Heck, my brother couldn't get it to work so he bought another copy from the EA store instead of reading yet another cut-and-paste reply from Steam and EA. Their own agents have no idea how this stuff works. Its very anti-consumer.
Steam, with just Steamworks DRM, is surprisingly good, but a lot of expensive big-budget titles will have their own DRM involved.
Yet the ipod touch costs less than that. Its essentially a mini tablet. I don't think its unreasonable to have a $250-$350 dollar range for tablets. My own Nook Color was $250. After rooting its a full blown tablet.
My take is that smartphones are artificially expensive because end users like you and me sign contracts to pay whatever Apple or whomever demands. There's no incentive to make a cheap smartphone. We're all signing two years and paying an extra $20 a month for the phone. Turns out both carriers and phone makers love this kind of low-information purchase and lock-in.
Imagine buying a car at the gas station, signing a contract to buy x amount of their gas a month, and then paying a few hundred on top of that for a car. Do you really think that car will be price competitive?
Violence? In the book where an ancient and beautiful dragon is slayed for his treasure? Or where they endlessly kill goblins and wargs without remorse after stealing the treasure?
A lot of people don't realize that the SSL handshake takes place before the client sends the host field to Apache or IIS. The server has no idea what site you are requesting. That means that if you have a virtual server with 200 sites then only one of those 200 can have an SSL cert. Can "Joe's Webhosting" ask for 199 IP addresses? What if all small and medium hosts did that? We'd hit the IPv4 address limit faster than we already are doing.
Virtual hosting is the server side equivalent of NAT. Its largely a hack to get us by. IPv6 will solve this, when and if it gets implemented. Or the SSL spec needs to be changed. Heck, why not just store certs in the DNS record (once DNSSEC becomes popular) and get rid of paying the registries yet again. Regardless, there's no easy fix for this.
Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing a complete SSL replacement.
I see a lot of useless coupons and services when I visit. Some "coupons" require me to buy in. Compared to deal sites like Woot or dealcatcher, I'm not seeing the allure. Typically, most of the "deals" are things like salons and jewerly/makeup which makes me think this is mostly a service for women.
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>Maybe that will kick US ass...
Yawn. Wake me when they're doing the space science we're doing. Where are their versions of just the stuff we've done in the past decade? When are they launcing a hubble or a Stardust or an LCROSS or a Spirit or a Cassini or a Mars Global Surveyor or Deep Space 1? What part of the ISS have they built or ferried? Where is their competitive private industry changing the face of space exploration?
I love how the haters keep brining up the moon like its this great prize. Err, it a big universe out there.
Let me guess, you're just another pissant whiner who doesn't care two shits about space science or exploration, but has this NASCAR-like menality of "vroom vroom, machines go fast!!! USA #1!!' Guess what? Expect to be disappointed from now on. Go watch a monster truck show and leave space to the adults. Thanks.
Better base? The garbage that HTC and Sumsung are pulling is not better, not by a long shot.
Lets see, my Vibrant has random 5 second lag because of some boneheaded decision to make a custom filesystem that sucks. The gallery app freezes randomly. It does this weird super loud beep when the battery is fully charged that wakes me almost every night.
My old EVO had similar issues and they both are behind the latest version of android for months because of these custom crap enhancements.
Of course, when I play with a G2, it has none of these problems. Yes, the UI is a little uglier, but its rock-solid and the google developed apps are light years ahead of the nonsense Samsung and HTC and the rest are doing.
More control is fine with me. I won't be buying modified android anymore anyway. Nesus S or better from now on. I feel sorry for Android users in the Android ghetto. All AT&T phones, most Samsung phones, most HTC phones, etc all have significant problems brought on by either the carrier or phone manufacturer.
Google is also running scared from the potential of Win7 mobile. MS is controling the platform just like Apple does with the iphone. Google is the only one with little to no control and it must be heartwrenching to watch other companies fuck up their product.
I'm not sure how this become the "biggest mystery in astrophysics." Maybe to the ADD addled tech crowd and other casual people who were using it as code for "hey, maybe aliens." It was like a "god of the gaps" argument. Well, "alien of the gaps."
Occam's razor, use it.
I think it has to do more with the war on terror. A lot of these iRobot bots are seeing service as IED disarming and cleaning paths. I'm not surprised to learn the US has radiation hardened ones too as disarming a dirty bomb probably will become a necessity some day.
These are radiation hardened industrial robots. Not grandma diaper changing, go playing, receptionist robots.
The iRobot 710 Warrior isn't interested in managing your manga collection or cooking you ramen noodles.
iRobot also sent a 510 packbot. In fact, the 710 can carry 510 packbots on its back and deploy they through openings (windows, holes, etc). A little Skynety, but fun.
Actually, gestures are on the roadmap for Win8. Tacking on the kinect isn't appropriate. You'll have better detection of fine movements (hands, fingers, etc) and a cheaper price.
I suspect the gesture genie has been released, we just are waiting for it to be properly integrated into new services.
> Give me my $500 tablet that I can stick in a pouch and carry without hardly noticing it.
Gestures are going to kill the tablet. Why hold this expensive and delicate thing that's too big to fit into my pocket when I should just be able to gesture and say what I want to my TV or PC?
The Kinect tech is geared towards games, but there's no reason why it can't be used to see smaller movements like wrist or finger movement. Combine that with surface tech and you can use any surface (your couch, your belly, etc) to pinch/zoom/tap, but I suspect pinch/zoom/tap will be made obsolete by proper gesture tech.
You're not as cutting edge as you think. The tablet touchscreen is old, old news. Gestures are the future. Wait until Apple releases their own Kinect-like tech. I could see it in the AppleTV. Or MS releases gestures in Win8.
I already just command my Xbox to do stuff with very easy movements to go through menus. I don't need to hold my arm out for 10 seconds like some shittily coded Harmonix game. There's a lot of potential here and its obvious to anyone with an imagination. Hell, visit the kinect mod scene sometime. Incredible things are happening.
If I'm allowed to make a prediction, I'd say the age of carrying around specialized gadgets is coming to an end. I don't want to lug around a smartphone, a netbook, a tablet, a keyboard, 5 chargers, etc. I just want to gesture at the machine I own and *maybe* carry a decent smartphone to make phone calls.
The real problem (other than morons who love conspiracy theories) is that hotmail https is a mess. I use the hotmail plugin in Outlook and because of that I can't enable https. It breaks the plugin. Yet, my phone can do ssl-based activesync with hotmail.
MS needs to up their game and start fixing https issues. Heck, they should make https the default and stop letting people use weak passwords. I think a live account can have a 4 character password with just letters.
Actually, he turned out to be right. I don't think he or MS was claiming to stop all SMTP traffic that you might call spam, but to have filtering technologies that worked well enough where it wasn't a problem for the end user.
I remember the late 90s and early 00's. Spam was a big issue. You could randomly get 100+ spam emails in an hour. No one had good filters. It was all client-side and big mess. By the mid 00's it was just this thing to worry about when you checked your quarantine and only the occasional message got through instead of 100+ a day. Of course, it wasnt MS that did all the work. Postini, spamassassin, barracuda, various server-side technologies, blacklists, greylisting, etc.
And, as anyone who travels abroad knows, the supposed "benefits" of competition don't seem so good: in those awful socialist countrys like france, they have, and have had for many years, superior telecoms.
Heck, the french had a proto web-like service called Minitel while we had crappy 300bps modems and balkanized BBS which didn't do a lot of the services Minitel could provide.
In the 90s and later we see Asian and European telcos moving to ADSL2+, VDSL, fiber, etc while the US was stuck on granny's vanilla DSL until fairly recently moving on towards FIOS or VDSL.
So, the big defense is that ma bell managed to hold down her network? Those crappy little analog phones were easy to maintain because they were simple machines. American business has a lot to learn from our European and Asian pals, epsecially when it comes to cell phones and broadband. Unfortunately, providing a good product with good service cuts into profit.
Caching solutions are always poor. No system is smart enough to cache everything and there's a cost to caching - misses, reading the first time, etc that produce lag and the characteristic disk churn of mechanical drives.
I find in everyday usage, most users are disk bound. CPU and RAM are just sitting around waiting for the disk. I've only put in 3 SSDs and the difference is night and day. The low seek times and transfer speeds make the computer feel completely different. Once Joe Average gets to see one of these in person, he'll be demanding one. Unfortunately, computer marketing is built around CPU speed, which is useless past a certain point for most users eg paying $150 for a .1 ghz uptick.
Ironically, gamers probably dont get as large of a boost as a general user. Your game is doing big reads and occasional little writes. You don't get all the benefits from SSDs in that scenario.
Toss in the power savings and you'll find that SSDs are ready for the mainstream. Not to mention the average user uses something like 30 or 40gigs of the drive, most of which is the OS and binaries and only has couple of gigs of personal files. Power users will just tack on 1TB drives and be on their way.
Once 120gb drives hit $100, mech hard drives in laptops are dead. I'm already seeing people complimenting the Macbook Air on how fast it, when its a pretty meager CPU, but they don't know that, they just see it runs quick because of the SSD.
Or the motion of always reaching for your phone the same way might cause some odd twist in the hip that could explain this. It isn't always "ZOMG RADIATION!!!"
>A Macbook makes a great Windows laptop,
This. I have a 13" aluminum macbook, put in a 60gb SSD, and tossed in a OEM Windows 7 license. $120 for the SSD and $90 for the windows license.
Best laptop I've ever owned. The SSD makes it crazy fast and gives me a little battery boost. Not to mention its 100% silent. Now that all my machines are SSD based except my mediapc, I can't stand HD noise. Everytime I watch something on my mediapc I'm shocked at how loud hard drives are how they all sound like they're about to die.
Whats wrong with comcast? I get 250gig per month. Their tools are accurate as far as I can tell. Their prices are competitive with equally fast providers (dont compare grandmas 1.5mbps dsl with my 15/3 line). Since the bitorrent throttling controversy they've been very open about their cap. When I call I get a human and support is good enough.
When I called AT&T about uverse they refused to sell me it without video service until I yelled at them, and then refused to coordinate my DSL shutoff with my uverse install unless I got video service. Their support is abysmal and often just refer me to other clueless departments. When I tell them something is wrong, they pretend to understand, and then send over a clueless tech. "Yes, its a new building so he'll need to put the line in to the demarc and also connect it to the right outlet. The outlets are not wired to the demarc." To them I'm speaking greek. A home DSL install in a new condo shouldn't take 6 days of work.
Comcast comes to my house, installs the line, and leaves. No fuss no muss.
Comcast Business gives me a reliable 22/5 line for $99 a month. That's cheaper than Verizon or ATT's shit business DSL that syncs at maybe 5m/768k if you're lucky. T1s are outdated and borderline useless nowadays. For T1 pricing I get fiber 10/10 or 100/100 to my building in most markets. The only thing these telecoms are good for are legacy services or backup lines.
My only complaint is that I'm on T-mobile and now the awful AT&T empire is going to get me by buying them. I fled AT&T only to be recaptured by them. Americans are just too pro-corporate and anti-consumer. As a nation we need to wake up and start regulating these companies accordingly.
Note, that he bought BC2 via Steam the first time. The Steam version has the EA DRM in it.
That's not true. Many publishers apply their own DRM on top of Steamworks. Try your suggestion with BC2. You'll need to get EA involved to make it work. Heck, my brother couldn't get it to work so he bought another copy from the EA store instead of reading yet another cut-and-paste reply from Steam and EA. Their own agents have no idea how this stuff works. Its very anti-consumer.
Steam, with just Steamworks DRM, is surprisingly good, but a lot of expensive big-budget titles will have their own DRM involved.
"Isn't it great when your dreams become reality?"
Did you actually write "I hope my nightmares don't become reality?"
Censorware 1.0 is not irony capable yet.
Oh course its secure! The $300/hr "Security Consultant" we hired said so and here's his checklist from the audit!
*DC power
*Use Passwords, change weekly
*Use Control-Alt-Delete
*Blame sysadmins for everything
Yet the ipod touch costs less than that. Its essentially a mini tablet. I don't think its unreasonable to have a $250-$350 dollar range for tablets. My own Nook Color was $250. After rooting its a full blown tablet.
My take is that smartphones are artificially expensive because end users like you and me sign contracts to pay whatever Apple or whomever demands. There's no incentive to make a cheap smartphone. We're all signing two years and paying an extra $20 a month for the phone. Turns out both carriers and phone makers love this kind of low-information purchase and lock-in.
Imagine buying a car at the gas station, signing a contract to buy x amount of their gas a month, and then paying a few hundred on top of that for a car. Do you really think that car will be price competitive?
Violence? In the book where an ancient and beautiful dragon is slayed for his treasure? Or where they endlessly kill goblins and wargs without remorse after stealing the treasure?
This.
A lot of people don't realize that the SSL handshake takes place before the client sends the host field to Apache or IIS. The server has no idea what site you are requesting. That means that if you have a virtual server with 200 sites then only one of those 200 can have an SSL cert. Can "Joe's Webhosting" ask for 199 IP addresses? What if all small and medium hosts did that? We'd hit the IPv4 address limit faster than we already are doing.
Virtual hosting is the server side equivalent of NAT. Its largely a hack to get us by. IPv6 will solve this, when and if it gets implemented. Or the SSL spec needs to be changed. Heck, why not just store certs in the DNS record (once DNSSEC becomes popular) and get rid of paying the registries yet again. Regardless, there's no easy fix for this.
Actually, I wouldn't mind seeing a complete SSL replacement.
I see a lot of useless coupons and services when I visit. Some "coupons" require me to buy in. Compared to deal sites like Woot or dealcatcher, I'm not seeing the allure. Typically, most of the "deals" are things like salons and jewerly/makeup which makes me think this is mostly a service for women.
Thank you for contacting Zerrodong! The suggested names for your project follow...
Please name open source projects better. "Hey boss, lets build all these sites on top of Drizzle."
Maybe some high profile OSS guys can help fund or start some kind of OSS naming service.
Right click on the toolbar area. You'll see options to bring back the menu bar, various toolbars, status bars, etc. Its not as user hostile as Chrome.