If developer support was their priority, then they got it unbelievably wrong!
I've spent most of my career working with various ms technologies, so was naturally curious about trying out the windows phone dev tools. Only they've managed to cripple them, to the extent that I still can't. Case in point - the emulator. Turns out it requires hyper v, not available for win 7... That's "cutting off nose to spite face" idiotic. No emulator on win 7, no corporate apps (we've only recently migrated to 7 at work, not about to do so again for a years yet).
Contrast this with android - dev tools, Inc emulator, even run on XP.
OK, maybe I can try it out on my home machine (if I hold my nose and swallow win 10) right? Actually, no - turns out you need slat support, which my (otherwise perfectly fine) CPU doesn't support. And no, I'm not about to buy a new machine (with a worse screen) just so I can try out win phone development (and discover that it's probably not worth the effort).
So it's android device for me. I can get dev tools. Now. And they work with my current hardware and OS.
How ms managed to screw this up so badly, I really can't comprehend.
So don't they have iPhones, or Blackberries, or Nokias, or any of the thousands of phones not made in Korea (most made in China) there? Or is this about some sort of import duty?
Interesting. Honestly curious Brit here - I know that US employees suffer lower levels of personal income tax than in the UK (or Europe) but I'm wondering if your employers pay more?
When you go to the password reset page on Amazon.co.uk, it doesn't appear to be a secure page. Maybe the "Save Changes" button submits via an https link, but I don't have time to go digging through the source code - that kinda defeats the whole point of the lock icon, etc, surely?
In any case, the captcha image has been "loading" for about 5 minutes now - guess everyone's trying to change their passwords?
Am I right in thinking that data recovery firms (and government agencies) can pull data off a hard drive, even after it's been overwritten - possibly several times? (Yes, if you overwrite it with random noise, that might make it hard to guess what was there before, but if you just record a normal file or video over the top, that'll have a set of known statistics that make it possible to subtract out and recover the earlier data.)
And if that's the case, why can't they recover the original recordings - which must surely rank amongst some of the most important ever made? It's not like NASA doesn't have the money or the expertise to do this.
Interesting analysis - in particular that you've come up with a figure of 100mW per square meter, which is two orders of magnitude less than most of the other postings assume.
You don't make any mention of moving the beam around - surely that would cut power requirements? Signal one 1,000Km stretch of coast for a few seconds, then the next, etc, then return. Maybe enough to knock another order of magnitude off the sums?
Which brings your final figure down to 2.3MW (for the Indonesia case, admittedly). Too high for direct power from (reasonable sized) solar panels, but surely the satellite would have some sort of stored energy system; flywheels or capacitors. Would reduce the allowable duty cycle further, but really only need a bright flash every few seconds.
To answer your other point: if the satellite happens to be in front of the sun's disc (or even close) you obviously won't see it. But you're going to need a few of these things for coverage anyhow, even in geostationary orbit.
In order to make the "flashing light" appear as anything, it has to be several orders of magnitude brighter than whatever else it is around. If the sun is overhead, then it has to be brighter than the sun.
So how is is that people have been able to use mirrors as a means of signaling?
My bigger flash heads can give you an instant flash-burn if you were to stand directly in front of it, but will only give me about 20-30 feet of range in broad sunlight.
Irrelevant. Not trying to take a flash photo of the land here. How far away is that flash visible from (and bright enough to attract attention) from in front of the camera? I bet it's a hell of a lot further than 30 feet.
10 watts / square meter is only bright enough to be seen as a light in the sky, reflected light will be non-existent.
So how is it then, then when you have something like the lights on a fire truck, these are clearly visible reflected off the walls of all the surrounding structures, even during broad daylight, even though there isn't anything close to 10W/sq metre incident on those surfaces?
I don't envision competing with the sun - like you say, that would take ridiculous amounts of power. But to produce a bright flashing light in the sky? I think that can be done for a lot less power than people here assume.
How bout this: Install sirens instead, as has already been done in places like Hawaii. Cheap, effective, and doesn't cost all that much since the range of the sirens is pretty good.
I'm presuming this scheme was aimed at places like Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, rather than places like Hawaii, which are already well covered. How do you power these sirens in the absence of mains electricity? Would solar-panel-charged batteries still be able to keep a charge after say, 10 years?
I was envisioning not so much an area illumination system, but a "holy crap, that's a bright star, and it's flashing" sort of system - which I think could lower the power requirements massively over actually trying to light up the ground.
If you are talking about 10W/m^2, which is ludicrously low, you're talking over 1.6 MW per laser pulse just to make the light visible over a sixteenth of a square mile (a square one quarter mile on each side). This assumes NO efficiency problems and no loss due to interference, cloud cover or the atmosphere.
I'm not sure about this 10W/m^2 figure. Maybe I just have a different concept to the rest of Slashdot, who seem to be imagining a system that would light up the ground and everything around you. I was imagining a really bright flashing "star". Given that you can easily see satellites with a really small telescope, and that's just using the sunlight reflecting off their panels (say, 1kW per square metre, maybe 1-10 square metres), that I think the power requirements could be way lower than discussed, and still produce an easily visible light. Granted someone in the village would have to be looking up, but I think there's a fair chance of that?
Ok, as the post above stated above, it takes ~10 watts / m^2 to illuminate. Raster scanning does not fix the problem. if you only have a signal in a given place for say 1/1000th of the time, then the signal needs to be 1000 times stronger to be noticed by the naked eye.
I'd dispute that. If the signal is, say, on for one second, then off for the next, does that make it less visible? You've just halved the average power requirement, and I'd argue the flashing makes it more visible if anything. I think you'd only need a very brief flash to make it visible, particularly if that flash was repeating periodically, so the average power requirement would fall correspondingly.
Say for the sake of argument that this was just 1 square mile of coastline. That is around 2.5 Million square meters, so again for just one square mile of coastline you need 25 Megawatts. This is roughly the power consumption of a small town. Good luck with that.
I had in mind a thin line, 20km long, but only 1 metre wide - one end of the strip at the beach, the other end inland (exact distance depending on gradient of coastline at that point). So that's 20,000 square metres, and I believe that 200kW is achievable with (really big) solar panels.
It's funny, in the recent "How Smart Are You" poll, only 5% of slashdotters rated themselves below average, yet there are some really fucking stupid answers to this post. Read the damn posting people (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot...).
For starters, there are those saying that it would be better to use radar than a laser. You can't see radar, the article's about using the laser for warning people, not measuring the height of the ocean surface.
Then there seem to be a ton of replies along the lines of "it would take gigawatts to illuminate the entire Earth! Sharks with friggin' lasers, etc...".
Who said this thing had to illuminate the entire damn planet in one go? Jeez, ever heard of raster scanning people?
So, it has to warn people in at-risk sections of coastline. That alone cuts the area to be illuminated by orders of magnitude. Then, it doesn't need to illuminate all of these areas simultaneously and permanently - it could sweep them repeatedly. Imagine that the laser was spread out along a line, say 20Km wide, and that then scanned the affected coastlines. So the people underneath might only see a bright flash lasting for say, 10th of a second every ten seconds. Brief, but maybe enough - better than nothing if you're out of range of a siren.
On top of that, you could limit your illumination area so that, at any one time, you're only lighting up sections of coast that are likely to be hit by the approaching tsunami within the next 3 hours, say. Obviously you needn't illuminate any areas which the tsunami has already hit - it's too late for them, sadly.
Come on slashdotters, how about actually engaging the intellect that I'm sure is actually present, and then discussing how this idea *could* be made to work (even if there are better ways), instead of idiotic "terrible idea" comments.
I can't believe that no-one here seems to have pointed out the elephant in the room - price. The iPhone is a really nice gadget, but it costs a fortune.
The Palm Pre is also a really nice gadget, with numerous cool features (at least one of which is that it's not controlled by Apple). But, in the UK at least, it's being launched for the exact same price as the iPhone! Are Palm completely batshit insane?
I'd love a smartphone, but I'm not paying in excess of 700UKP for one. Get them under 100UKP, no contract crap, then maybe they'll take off. Maybe I'm unusual in that I don't need or want 30UKP worth of calls every month, but I doubt it.
If Endeavour is all set to launch from pad 39B in the event of an emergency rescue mission, then why are they planning to move it across to 39A for the "regular" mission?
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
This whole business of running Linux is basically just a tax dodge anyhow - because, if it didn't run Linux, the EU would have classified it as a game, rather than a computer, and slapped a higher import duty on it.
The EU should have stood firm and said "if you want to claim it's a computer, then users should be able to program the facilities of the *whole* computer".
How happy would you be if you bought a new PC, only to find out that, no, you can't access the GPU, etc from your own programs?
I made sure that my current machine had an nVidia graphics chip, so that I could play with stuff like CUDA. But my machine also runs Vista and, some 18 months after its release, there still isn't a stable version of CUDA for Vista. Plus, seeing as my machine's a laptop, I doubt that even the beta drivers available from nVidia would install, seeing as how they're prone to playing silly buggers when it comes to laptop chip support.
So nVidia, instead of spouting off about how great the future's going to be, how about supporting some of the people who are trying to run your hardware in the present, eh?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't those attacks eventually turn out to have nothing at all to do with Russia, being instead the work of a single person?
Funny how no-one thought to mention this before diverting large sums of money to setting up the centre.
And it's shameful that the BBC can't be bothered to do basic fact-checking any more.
I'd like to try Qt, I reall would. But I only have Visual C++ Express Edition available to me at home, and there seems to be conflicting information as to whether Qt will support VC++ Express.
But then, when you check the Qt download page, you're told that "Please note that the Open Source Edition of Qt will support the MinGW compiler".
So which is it?
There are some guides to getting it working, but they appear to involve strange nonstandard patches, and a whole bunch of manual configuration - frankly, it's all just too much damn work. I may only qualify as a hobbyist programmer at home, but my time is still precious.
The irony is that, because Visual C++ Express doesn't come with MFC, there appears to be a gap in the market for a C++ windowing library for hobbyist Windows programmers. And who knows, if I like Qt at home, I may end up recommending buying it at work.
Slashdot Mirror
If developer support was their priority, then they got it unbelievably wrong! I've spent most of my career working with various ms technologies, so was naturally curious about trying out the windows phone dev tools. Only they've managed to cripple them, to the extent that I still can't. Case in point - the emulator. Turns out it requires hyper v, not available for win 7... That's "cutting off nose to spite face" idiotic. No emulator on win 7, no corporate apps (we've only recently migrated to 7 at work, not about to do so again for a years yet). Contrast this with android - dev tools, Inc emulator, even run on XP. OK, maybe I can try it out on my home machine (if I hold my nose and swallow win 10) right? Actually, no - turns out you need slat support, which my (otherwise perfectly fine) CPU doesn't support. And no, I'm not about to buy a new machine (with a worse screen) just so I can try out win phone development (and discover that it's probably not worth the effort). So it's android device for me. I can get dev tools. Now. And they work with my current hardware and OS. How ms managed to screw this up so badly, I really can't comprehend.
They'll probably claim they can't trace the call, and yet they seem to know exactly where to send the bill. Odd, that.
Who cares when it was first released?
Surely it's more relevant that they were still selling it up to just over 3 years ago?
The SR-71 was the evolution of the Wright Flier pushed to its very limit (well, the ramjet represents a slight break, but not a tremendous leap).
I think you'll find that the jet engine was a "tremendous leap" over the Wright Flier...
So don't they have iPhones, or Blackberries, or Nokias, or any of the thousands of phones not made in Korea (most made in China) there? Or is this about some sort of import duty?
Interesting. Honestly curious Brit here - I know that US employees suffer lower levels of personal income tax than in the UK (or Europe) but I'm wondering if your employers pay more?
So, $19.2 million, divided by 8 years, divided by 34 people equals...
The toll-collectors get paid $70K per year?
When you go to the password reset page on Amazon.co.uk, it doesn't appear to be a secure page. Maybe the "Save Changes" button submits via an https link, but I don't have time to go digging through the source code - that kinda defeats the whole point of the lock icon, etc, surely?
In any case, the captcha image has been "loading" for about 5 minutes now - guess everyone's trying to change their passwords?
Am I right in thinking that data recovery firms (and government agencies) can pull data off a hard drive, even after it's been overwritten - possibly several times? (Yes, if you overwrite it with random noise, that might make it hard to guess what was there before, but if you just record a normal file or video over the top, that'll have a set of known statistics that make it possible to subtract out and recover the earlier data.)
And if that's the case, why can't they recover the original recordings - which must surely rank amongst some of the most important ever made? It's not like NASA doesn't have the money or the expertise to do this.
Interesting analysis - in particular that you've come up with a figure of 100mW per square meter, which is two orders of magnitude less than most of the other postings assume. You don't make any mention of moving the beam around - surely that would cut power requirements? Signal one 1,000Km stretch of coast for a few seconds, then the next, etc, then return. Maybe enough to knock another order of magnitude off the sums? Which brings your final figure down to 2.3MW (for the Indonesia case, admittedly). Too high for direct power from (reasonable sized) solar panels, but surely the satellite would have some sort of stored energy system; flywheels or capacitors. Would reduce the allowable duty cycle further, but really only need a bright flash every few seconds. To answer your other point: if the satellite happens to be in front of the sun's disc (or even close) you obviously won't see it. But you're going to need a few of these things for coverage anyhow, even in geostationary orbit.
In order to make the "flashing light" appear as anything, it has to be several orders of magnitude brighter than whatever else it is around. If the sun is overhead, then it has to be brighter than the sun.
So how is is that people have been able to use mirrors as a means of signaling?
My bigger flash heads can give you an instant flash-burn if you were to stand directly in front of it, but will only give me about 20-30 feet of range in broad sunlight.
Irrelevant. Not trying to take a flash photo of the land here. How far away is that flash visible from (and bright enough to attract attention) from in front of the camera? I bet it's a hell of a lot further than 30 feet.
10 watts / square meter is only bright enough to be seen as a light in the sky, reflected light will be non-existent.
So how is it then, then when you have something like the lights on a fire truck, these are clearly visible reflected off the walls of all the surrounding structures, even during broad daylight, even though there isn't anything close to 10W/sq metre incident on those surfaces? I don't envision competing with the sun - like you say, that would take ridiculous amounts of power. But to produce a bright flashing light in the sky? I think that can be done for a lot less power than people here assume.
How bout this: Install sirens instead, as has already been done in places like Hawaii. Cheap, effective, and doesn't cost all that much since the range of the sirens is pretty good.
I'm presuming this scheme was aimed at places like Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, rather than places like Hawaii, which are already well covered. How do you power these sirens in the absence of mains electricity? Would solar-panel-charged batteries still be able to keep a charge after say, 10 years?
I was envisioning not so much an area illumination system, but a "holy crap, that's a bright star, and it's flashing" sort of system - which I think could lower the power requirements massively over actually trying to light up the ground.
If you are talking about 10W/m^2, which is ludicrously low, you're talking over 1.6 MW per laser pulse just to make the light visible over a sixteenth of a square mile (a square one quarter mile on each side). This assumes NO efficiency problems and no loss due to interference, cloud cover or the atmosphere.
I'm not sure about this 10W/m^2 figure. Maybe I just have a different concept to the rest of Slashdot, who seem to be imagining a system that would light up the ground and everything around you. I was imagining a really bright flashing "star". Given that you can easily see satellites with a really small telescope, and that's just using the sunlight reflecting off their panels (say, 1kW per square metre, maybe 1-10 square metres), that I think the power requirements could be way lower than discussed, and still produce an easily visible light. Granted someone in the village would have to be looking up, but I think there's a fair chance of that?
Ok, as the post above stated above, it takes ~10 watts / m^2 to illuminate. Raster scanning does not fix the problem. if you only have a signal in a given place for say 1/1000th of the time, then the signal needs to be 1000 times stronger to be noticed by the naked eye.
I'd dispute that. If the signal is, say, on for one second, then off for the next, does that make it less visible? You've just halved the average power requirement, and I'd argue the flashing makes it more visible if anything. I think you'd only need a very brief flash to make it visible, particularly if that flash was repeating periodically, so the average power requirement would fall correspondingly.
Say for the sake of argument that this was just 1 square mile of coastline. That is around 2.5 Million square meters, so again for just one square mile of coastline you need 25 Megawatts. This is roughly the power consumption of a small town. Good luck with that.
I had in mind a thin line, 20km long, but only 1 metre wide - one end of the strip at the beach, the other end inland (exact distance depending on gradient of coastline at that point). So that's 20,000 square metres, and I believe that 200kW is achievable with (really big) solar panels.
It's funny, in the recent "How Smart Are You" poll, only 5% of slashdotters rated themselves below average, yet there are some really fucking stupid answers to this post. Read the damn posting people (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot...).
For starters, there are those saying that it would be better to use radar than a laser. You can't see radar, the article's about using the laser for warning people, not measuring the height of the ocean surface.
Then there seem to be a ton of replies along the lines of "it would take gigawatts to illuminate the entire Earth! Sharks with friggin' lasers, etc...".
Who said this thing had to illuminate the entire damn planet in one go? Jeez, ever heard of raster scanning people?
So, it has to warn people in at-risk sections of coastline. That alone cuts the area to be illuminated by orders of magnitude. Then, it doesn't need to illuminate all of these areas simultaneously and permanently - it could sweep them repeatedly. Imagine that the laser was spread out along a line, say 20Km wide, and that then scanned the affected coastlines. So the people underneath might only see a bright flash lasting for say, 10th of a second every ten seconds. Brief, but maybe enough - better than nothing if you're out of range of a siren.
On top of that, you could limit your illumination area so that, at any one time, you're only lighting up sections of coast that are likely to be hit by the approaching tsunami within the next 3 hours, say. Obviously you needn't illuminate any areas which the tsunami has already hit - it's too late for them, sadly.
Come on slashdotters, how about actually engaging the intellect that I'm sure is actually present, and then discussing how this idea *could* be made to work (even if there are better ways), instead of idiotic "terrible idea" comments.
I fail to see why it takes Diego Maradona to free the rover, wherever it is.
I can't believe that no-one here seems to have pointed out the elephant in the room - price. The iPhone is a really nice gadget, but it costs a fortune.
The Palm Pre is also a really nice gadget, with numerous cool features (at least one of which is that it's not controlled by Apple). But, in the UK at least, it's being launched for the exact same price as the iPhone! Are Palm completely batshit insane?
I'd love a smartphone, but I'm not paying in excess of 700UKP for one. Get them under 100UKP, no contract crap, then maybe they'll take off. Maybe I'm unusual in that I don't need or want 30UKP worth of calls every month, but I doubt it.
If Endeavour is all set to launch from pad 39B in the event of an emergency rescue mission, then why are they planning to move it across to 39A for the "regular" mission?
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
This whole business of running Linux is basically just a tax dodge anyhow - because, if it didn't run Linux, the EU would have classified it as a game, rather than a computer, and slapped a higher import duty on it.
The EU should have stood firm and said "if you want to claim it's a computer, then users should be able to program the facilities of the *whole* computer".
How happy would you be if you bought a new PC, only to find out that, no, you can't access the GPU, etc from your own programs?
I made sure that my current machine had an nVidia graphics chip, so that I could play with stuff like CUDA. But my machine also runs Vista and, some 18 months after its release, there still isn't a stable version of CUDA for Vista. Plus, seeing as my machine's a laptop, I doubt that even the beta drivers available from nVidia would install, seeing as how they're prone to playing silly buggers when it comes to laptop chip support.
So nVidia, instead of spouting off about how great the future's going to be, how about supporting some of the people who are trying to run your hardware in the present, eh?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't those attacks eventually turn out to have nothing at all to do with Russia, being instead the work of a single person?
Funny how no-one thought to mention this before diverting large sums of money to setting up the centre.
And it's shameful that the BBC can't be bothered to do basic fact-checking any more.
I'd like to try Qt, I reall would. But I only have Visual C++ Express Edition available to me at home, and there seems to be conflicting information as to whether Qt will support VC++ Express.
First there were a bunch of postings indicating that it would.
But then, when you check the Qt download page, you're told that "Please note that the Open Source Edition of Qt will support the MinGW compiler".
So which is it?
There are some guides to getting it working, but they appear to involve strange nonstandard patches, and a whole bunch of manual configuration - frankly, it's all just too much damn work. I may only qualify as a hobbyist programmer at home, but my time is still precious.
The irony is that, because Visual C++ Express doesn't come with MFC, there appears to be a gap in the market for a C++ windowing library for hobbyist Windows programmers. And who knows, if I like Qt at home, I may end up recommending buying it at work.
But surely Office 2007 is far more different to previous versions of Office than Open Office is?