Aero Glass was too slow on non-Intel platforms, so Microsoft removed it entirely to avoid having Windows look uglier and worse on ARM tablets than it does on a top of the line i7 workstation.
"Cortana, what percentage of people who buy top of the line i7 workstation-class computers actually CARE about running Windows on ARM?"
After getting totally fucked by Google & Logitech over the Revue, I swore to every relevant deity known to western civilization that I'd never buy another Android TV device that couldn't be rooted and reflashed... without sacrificing any of its hardware features (specifically, h.264 and MPEG-2 playback acceleration... with it, a 500MHz ARM is semi-adequate. Without it, you'd better have a fairly hefty 2+ core AMD64-architecture CPU running at 2.5GHz or better unless you're willing to tolerate stuttering and dropped frames. This isn't idle speculation... just an observation about the realistic limits of what VLC player needs for flawless CPU-only playback of 1080p60 video).
One of the other requirements is that it be at least technically capable of playing DRM'ed content, even with a custom ROM. From a hardware design standpoint, this is TOTALLY do-able with ARM TrustZone... you'd just have the official, immutable bootloader load up the DRM kernel into TrustZone, then allow it to chain to a user-flashed stage 2 bootloader that can load custom ROMs. To an app running under a custom ROM, the DRM playback looks like a custom chip... the ROM tells it whether to play the video in full-screen or a window, what to overlay, passes along transport controls (skip, rewind, fast forward, replay, etc), and manages the TCP/IP data stream. That's what ARM TrustZone IS... it's kind of like a chip-level hypervisor that allows you to execute code from encrypted ROM or RAM, then expose its functionality to less-secure apps as desired without exposing the code itself or compromising its integrity. It's just that ARM TrustZone is SO badly explained by ARM's public whitepapers (available without signing NDAs), most Android developers barely even know that it EXISTS, let alone how it can be used for non-Evil(tm) purposes. So most Android devices that need DRM capabilities just pull out the nuclear bomb and either lock out custom ROMs entirely, or nuke the DRM capabilities if the user unlocks the bootloader (the fact that Sony-Ericcson phones go a step further, and fuck the camera capabilities if you unlock the bootloader is 97% of the reason why I refuse to even look at their phones).
Ten years ago, I felt the same way. Then about 2 years ago, it began to sink in just how completely divorced from popular culture I'd become when I spent a night attempting to have a meaningful conversation at a family gathering, and didn't know anything about popular shows & movies like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, pretty much the entire Marvel cinematic universe, etc. I still have zero interest in Kardashian gossip or New Jersey housewives, but the truth is, I DID miss out on a lot of enjoyable shows that I've been binge-watching one series at a time every now and then to try and catch up.
SlingTV has the right idea of offering a bundle that has many popular channels, without two specific (and expensive) channels that are of negligible interest to a significant chunk of their subscribers: ESPN and Disney.
Companies like Comcast and AT&T could gain, or at least retain, plenty of subscribers while maintaining revenues, just by following SlingTV's lead and allowing people who subscribe to one of their economy packages to substitute channels like Showtime and HBO for expensive channels like ESPN, regional sports networks, and Disney (plus kids' channels, with the specific exception of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim). Or allowing customers to subscribe WITHOUT local OTA channels for a discount equal to slightly less than they'd otherwise have to pay those channels in carriage fees.
Right off the top, without requiring customers to give up a single channel, DirecTV could offer a relatively painless $8/month discount for service without local channels. Or even a $5/month discount, if they gave us back a feature that was almost universal among satellite TV boxes circa 2010 -- the ability to connect the dish to one input, the antenna to another input, and have the box seamlessly insert the OTA channels into the lineup. Yeah, I know there are people who "can't" have an outdoor antenna... but the fact is, 99% of the people who "can't" have just been conditioned by 40 years of HOA propaganda and social norms. By law and FCC regulations, a HOA can't outright prohibit reasonable OTA TV antennas unless they offer a free alternative of equal value (which is why lots of HOAs DO offer "free" basic cable, and pay for it out of the association fees... it's their one legal loophole). I live in Miami about 10 miles away from our local antenna farm near Hallandale, and enjoy nearly perfect reception of OTA channels with an outdoor "bowtie" type antenna that's less than 2 feet by 2 feet, & almost unnoticeable unless you're actively looking for it, together with an inline amplifier (mostly, to compensate for 50 feet of cable loss and splitters).
If SlingTV had a virtual tuner available for Windows Media Center (so I could use my HTPC as a DVR for SlingTV channels), it would be damn near perfect. As it is, the lack of DVR support is the only reason I'd even contemplate Comcast (with a HDHomeRun Prime HDHR3-CC and cablecard) or DirecTV (their $50/month all-inclusive package for Uverse customers is tempting, though I suspect the REAL cost is probably closer to $70 or $80 after taxes and fine-print fees)..
I'm not a smoker, and I don't vape. I hate being around cigarette smoke.
I still think the anti-vaping hysteria is bullshit.
Is vaping absolutely, totally, 100% safe? Of course not. Neither is dihydrogen monoxide, which (in large quantities) often causes death, is found in all cancer cells, can cause severe burns, and is the primary component of acid rain.
(spoiler: dihydrogen monoxide is commonly known by its non-scientific name, "water")
Is vaping several orders of magnitude better than smoking cigarettes? Unquestionably. It doesn't bother me AT ALL when friends vape in my car. If they've been smoking cigarettes, though, I won't even let them get in until 30 seconds after taking their final draw from the cigarette (otherwise, they'll just exhale cigarette smoke into my car).
The real-world alternative to vaping isn't abstinence... it's cigarette-smoking. Unless, of course, we want to extend the disastrous 80+ year miserably-failed social experiment known as "prohibition" to include cigarettes, too.
If the FDA eliminates most currently-available e-cigarette products from American markets, the result won't be smoke-free Americans who don't vape... it'll be more Americans who smoke, plus a lot of Americans buying e-cig juice online by the gallon from China, with literally ZERO regulation and not even IMPLIED guarantees about safety or ingredients.
Is the cigarette industry opposed to e-juice? Not really. It's resisted them the same way all established industries try to fight off disruptive change, but if vaping became the overwhelmingly preferred method for getting nicotine, we'll just have Marlboro-branded $299 vaporizers, with screw-on (branded & visible) tanks of Marlboro e-juice (and lots of parts designed to be proprietary and require frequent replacement). Remember, most non-synthetic nicotine comes from... the same companies that make cigarettes. And at the end of the day, their profit per usage-minute for selling that pure nicotine to the e-cig industry is about the same as their net profit from cigarettes after you factor out the taxes.
IMHO, the REAL source of the panic over e-cigs lies with state governments that have come to depend upon the steady stream of revenue from cigarette taxes. They're doing their best to try and build up a case for taxing e-cig and vaping supplies as much as they currently tax cigarettes.
Sorry. I've been waiting 20 years for the chance to use "VAX-endian" in a sentence. I couldn't pass it up...:-D
(for anybody who didn't major in computer science... the way VAX mainframes represented double-precision floating point internally was... er... kind of weird... I think it did something wacky like represent the mantissa as a little-endian bit sequence, followed by a big-endian exponent, so the most significant bits ended up in the middle. Or something like that. I'm not old enough to have had to personally deal with it, but I remember one of my professors mentioning it as a historical footnote during the discussion of big- vs little-endian-ness as an example of how a vendor could completely throw a monkey wrench into the usual dichotomy and make a REAL mess).
Better yet, buy a HDHomeRun (the HDHR3-US goes for about $50 on eBay) and pair it with an old laptop (dualcore, 4 gigs, preferably a ssd, win 7 pro or 8 pro) and external 2-8tb hard drive to use with Windows Media Center. Then, you'll have a DVR that's at least as good as any you could get from Comcast, and won't have to pay a thing for DVR guide service (if Microsoft discontinues the free guide data, there's a company that charges $25/year and integrated with WMC).
Better yet, if you miss cable tv channels, you can buy a HDHR3-CC for about $65 on eBay and use the same gear as your Comcast DVR. You don't even have to give up the OTA, since the HDHR is networked... You can configure windows media center to show the OTA channels you prefer instead of Comcast's channels, as well as show ONLY the Comcast channels you actually get and/or like... 2 OTA channels at once from the hdhr3-us, and 3 cable channels at once from the hdhr3-cc. You can even map Comcast's ota channels to other numbers and record THEM if you want to record a third ota channel sometime.
Best of all, Comcast will credit you around $8/month if you have ONLY a cablecard and no boxes from them, and regardless of how many tvs you network to it (the xbox 360 is dirt cheap at Gamestop, and makes the perfect media center extender, even if you don't actually care about gaming) since as far as Comcast's billing department is concerned, you have "a single outlet". Also, no monthly dvr rental or guide service fees.
But wait! There's STILL MORE... If you cancel Comcast after the promo rates expire, you'll STILL have perpetual access to everything you recorded on the dvr. So you can cancel for a month or two, then re-subscribe once you're eligible again, and your DVR will barely even notice. This is a HUGE benefit, because it deprives Comcast of their ability to hold the threat of losing all your DVR'ed shows over your head.
I just hope wish the fcc would hurry up and force DirecTV, Dish, and Uverse to implement a cablecard-like alternative too. It's not rocket science... If you already have the dish from past service or Uverse internet, it's basically just encrypted DVB-S or IP multicast. It won't work with current hardware, but making it work wouldn't be NEARLY as hard as DirecTV, Dish, and AT&T claim it would be, because they already have a working model for authorization and decryption using consumer-owned hardware.
From what I recall, the thing that triggers exponential delays upon reboot that can tie up the computer for days is when you do something like:
1. Boot into Linux
2. Back up an entire Windows C:\ drive into a gigantic tarball
3. Perform the annual Windows Reinstallation Ceremony
4. Spend the next two days installing updates, half of which could have been avoided if Windows weren't too fucking stupid to install SP1 FIRST, instead of installing 430 updates that are actually PART of SP1 and would have been included in it ANYWAY.
5. Boot into Linux
6. Unpack the tarball of your old C drive in its entirety into c:\oldC
7. Reboot into Windows. Windows sees a few hundred million files in c:\oldC with invalid GUIDs, and spends hours/days rebuilding its ACLs.
Or... if you want to watch Windows REALLY hang for a week, fill a 4 terabyte drive with severely fragmented files, then boot into Linux and use a program to do a full offline defrag. Windows will take SO LONG to complete the next boot (assuming it ever DOES), any time savings from the new, efficient organization will be consumed a hundred times over waiting for Windows to finish loading.
You can coax Windows 10 into letting you install and run Windows Media Center, but everything DRM-related is broken under Windows 10. So no DVR'ed HBO (or other channels, depending on how aggressively the cable company sets COPY_ONCE flags... some, like BrightHouse in Central Florida, flag fucking EVERYTHING, including local channels that are free with an antenna).
The biggest problem with Windows Media Center 7 is the fact that it had few compelling uses until the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime (HDHR3-CC) came out around 2012 and FINALLY made it possible to use WMC as a DVR for cablecard-protected cable content like HBO. By the time many of its current biggest fans and most hardcore users even realized that it EXISTED, it was technically an abandoned legacy product. As a direct result of the HDHR Prime, WMC has the distinction of being literally the ONLY way to own a DVR without monthly guide subscription fees that's compatible with channels like HBO.
Personally, I think SiliconDust was slightly crazy for deciding to try and roll their own Linux-based replacement for WMC, instead of just buying the sourcecode and rights to WMC from Microsoft (kind of like the way Citrix did with Windows NT 3) and taking over its development. It would have been a win-win for both of them... SiliconDust would have had the DRM engine that already works perfectly ready to go, and Microsoft could have sold more xbox 360 and xbox one systems to people buying them almost entirely to use as DRM-compatible Media Center Extenders. At the very least, SiliconDust should have solved the DRM problem (the one problem that I, as a consumer, am utterly powerless to solve on my own) FIRST and gotten it to work as a bunch of scriptable commandline apps without a real UI, and THEN worried about assembling it into a consumer-friendly DVR app, instead of spending 2 years developing a product that's still behind Kodi, and has no hope of supporting DRM'ed cablecard shows anytime soon. Microsoft was able to somewhat bully CableLabs into playing nicely with them. SiliconDust doesn't have that kind of power, and by all appearances it looks like CableLabs is doing its best to wear them down and deflect them as long as possible (because CableLabs is owned by Cable companies, and exists solely to further THEIR agenda... like forcing customers to pay $15+ per month in perpetuity for a DVR, instead of being able to buy one and show the cable company their middle finger).
I think it's mostly a NTFS thing. Back when 99.9% of files were under 4 gigs, I just put all of my data on a FAT32 volume.
I believe the problem got worse sometime around Vista or Win7, when Microsoft started applying "special" permissions and restrictions to directories like c:\, "c:\program files", anything that's a subdirectory of c:\users, etc.
I'll freely admit that doing things like sharing Thunderbird data files between Linux and Windows was known to be suicidal even in the "good old days", but at least back then you could edit a Windows.ini file under Linux without having Windows blow up due to permissions problems the next time you booted. There were more than a few times when I successfully repaired a borked Windows installation by booting into a Linux live CD and fixing the mess Windows itself wouldn't have allowed me to fix. Now, fixing a borked installation of Windows by booting into Linux has become almost impossible. Even if you fix the original problem, Windows will invent new problems of its own and STILL refuse to start up.
I think the startup delays occur because the Linux version can't spoof Windows' auditing metadata, so Windows notices that someone was editing files it regards as its sovereign property and runs scandisk on them to re-analyze the permissions and ACL metadata. Prior to Win 7 (maybe Vista), Windows didn't particularly care about that metadata unless you had the system locked down by policy, but now it enforces it vigorously. Kind of like how I had a full-blown domain-based Samba network back in 2000 that worked perfectly, but ever since Vista and its fucking homegroup bullshit, it seems like I have to spend 20 minutes fixing Windows' latest self-inflicted breakage every time I need to access a file on the Samba server from under Windows.
Ten years ago, it was relatively straightforward to install Linux in one bootable partition, install Windows in another, and share data partitions between them.
Try that now, and you'll be forced to wait somewhere between 20 seconds and a week every time you boot into Windows after writing to a NTFS partition. Every. Single. Goddamn. Time.
It's gotten so bad, I know people who've set up a NAS just to keep Linux and Windows from directly touching each other's files.
The fucked up licensing for exFAT is another example of Microsoft making it intentionally hard for Linux and Windows to directly share hard drives. It's damn near impossible to get proper exFAT support under Linux, using ext2fsd under Windows is slightly brittle, FAT32's inability to deal with large files has gotten too annoying, and Windows goes full-on psychotic whenever it notices that someone else has been touching a NTFS filesystem it regards as its sole property.
The NTFS problem is particularly frustrating, because it's the only modern filesystem we have LEFT that works under both Linux and Windows. Unfortunately, Windows enforces limits on NTFS filesystems that go above and beyond the limits imposed by NTFS itself. It's absolutely possible to get a NTFS filesystem into a state that's completely legit as far as NTFS is concerned, but Windows won't touch with a 40 foot pole.
I've personally been living dangerously and using ext2 via ext2fsd, but when you do that, it's REALLY easy to accidentally mangle or delete files by mistake... especially if you go a step further and try to selectively move certain special directories, like "my documents" and "my pictures", to the ext2 volume. Moving personal special directories is semi-undocumented black magic to begin with, and it doesn't take much to end up in Windows Permissions Hell (where not even a user with admin rights can touch a file, and attempts to recursively take ownership of files in a directory STILL fails because Microsoft decided to treat unknown ownership GUIDs and permissions as "deny everyone, INCLUDING administrator".
God, I miss the days when being a local admin was as good as being root under Linux. Under recent versions of Windows, admins are more like Orwellian "outer party" members who can do slightly more than proles, at the cost of having their every move watched and second-guessed by the inner party. Microsoft needs to add a third option to their "access denied, contact your administrator" that says "I *am* the Administrator!"
And loss of access WILL eventually happen. I made the mistake of buying three WMV-HD discs back around 2006 (when Microsoft was threatening to back a renegade red-laser DVD-ROM based 720p24 competing format unless Blu Ray and HD-DVD made VC9 a mandatory codec). None of them will play as HD.wmv files anymore, because Microsoft took down their fucking DRM keyserver.
Is Beryl a separate project again, or are you just using a 9 year old distro? I thought Beryl ceased to exist as a separate project after it merged into Compiz sometime around 2007...
1. A Start menu that isn't the nemesis of anyone who has ADHD who gets easily distracted.
2. A start menu that works like Windows 7's. I'm not a Luddite. If Microsoft came up with a genuinely better idea, I'd use it happily. Windows 10's start menu is an unambiguous step downward from Windows 7's. And it's butt-ugly, too.
3. I want Microsoft to quit crippling desktop apps and making them ugly for the benefit of tablets and phones that statistically, nobody even owns or wants anyway. I want Ubuntu to quit doing it, too, btw. At least with Ubuntu, Unity can be ignored and replaced.
4. I want the ability and right to decline future updates. Microsoft wants to make sure we can never again snub a future fuckup like Windows 8 and turn our backs on it. Sure, it's only a matter of time until openwrt adds an option to block windows update... But it's also only a matter of time until Microsoft has Windows deactivate itself if its attempts to download updates get frustrated too many times.
5. I want Aero Glass back, dammit. I paid $400 extra to get a discrete Quadro 3-D graphics card for my laptop just so I could enjoy Aero Glass in all its hardware-accelerated splendor. I really like it. Yes, I know we can (temporarily) re-enable it by copying dll files from Windows 7, but how long until Microsoft takes that away, too (see point 4)
6. I want Windows Media Center with full CableLabs-certified support for DVR'ing cablecard content flagged COPY_ONCE... Just like Windows 7 has.
Technically, we've ALREADY started to "go vertical". There are ALREADY combo chips that stack RAM and Flash chips (sandwiched between heat-removal structures and separated by some kind of insulator), but they're limited to chips where you have one chip that's not terribly hot, and one chip that's relatively cool (like slow-clocked PSRAM and NOR flash). If you tried to stack a pair of i7 cores, they'd fry each other within milliseconds.
Heat removal is a nontrivial problem. If Intel wanted to, it could sell boards the size of an old Pentium II packed with Sandy Bridge-ish i7 cores... but it would generate SO MUCH heat, you'd literally have to refrigerate it and somehow exhaust the heat outside unless you didn't mind working in a 90 degree room (with your air conditioner running nonstop). Back around 2002, my computer generated SO MUCH heat, I literally cut a hole in the wall, moved it into the adjacent guest bedroom, and pulled the monitor, keyboard, USB, and other important cables through the hole into my computer room, because it generated more heat than a 500-watt halogen torchiere used to, and made almost as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. I don't personally care about energy conservation, but it IS kind of nice to be able to use my laptop without burning my legs or fingertips (the way several generations of laptops USED to), and to have a HTPC sitting next to my TV that doesn't generate intolerable amounts of noise.
That said, the massive consolidation of cables enabled by things like Thunderbolt means someone COULD conceivably build PCs with the approximate form factor of a window air conditioner (and in fact, contain the guts OF a window air conditioner), then allow me to run up to a 100' Thunderbolt cable to a hub/port replicator on my desk. Maybe then we could finally have 3840x2560 @ 120fps with realtime hardware-accelerated raytracing (for Aero Glass type transparency effects in everything)...
Coke's REAL weapon is trademark law. If somebody started selling a beverage that tasted exactly like Coca-Cola, but never represented it as tasting like Coke or having anything to do with Coke, there's very little Coca-Cola could actually DO to stop them.
The thing is, it would only be a matter of time until some employee was overheard claiming to someone that it WAS the same as Coke, and Coca-Cola could sue them into oblivion based upon the actions of that employee.
That said, AFAIK, Coca-Cola is the ONLY company authorized to buy de-cocanized coca leaves from the federal government's sole authorized supplier. So as a practical matter, even if you downloaded their allegedly secret formula online, you'd never be able to replicate it exactly unless you wanted to risk getting raided and arrested by DEA agents, since there's no legal second source for that key ingredient.
The thing is, other networks like Dish, DirecTV, and Uverse have the exact same potential problem, yet they'll HAPPILY send you an email that tells you exactly what channels a particular package sold to customers in your area has included, as well as the current fees & taxes.
If you call or email DirecTV, Dish, or Uverse, they'll tell you EXACTLY what additional fees and charges apply, including the precise amount of taxes. Obviously they'll change if the city/county/state/whatever changes its tax amount, but the point is... they -- unlike Comcast -- WILL give you a "point in time" itemized price quote for a specific area. With Comcast, it's hard to even get a straight answer about how much the package you're thinking about ordering would cost if the promo didn't apply. For "deals" that involve 12 months of discounts, but 24 months of commitment, those details are important... and for the most part, Comcast will do its best to avoid giving them to you.
It's like Comcast's entire business model revolves around keeping customers in the dark about what services they're paying for and how much they're paying for them. Uverse is expensive as fsck'ing hell (I was paying them about $128/month for U300 with DVR and a second box before I dumped the TV for SlingTV), but at least their pricing is relatively transparent and straightforward. You'll still have to contact someone there to get the precise current tax & franchise fee amounts for your area, but at least they're totally up-front about the charges THEY control.
Or try to find out what service you're even supposed to be getting provided, since unlike pretty much every other service provider in America, Comcast goes out of its way to NOT tell you what you're even GETTING from them.
I couldn't even get a straight disclaimer-free answer from them about what channels I was supposed to be able to get. Comcast really, Really, REALLY HATES to give customers ANYTHING in writing, unless it's armored with disclaimers that basically say, "Everything we just said might be a complete fiction and total lie. The fact that it's written here is just a possibility that might, or might not, be true."
I remember at one point when they started advertising "Max Blast" service, and I tried to get a straight answer from them about whether that's the service I had... and if not, how it differed from the service I had. I argued with them on the phone for FIFTEEN GODDAMN MINUTES. At the time, my bill basically said, "High-speed internet access" on one line with its price, and a second line that said "Bundled Promo Economy TV service" (or something to that effect) with "(no charge)" for the price. That's IT.
The final straw (after Uverse started advertising once they finished their new VRAD and started taking new customers again in my neighborhood) was when I went to the Comcast service center a few miles away, waited in line for 20 minutes, and tried to get the same two questions answered ("what channels am I supposed to be getting", and "how does the internet service I currently have differ from what's being advertised as "Max Blast"). The CSR admitted (verbally, not in writing) that Max Blast was $10 more than what I was paying, but for some reason the service I had was exactly the same anyway. She then handed me a printed channel line-up brochure that conveniently said nothing about the channel line up for the service I actually had (it basically listed every channel that someone with the most maxed-out package might have conceivably gotten), and got irate when I demanded to know PRECISELY which channels listed in that brochure were the ones I was supposed to get.
Worst of all... after I escalated it to her supervisor and finally got a printout... the printout listed two channels that WEREN'T actually available, and included yet another disclaimer letting them off the hook by emphasizing that channel line-ups differed "by market". Unbelievable. You can practically hold a knife to their throats, and they'll STILL do their best to avoid giving you any kind of concrete answer. Comcast's entire corporate culture is rotten to the core from top to bottom.
That's what happened to me. When I bought my house ~10 years ago, I made a point of adding a contingency for DSL availability (because I didn't want to get stuck with Comcast).
It turns out, both of my immediate neighbors to my left and right had DSL, but AT&T wouldn't let ME sign up because their DSLAM was maxed out, and they weren't going to expand it. For a year and a half, literally the only way to get DSL was to call them and be lucky enough to grab the slot recently opened up by someone (they didn't have a waiting list, either).
The two years I was forced to endure Comcast were MISERABLE. Their service went down AT LEAST 2 or 3 times per week. I was working from home, so when it happened... I noticed immediately. Basically, their installers would disconnect trunk cables when doing new installations & take everyone downstream from that node offline, because at that point they still had the mentality of "TV provider" instead of "five-nines network service provider".
The worst part about it is, if I called Comcast to report the outage (and implicitly, to bitch at them for going down yet again), they INSISTED upon wasting my time making me reboot my computer and other troubleshooting steps, even though they could have known within a matter of seconds whether my cable modem was even reachable. They basically treated service outages like a state secret, and bent over backwards to not admit there was one in my neighborhood, even when they knew DAMN WELL that the problem was somewhere upstream from my cable modem. And Comcast STILL doesn't seem to understand why I passionately hate them so much, and refuse to talk to their salespeople.
The really fucked up and sad thing is, when Samsung developed Knox, they bent over backwards to ensure that its security didn't depend upon the user having never rooted or reflashed the phone. It had an immutable stage-one bootloader that could ALWAYS be used to boot into a secure & known state from which the second stage of the bootloader could be reflashed, then used to restore the phone to its virgin & secure state.
They ended up disabling it in favor of one-time bootloader fuses, because big corporate clients point-blank refused to adopt Knox unless it permanently exiled rooted and reflashed phones to eternal exile. I participated in calls with Samsung about it, and ended up having HUGE arguments with my own coworkers trying to convince them that Samsung was right. I tried to explain how ARM TrustZone worked, and how Samsung used it to make the stage-1 bootloader absolutely bulletproof. In the end, irrational fear prevailed over logic and design. A feature that could have been used for good ended up being used to cripple the phones of anyone who tried to chainload a better build of Android. RIP.
Making matters worse, Samsung and other manufacturers went a step further with the next generation of phones, and started designing them to be dysfunctional (at least, as far as their wireless functionality was concerned) if the user attempted to treat the locked-down Android as a de-facto bootloader & use it to chainload their own Android ROM (basically, shutting down all the kernel services, killing off all the system threads besides one, then launching the new Android from that final thread). It was never about security, but about asserting control over end users and limiting what they could do. I'm convinced that Samsung tried to do the right thing, but when the largest mobile operator in America (Verizon) threatens to quit allowing its customers to use your phones, it's hard to fight back. Then AT&T joined the lockdown party, knowing that even though they're technically a GSM network, forcing Samsung to lock down its devices would ultimately cause Sprint & T-Mobile devices to end up locked down too, because at that point it would cost more for Samsung to maintain unlocked phones than T-Mobile would have been willing to single-handedly subsidize (Sprint was ambivalently neutral... it didn't care either way, but absolutely wouldn't have paid a premium to maintain a feature they were unenthusiastic about anyway).
The Galaxy Note 4 is a perfect example of why the impact of carrier evil extends beyond the users of the evil carrier itself. The T-Mobile version had an unlocked bootloader. And ultimately, had maybe a half-dozen useful ROM distros for it that ever progressed beyond the "unstable experiment" stage. Why? The number of users capable of RUNNING those ROMs had diminished to a tiny subset of T-Mobile customers. Back when Sprint and AT&T phones were locked with the equivalent of a skeleton key hidden under the doormat (and Verizon's bootloader could be sidestepped via chainloading), there was a large, thriving developer community that took advantage of the fact that the Galaxy S3 was basically the same hardware on every network in America (even the CDMA ones). With the Note 4, that same community was eviscerated & almost completely dried up.
Well, actually, in quite a few cases, you CAN replace stock Android with custom firmware regardless of whether or not the manufacturer wants to allow it. As a practical matter, though, those devices usually end up with dysfunctional custom ROMs that can't run newer versions of Android (because Linux intentionally sucks at dealing with binary kernel modules... a policy that mostly worked as intended to keep Linux open on x86 and AMD64 architectures, but has been a complete consumer DISASTER within the Android realm).
The sad irony is, Windows Mobile 6 (back in 2007) was almost as "open" (in the sense of being able to extend it in ways neither envisioned nor blessed by Microsoft or the phone's manufacturer) as Android is in 2016. Obviously, you couldn't build Windows Mobile 6 from scratch... but fuck, you can't even independently build a copy of the NEXUS GODDAMN 6P's ROM from source. You can build your own AOSP-derived approximation of it, of course... but you'll never be able to independently build your own ROM image that's ultimately identical to Huawei's (and use its source as the starting point for later modifications & improvements).
Ten years ago, Windows Mobile users at XDA-developers.com ripped files from newer phones and used the.dll files to upgrade older phones to newer versions of Windows Mobile. Today, with Android phones, we're STILL stuck doing more or less the same thing. AOSP has been seriously eroded away by Google over the past few years compared to its golden age (the Galaxy S3... probably the most thoroughly reflashed and extended phone in Android history). Sure, you can build a ROM "for Android" -- but 95% of the things most people regard AS fundamental characteristics of Android (Google Play, Google Maps, and everything that depends upon them to run) are as closed and binary now as Windows Mobile EVER was.
IMHO, the single biggest fuckup Microsoft made with Windows (Phone) was insisting upon locking it down. It didn't win them a single iPhone customer, and antagonized millions of disillusioned Android owners who are only still with Android because it's the least-evil option we have left. Had Windows (Phone) been at least as open (both as an operating system, and for running "unapproved" software) as Windows Mobile 6 was, I'd argue that several million people who currently have Android phones would have jumped ship and tried Windows (especially if Microsoft quietly made sure there was a fully-working distro comparable to Cyanogenmod that could be flashed to it if the user changed his mind, making the phone's purchase a nearly risk-free experiment). Instead, Microsoft managed to create a phone OS that combined the worst limitations of both competitors & nothing to mitigate them.
Bullshit. Look at any demo that animates a high-constrast white object horizontally on a black background at a rate of 120 pixels per second on three monitors side by side... one moving it by one pixel every 120th of a second, one moving it by 2 pixels every 1/60th of a second, and one moving it by 4 pixels every 1/30th of a second. I can absolutely GUARANTEE that nearly everyone can accurately and easily tell them apart (though some users might need to be told what to look for).
Yes, to some extent, motion blur can compensate for framerate (because you're replicating in source video what the eye itself would see with hard-edged motion at a high framerate), but unless you get it EXACTLY RIGHT (or more precisely, "at least twice as good as exactly right"), the brain is still going to notice that something isn't quite right & you'll crash-land into the uncanny valley.
I've worked with VR. In the medium term, at least, high-framerate is likely to be a much easier way to bridge the uncanny valley than attempting to perfectly simulate motion blur.
15 years ago, we had multisync CRTs that could do 120hz or more without breaking a sweat (at least, as long as you reduced your horizontal pixel clock and blurred it a bit to remain within the CRT's bandwidth limits), but unfortunately we didn't really have graphics chips, memory, or CPU horsepower to really put it to good use. Then, right around the time the graphics hardware started to become powerful enough, LCDs became dominant almost overnight (something that took a lot of people by surprise, because LCDs looked better than shit CRTs, but the best of the best flat-front CRT displays totally spanked them, even though they weighed a ton and took a huge amount of desk space... we HAD those best-of-breed CRTs, and underestimated just how awful mainstream CRT displays were for the unwashed masses). Simply put, the LCD market stagnated in terms of resolution and framerate, and focused almost entirely on cost & size (with a tiny bit of work on improving color fidelity and response times). Many people forget that there was a period around 2008 when it was nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy a laptop (or monitor) with a resolution besides 1920x1080 or 1366x768, and if you did, you'd have paid prices that would have made Apollo-era NASA gasp.
Thankfully, we're finally on the cusp of monitors that can be updated (at least partially) at effective framerates approaching 300fps (though we're probably still at least a decade away from seeing affordable monitors that can literally change 100% of their pixels from frame to frame at 300fps, partly because the industry has now fetishized "UHD" at the same slow external framerates [hence, the current glut of supposedly 240hz TVs that can't even be directly driven at 120fps]).
Is 300fps overkill for foveal vision? Mostly, yeah. The problem is, without putting a dedicated display in front of each eye and using gaze tracking to figure out WHERE you need to sacrifice resolution for raw framerate in realtime, your only alternative is to satisfy the most demanding requirements for both peripheral-motion and foveal-detail across the entire screen, since the user could conceivably be looking anywhere.
In Florida, we kind of take the middle ground... with very few exceptions, all private property ends at the high tide line and the beach itself is public. In most cases, public ACCESS to the beach (via pedestrian trail through a 10-foot wide easement from the nearest public road to the beach) is required by law, but there might not be anything like parking, restrooms, etc. within a half mile or more. So the easements mainly serve to guarantee access to the beach for other people who live NEAR the beach (but not ON the beach). Members of the general public end up packed into a small number of "park" beaches that have somewhat adequate parking facilities, usually with steep parking fees (for nonresidents, at least) and possibly some fee for use of the park itself (though the "use" fee is usually per-vehicle and rolled into the parking fee, to prevent people from getting out of the car and walking in from an adjacent property and paying only a single entrance fee for the driver). I believe there IS a small area in/near Bal Harbour where the county government agreed back in the 1960s or 70s to (temporarily?) waive public access in exchange for the property owners agreeing to pay the full costs of pumping new sand into the beach to rebuild eroded parts, but even THERE, if a member of the public can somehow get to it, there's nothing to stop them from going there (however, I think at least one stretch has no public access points between northern and southern inlets, so you'd literally have to park, walk up or down the beach, then swim across a dredged inlet/pass with substantial tidal forces and a non-insignificant amount of boat traffic.
That's not to say all of Florida's beaches meet that ideal... I remember that back when I was in high school in Naples (late 80s/early 90s), there was a lot of noise made about the fact that most of the county's and city's public beach access points had completely fallen into neglect and disrepair over the past 50 years. Most of them were overgrown and impassable, and a few of them were blocked by fences and walls. More than a few lawsuits ensued because many of the property owners who built the fences & walls did so because the access easement had essentially reverted to jungle, and the property owners had spent substantial amounts of their own money clearing away the native vegetation and turning it into an extension of their yard. Most of those property owners were partially compensated, at least for the amount the county would have had to spend to bulldoze away an overgrown path, as long as they removed the fence/wall at their own expense. In many other areas, the access path still semi-existed, but was overgrown on both sides of a worn dirt path & effectively inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair (and exposed people walking down the path to things like poison ivy, hostile wildlife, and Florida's infamous sandspurs). It took about 20 years, but the access points are now mostly in the condition they were officially required to be all along. During the construction boom in the early 2000s (when most of the "small" original beachfront homes were flipped, bulldozed, and replaced by 10,000sf+ multi-story mansions, there was a constant battle between builders who "accidentally" blocked a public access point for months or years (always making excuses like "oops, sorry!" or "for public safety during construction") and nearby residents (who'd scream to the City, but the City itself would do little more than mail sternly-worded letters for a year or more, and often forgot about them after a few months unless residents kept pestering them).
IMHO, the ideal situation is like the one that now exists in most of South Beach and Fort Lauderdale Beach... a pedestrian-friendly public road & sidewalks, with public beach on one side, and the front doors of private properties on the other. Though making the road pedestrian-friendly is a lot harder than it sounds, since in many cases the road dividing the private and public realms is the one and only continuous north-south road ON t
You're insane if you think wealthy nations will do nothing to protect their beaches. In places like Florida, levees might not work due to limestone permeability, but that barely matters because Florida doesn't depend on levees ANYWAY, and never HAS. We just dredge out deep backyard lakes & canals, and use the fill dirt to raise the adjacent land high enough to be above the water table at all times. And when that's not enough to protect a building from storm surge, we build it on concrete pilings so occupied floors are high enough to remain undamaged (by flooding, at least).
Actually, it's worse than that. 90fps is the rock-bottom MINIMUM. If you want a frame rate that satisfies the Nyquist minimum for high-contrast peripheral vision, even 400fps is on the low side.
The human eye is really hard to fully satisfy with immersive video, because trying to define the eye's "resolution" or "frame rate" is kind of like trying to define the resolution of an Atari 2600 or an Apple IIe. The fovea has relatively high color resolution, but comparatively poor luminance resolution. Peripheral vision has poor color perception, but is extremely sensitive to motion.
That's why 60hz CRT multisync monitors looked OK when you looked directly at them, but visibly flickered if you saw the screen in peripheral vision while focusing on something else, like a book in your lap.
Slashdot Mirror
"Cortana, why is Windows 10 so ugly?"
Aero Glass was too slow on non-Intel platforms, so Microsoft removed it entirely to avoid having Windows look uglier and worse on ARM tablets than it does on a top of the line i7 workstation.
"Cortana, what percentage of people who buy top of the line i7 workstation-class computers actually CARE about running Windows on ARM?"
***DIVISION BY ZERO ERROR***
After getting totally fucked by Google & Logitech over the Revue, I swore to every relevant deity known to western civilization that I'd never buy another Android TV device that couldn't be rooted and reflashed... without sacrificing any of its hardware features (specifically, h.264 and MPEG-2 playback acceleration... with it, a 500MHz ARM is semi-adequate. Without it, you'd better have a fairly hefty 2+ core AMD64-architecture CPU running at 2.5GHz or better unless you're willing to tolerate stuttering and dropped frames. This isn't idle speculation... just an observation about the realistic limits of what VLC player needs for flawless CPU-only playback of 1080p60 video).
One of the other requirements is that it be at least technically capable of playing DRM'ed content, even with a custom ROM. From a hardware design standpoint, this is TOTALLY do-able with ARM TrustZone... you'd just have the official, immutable bootloader load up the DRM kernel into TrustZone, then allow it to chain to a user-flashed stage 2 bootloader that can load custom ROMs. To an app running under a custom ROM, the DRM playback looks like a custom chip... the ROM tells it whether to play the video in full-screen or a window, what to overlay, passes along transport controls (skip, rewind, fast forward, replay, etc), and manages the TCP/IP data stream. That's what ARM TrustZone IS... it's kind of like a chip-level hypervisor that allows you to execute code from encrypted ROM or RAM, then expose its functionality to less-secure apps as desired without exposing the code itself or compromising its integrity. It's just that ARM TrustZone is SO badly explained by ARM's public whitepapers (available without signing NDAs), most Android developers barely even know that it EXISTS, let alone how it can be used for non-Evil(tm) purposes. So most Android devices that need DRM capabilities just pull out the nuclear bomb and either lock out custom ROMs entirely, or nuke the DRM capabilities if the user unlocks the bootloader (the fact that Sony-Ericcson phones go a step further, and fuck the camera capabilities if you unlock the bootloader is 97% of the reason why I refuse to even look at their phones).
Ten years ago, I felt the same way. Then about 2 years ago, it began to sink in just how completely divorced from popular culture I'd become when I spent a night attempting to have a meaningful conversation at a family gathering, and didn't know anything about popular shows & movies like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, pretty much the entire Marvel cinematic universe, etc. I still have zero interest in Kardashian gossip or New Jersey housewives, but the truth is, I DID miss out on a lot of enjoyable shows that I've been binge-watching one series at a time every now and then to try and catch up.
SlingTV has the right idea of offering a bundle that has many popular channels, without two specific (and expensive) channels that are of negligible interest to a significant chunk of their subscribers: ESPN and Disney.
Companies like Comcast and AT&T could gain, or at least retain, plenty of subscribers while maintaining revenues, just by following SlingTV's lead and allowing people who subscribe to one of their economy packages to substitute channels like Showtime and HBO for expensive channels like ESPN, regional sports networks, and Disney (plus kids' channels, with the specific exception of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim). Or allowing customers to subscribe WITHOUT local OTA channels for a discount equal to slightly less than they'd otherwise have to pay those channels in carriage fees.
Right off the top, without requiring customers to give up a single channel, DirecTV could offer a relatively painless $8/month discount for service without local channels. Or even a $5/month discount, if they gave us back a feature that was almost universal among satellite TV boxes circa 2010 -- the ability to connect the dish to one input, the antenna to another input, and have the box seamlessly insert the OTA channels into the lineup. Yeah, I know there are people who "can't" have an outdoor antenna... but the fact is, 99% of the people who "can't" have just been conditioned by 40 years of HOA propaganda and social norms. By law and FCC regulations, a HOA can't outright prohibit reasonable OTA TV antennas unless they offer a free alternative of equal value (which is why lots of HOAs DO offer "free" basic cable, and pay for it out of the association fees... it's their one legal loophole). I live in Miami about 10 miles away from our local antenna farm near Hallandale, and enjoy nearly perfect reception of OTA channels with an outdoor "bowtie" type antenna that's less than 2 feet by 2 feet, & almost unnoticeable unless you're actively looking for it, together with an inline amplifier (mostly, to compensate for 50 feet of cable loss and splitters).
If SlingTV had a virtual tuner available for Windows Media Center (so I could use my HTPC as a DVR for SlingTV channels), it would be damn near perfect. As it is, the lack of DVR support is the only reason I'd even contemplate Comcast (with a HDHomeRun Prime HDHR3-CC and cablecard) or DirecTV (their $50/month all-inclusive package for Uverse customers is tempting, though I suspect the REAL cost is probably closer to $70 or $80 after taxes and fine-print fees)..
I'm not a smoker, and I don't vape. I hate being around cigarette smoke.
I still think the anti-vaping hysteria is bullshit.
Is vaping absolutely, totally, 100% safe? Of course not. Neither is dihydrogen monoxide, which (in large quantities) often causes death, is found in all cancer cells, can cause severe burns, and is the primary component of acid rain.
Just take a look at its MSDS! It's all here in black & white -- http://dhmo.org/msdsdhmo.html
(spoiler: dihydrogen monoxide is commonly known by its non-scientific name, "water")
Is vaping several orders of magnitude better than smoking cigarettes? Unquestionably. It doesn't bother me AT ALL when friends vape in my car. If they've been smoking cigarettes, though, I won't even let them get in until 30 seconds after taking their final draw from the cigarette (otherwise, they'll just exhale cigarette smoke into my car).
The real-world alternative to vaping isn't abstinence... it's cigarette-smoking. Unless, of course, we want to extend the disastrous 80+ year miserably-failed social experiment known as "prohibition" to include cigarettes, too.
If the FDA eliminates most currently-available e-cigarette products from American markets, the result won't be smoke-free Americans who don't vape... it'll be more Americans who smoke, plus a lot of Americans buying e-cig juice online by the gallon from China, with literally ZERO regulation and not even IMPLIED guarantees about safety or ingredients.
Is the cigarette industry opposed to e-juice? Not really. It's resisted them the same way all established industries try to fight off disruptive change, but if vaping became the overwhelmingly preferred method for getting nicotine, we'll just have Marlboro-branded $299 vaporizers, with screw-on (branded & visible) tanks of Marlboro e-juice (and lots of parts designed to be proprietary and require frequent replacement). Remember, most non-synthetic nicotine comes from... the same companies that make cigarettes. And at the end of the day, their profit per usage-minute for selling that pure nicotine to the e-cig industry is about the same as their net profit from cigarettes after you factor out the taxes.
IMHO, the REAL source of the panic over e-cigs lies with state governments that have come to depend upon the steady stream of revenue from cigarette taxes. They're doing their best to try and build up a case for taxing e-cig and vaping supplies as much as they currently tax cigarettes.
"International" dates are big-endian.
British dates are little-endian.
American dates are VAX-endian.
Sorry. I've been waiting 20 years for the chance to use "VAX-endian" in a sentence. I couldn't pass it up... :-D
(for anybody who didn't major in computer science... the way VAX mainframes represented double-precision floating point internally was... er... kind of weird... I think it did something wacky like represent the mantissa as a little-endian bit sequence, followed by a big-endian exponent, so the most significant bits ended up in the middle. Or something like that. I'm not old enough to have had to personally deal with it, but I remember one of my professors mentioning it as a historical footnote during the discussion of big- vs little-endian-ness as an example of how a vendor could completely throw a monkey wrench into the usual dichotomy and make a REAL mess).
Better yet, buy a HDHomeRun (the HDHR3-US goes for about $50 on eBay) and pair it with an old laptop (dualcore, 4 gigs, preferably a ssd, win 7 pro or 8 pro) and external 2-8tb hard drive to use with Windows Media Center. Then, you'll have a DVR that's at least as good as any you could get from Comcast, and won't have to pay a thing for DVR guide service (if Microsoft discontinues the free guide data, there's a company that charges $25/year and integrated with WMC).
Better yet, if you miss cable tv channels, you can buy a HDHR3-CC for about $65 on eBay and use the same gear as your Comcast DVR. You don't even have to give up the OTA, since the HDHR is networked... You can configure windows media center to show the OTA channels you prefer instead of Comcast's channels, as well as show ONLY the Comcast channels you actually get and/or like... 2 OTA channels at once from the hdhr3-us, and 3 cable channels at once from the hdhr3-cc. You can even map Comcast's ota channels to other numbers and record THEM if you want to record a third ota channel sometime.
Best of all, Comcast will credit you around $8/month if you have ONLY a cablecard and no boxes from them, and regardless of how many tvs you network to it (the xbox 360 is dirt cheap at Gamestop, and makes the perfect media center extender, even if you don't actually care about gaming) since as far as Comcast's billing department is concerned, you have "a single outlet". Also, no monthly dvr rental or guide service fees.
But wait! There's STILL MORE... If you cancel Comcast after the promo rates expire, you'll STILL have perpetual access to everything you recorded on the dvr. So you can cancel for a month or two, then re-subscribe once you're eligible again, and your DVR will barely even notice. This is a HUGE benefit, because it deprives Comcast of their ability to hold the threat of losing all your DVR'ed shows over your head.
I just hope wish the fcc would hurry up and force DirecTV, Dish, and Uverse to implement a cablecard-like alternative too. It's not rocket science... If you already have the dish from past service or Uverse internet, it's basically just encrypted DVB-S or IP multicast. It won't work with current hardware, but making it work wouldn't be NEARLY as hard as DirecTV, Dish, and AT&T claim it would be, because they already have a working model for authorization and decryption using consumer-owned hardware.
From what I recall, the thing that triggers exponential delays upon reboot that can tie up the computer for days is when you do something like:
1. Boot into Linux
2. Back up an entire Windows C:\ drive into a gigantic tarball
3. Perform the annual Windows Reinstallation Ceremony
4. Spend the next two days installing updates, half of which could have been avoided if Windows weren't too fucking stupid to install SP1 FIRST, instead of installing 430 updates that are actually PART of SP1 and would have been included in it ANYWAY.
5. Boot into Linux
6. Unpack the tarball of your old C drive in its entirety into c:\oldC
7. Reboot into Windows. Windows sees a few hundred million files in c:\oldC with invalid GUIDs, and spends hours/days rebuilding its ACLs.
Or... if you want to watch Windows REALLY hang for a week, fill a 4 terabyte drive with severely fragmented files, then boot into Linux and use a program to do a full offline defrag. Windows will take SO LONG to complete the next boot (assuming it ever DOES), any time savings from the new, efficient organization will be consumed a hundred times over waiting for Windows to finish loading.
You can coax Windows 10 into letting you install and run Windows Media Center, but everything DRM-related is broken under Windows 10. So no DVR'ed HBO (or other channels, depending on how aggressively the cable company sets COPY_ONCE flags... some, like BrightHouse in Central Florida, flag fucking EVERYTHING, including local channels that are free with an antenna).
The biggest problem with Windows Media Center 7 is the fact that it had few compelling uses until the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime (HDHR3-CC) came out around 2012 and FINALLY made it possible to use WMC as a DVR for cablecard-protected cable content like HBO. By the time many of its current biggest fans and most hardcore users even realized that it EXISTED, it was technically an abandoned legacy product. As a direct result of the HDHR Prime, WMC has the distinction of being literally the ONLY way to own a DVR without monthly guide subscription fees that's compatible with channels like HBO.
Personally, I think SiliconDust was slightly crazy for deciding to try and roll their own Linux-based replacement for WMC, instead of just buying the sourcecode and rights to WMC from Microsoft (kind of like the way Citrix did with Windows NT 3) and taking over its development. It would have been a win-win for both of them... SiliconDust would have had the DRM engine that already works perfectly ready to go, and Microsoft could have sold more xbox 360 and xbox one systems to people buying them almost entirely to use as DRM-compatible Media Center Extenders. At the very least, SiliconDust should have solved the DRM problem (the one problem that I, as a consumer, am utterly powerless to solve on my own) FIRST and gotten it to work as a bunch of scriptable commandline apps without a real UI, and THEN worried about assembling it into a consumer-friendly DVR app, instead of spending 2 years developing a product that's still behind Kodi, and has no hope of supporting DRM'ed cablecard shows anytime soon. Microsoft was able to somewhat bully CableLabs into playing nicely with them. SiliconDust doesn't have that kind of power, and by all appearances it looks like CableLabs is doing its best to wear them down and deflect them as long as possible (because CableLabs is owned by Cable companies, and exists solely to further THEIR agenda... like forcing customers to pay $15+ per month in perpetuity for a DVR, instead of being able to buy one and show the cable company their middle finger).
I think it's mostly a NTFS thing. Back when 99.9% of files were under 4 gigs, I just put all of my data on a FAT32 volume.
I believe the problem got worse sometime around Vista or Win7, when Microsoft started applying "special" permissions and restrictions to directories like c:\, "c:\program files", anything that's a subdirectory of c:\users, etc.
I'll freely admit that doing things like sharing Thunderbird data files between Linux and Windows was known to be suicidal even in the "good old days", but at least back then you could edit a Windows .ini file under Linux without having Windows blow up due to permissions problems the next time you booted. There were more than a few times when I successfully repaired a borked Windows installation by booting into a Linux live CD and fixing the mess Windows itself wouldn't have allowed me to fix. Now, fixing a borked installation of Windows by booting into Linux has become almost impossible. Even if you fix the original problem, Windows will invent new problems of its own and STILL refuse to start up.
I think the startup delays occur because the Linux version can't spoof Windows' auditing metadata, so Windows notices that someone was editing files it regards as its sovereign property and runs scandisk on them to re-analyze the permissions and ACL metadata. Prior to Win 7 (maybe Vista), Windows didn't particularly care about that metadata unless you had the system locked down by policy, but now it enforces it vigorously. Kind of like how I had a full-blown domain-based Samba network back in 2000 that worked perfectly, but ever since Vista and its fucking homegroup bullshit, it seems like I have to spend 20 minutes fixing Windows' latest self-inflicted breakage every time I need to access a file on the Samba server from under Windows.
Ten years ago, it was relatively straightforward to install Linux in one bootable partition, install Windows in another, and share data partitions between them.
Try that now, and you'll be forced to wait somewhere between 20 seconds and a week every time you boot into Windows after writing to a NTFS partition. Every. Single. Goddamn. Time.
It's gotten so bad, I know people who've set up a NAS just to keep Linux and Windows from directly touching each other's files.
The fucked up licensing for exFAT is another example of Microsoft making it intentionally hard for Linux and Windows to directly share hard drives. It's damn near impossible to get proper exFAT support under Linux, using ext2fsd under Windows is slightly brittle, FAT32's inability to deal with large files has gotten too annoying, and Windows goes full-on psychotic whenever it notices that someone else has been touching a NTFS filesystem it regards as its sole property.
The NTFS problem is particularly frustrating, because it's the only modern filesystem we have LEFT that works under both Linux and Windows. Unfortunately, Windows enforces limits on NTFS filesystems that go above and beyond the limits imposed by NTFS itself. It's absolutely possible to get a NTFS filesystem into a state that's completely legit as far as NTFS is concerned, but Windows won't touch with a 40 foot pole.
I've personally been living dangerously and using ext2 via ext2fsd, but when you do that, it's REALLY easy to accidentally mangle or delete files by mistake... especially if you go a step further and try to selectively move certain special directories, like "my documents" and "my pictures", to the ext2 volume. Moving personal special directories is semi-undocumented black magic to begin with, and it doesn't take much to end up in Windows Permissions Hell (where not even a user with admin rights can touch a file, and attempts to recursively take ownership of files in a directory STILL fails because Microsoft decided to treat unknown ownership GUIDs and permissions as "deny everyone, INCLUDING administrator".
God, I miss the days when being a local admin was as good as being root under Linux. Under recent versions of Windows, admins are more like Orwellian "outer party" members who can do slightly more than proles, at the cost of having their every move watched and second-guessed by the inner party. Microsoft needs to add a third option to their "access denied, contact your administrator" that says "I *am* the Administrator!"
And loss of access WILL eventually happen. I made the mistake of buying three WMV-HD discs back around 2006 (when Microsoft was threatening to back a renegade red-laser DVD-ROM based 720p24 competing format unless Blu Ray and HD-DVD made VC9 a mandatory codec). None of them will play as HD .wmv files anymore, because Microsoft took down their fucking DRM keyserver.
Is Beryl a separate project again, or are you just using a 9 year old distro? I thought Beryl ceased to exist as a separate project after it merged into Compiz sometime around 2007...
> What is it you want
1. A Start menu that isn't the nemesis of anyone who has ADHD who gets easily distracted.
2. A start menu that works like Windows 7's. I'm not a Luddite. If Microsoft came up with a genuinely better idea, I'd use it happily. Windows 10's start menu is an unambiguous step downward from Windows 7's. And it's butt-ugly, too.
3. I want Microsoft to quit crippling desktop apps and making them ugly for the benefit of tablets and phones that statistically, nobody even owns or wants anyway. I want Ubuntu to quit doing it, too, btw. At least with Ubuntu, Unity can be ignored and replaced.
4. I want the ability and right to decline future updates. Microsoft wants to make sure we can never again snub a future fuckup like Windows 8 and turn our backs on it. Sure, it's only a matter of time until openwrt adds an option to block windows update... But it's also only a matter of time until Microsoft has Windows deactivate itself if its attempts to download updates get frustrated too many times.
5. I want Aero Glass back, dammit. I paid $400 extra to get a discrete Quadro 3-D graphics card for my laptop just so I could enjoy Aero Glass in all its hardware-accelerated splendor. I really like it. Yes, I know we can (temporarily) re-enable it by copying dll files from Windows 7, but how long until Microsoft takes that away, too (see point 4)
6. I want Windows Media Center with full CableLabs-certified support for DVR'ing cablecard content flagged COPY_ONCE... Just like Windows 7 has.
Did I miss anything?
Technically, we've ALREADY started to "go vertical". There are ALREADY combo chips that stack RAM and Flash chips (sandwiched between heat-removal structures and separated by some kind of insulator), but they're limited to chips where you have one chip that's not terribly hot, and one chip that's relatively cool (like slow-clocked PSRAM and NOR flash). If you tried to stack a pair of i7 cores, they'd fry each other within milliseconds.
Heat removal is a nontrivial problem. If Intel wanted to, it could sell boards the size of an old Pentium II packed with Sandy Bridge-ish i7 cores... but it would generate SO MUCH heat, you'd literally have to refrigerate it and somehow exhaust the heat outside unless you didn't mind working in a 90 degree room (with your air conditioner running nonstop). Back around 2002, my computer generated SO MUCH heat, I literally cut a hole in the wall, moved it into the adjacent guest bedroom, and pulled the monitor, keyboard, USB, and other important cables through the hole into my computer room, because it generated more heat than a 500-watt halogen torchiere used to, and made almost as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. I don't personally care about energy conservation, but it IS kind of nice to be able to use my laptop without burning my legs or fingertips (the way several generations of laptops USED to), and to have a HTPC sitting next to my TV that doesn't generate intolerable amounts of noise.
That said, the massive consolidation of cables enabled by things like Thunderbolt means someone COULD conceivably build PCs with the approximate form factor of a window air conditioner (and in fact, contain the guts OF a window air conditioner), then allow me to run up to a 100' Thunderbolt cable to a hub/port replicator on my desk. Maybe then we could finally have 3840x2560 @ 120fps with realtime hardware-accelerated raytracing (for Aero Glass type transparency effects in everything)...
Coke's REAL weapon is trademark law. If somebody started selling a beverage that tasted exactly like Coca-Cola, but never represented it as tasting like Coke or having anything to do with Coke, there's very little Coca-Cola could actually DO to stop them.
The thing is, it would only be a matter of time until some employee was overheard claiming to someone that it WAS the same as Coke, and Coca-Cola could sue them into oblivion based upon the actions of that employee.
That said, AFAIK, Coca-Cola is the ONLY company authorized to buy de-cocanized coca leaves from the federal government's sole authorized supplier. So as a practical matter, even if you downloaded their allegedly secret formula online, you'd never be able to replicate it exactly unless you wanted to risk getting raided and arrested by DEA agents, since there's no legal second source for that key ingredient.
The thing is, other networks like Dish, DirecTV, and Uverse have the exact same potential problem, yet they'll HAPPILY send you an email that tells you exactly what channels a particular package sold to customers in your area has included, as well as the current fees & taxes.
If you call or email DirecTV, Dish, or Uverse, they'll tell you EXACTLY what additional fees and charges apply, including the precise amount of taxes. Obviously they'll change if the city/county/state/whatever changes its tax amount, but the point is... they -- unlike Comcast -- WILL give you a "point in time" itemized price quote for a specific area. With Comcast, it's hard to even get a straight answer about how much the package you're thinking about ordering would cost if the promo didn't apply. For "deals" that involve 12 months of discounts, but 24 months of commitment, those details are important... and for the most part, Comcast will do its best to avoid giving them to you.
It's like Comcast's entire business model revolves around keeping customers in the dark about what services they're paying for and how much they're paying for them. Uverse is expensive as fsck'ing hell (I was paying them about $128/month for U300 with DVR and a second box before I dumped the TV for SlingTV), but at least their pricing is relatively transparent and straightforward. You'll still have to contact someone there to get the precise current tax & franchise fee amounts for your area, but at least they're totally up-front about the charges THEY control.
Or try to find out what service you're even supposed to be getting provided, since unlike pretty much every other service provider in America, Comcast goes out of its way to NOT tell you what you're even GETTING from them.
I couldn't even get a straight disclaimer-free answer from them about what channels I was supposed to be able to get. Comcast really, Really, REALLY HATES to give customers ANYTHING in writing, unless it's armored with disclaimers that basically say, "Everything we just said might be a complete fiction and total lie. The fact that it's written here is just a possibility that might, or might not, be true."
I remember at one point when they started advertising "Max Blast" service, and I tried to get a straight answer from them about whether that's the service I had... and if not, how it differed from the service I had. I argued with them on the phone for FIFTEEN GODDAMN MINUTES. At the time, my bill basically said, "High-speed internet access" on one line with its price, and a second line that said "Bundled Promo Economy TV service" (or something to that effect) with "(no charge)" for the price. That's IT.
The final straw (after Uverse started advertising once they finished their new VRAD and started taking new customers again in my neighborhood) was when I went to the Comcast service center a few miles away, waited in line for 20 minutes, and tried to get the same two questions answered ("what channels am I supposed to be getting", and "how does the internet service I currently have differ from what's being advertised as "Max Blast"). The CSR admitted (verbally, not in writing) that Max Blast was $10 more than what I was paying, but for some reason the service I had was exactly the same anyway. She then handed me a printed channel line-up brochure that conveniently said nothing about the channel line up for the service I actually had (it basically listed every channel that someone with the most maxed-out package might have conceivably gotten), and got irate when I demanded to know PRECISELY which channels listed in that brochure were the ones I was supposed to get.
Worst of all... after I escalated it to her supervisor and finally got a printout... the printout listed two channels that WEREN'T actually available, and included yet another disclaimer letting them off the hook by emphasizing that channel line-ups differed "by market". Unbelievable. You can practically hold a knife to their throats, and they'll STILL do their best to avoid giving you any kind of concrete answer. Comcast's entire corporate culture is rotten to the core from top to bottom.
That's what happened to me. When I bought my house ~10 years ago, I made a point of adding a contingency for DSL availability (because I didn't want to get stuck with Comcast).
It turns out, both of my immediate neighbors to my left and right had DSL, but AT&T wouldn't let ME sign up because their DSLAM was maxed out, and they weren't going to expand it. For a year and a half, literally the only way to get DSL was to call them and be lucky enough to grab the slot recently opened up by someone (they didn't have a waiting list, either).
The two years I was forced to endure Comcast were MISERABLE. Their service went down AT LEAST 2 or 3 times per week. I was working from home, so when it happened... I noticed immediately. Basically, their installers would disconnect trunk cables when doing new installations & take everyone downstream from that node offline, because at that point they still had the mentality of "TV provider" instead of "five-nines network service provider".
The worst part about it is, if I called Comcast to report the outage (and implicitly, to bitch at them for going down yet again), they INSISTED upon wasting my time making me reboot my computer and other troubleshooting steps, even though they could have known within a matter of seconds whether my cable modem was even reachable. They basically treated service outages like a state secret, and bent over backwards to not admit there was one in my neighborhood, even when they knew DAMN WELL that the problem was somewhere upstream from my cable modem. And Comcast STILL doesn't seem to understand why I passionately hate them so much, and refuse to talk to their salespeople.
The really fucked up and sad thing is, when Samsung developed Knox, they bent over backwards to ensure that its security didn't depend upon the user having never rooted or reflashed the phone. It had an immutable stage-one bootloader that could ALWAYS be used to boot into a secure & known state from which the second stage of the bootloader could be reflashed, then used to restore the phone to its virgin & secure state.
They ended up disabling it in favor of one-time bootloader fuses, because big corporate clients point-blank refused to adopt Knox unless it permanently exiled rooted and reflashed phones to eternal exile. I participated in calls with Samsung about it, and ended up having HUGE arguments with my own coworkers trying to convince them that Samsung was right. I tried to explain how ARM TrustZone worked, and how Samsung used it to make the stage-1 bootloader absolutely bulletproof. In the end, irrational fear prevailed over logic and design. A feature that could have been used for good ended up being used to cripple the phones of anyone who tried to chainload a better build of Android. RIP.
Making matters worse, Samsung and other manufacturers went a step further with the next generation of phones, and started designing them to be dysfunctional (at least, as far as their wireless functionality was concerned) if the user attempted to treat the locked-down Android as a de-facto bootloader & use it to chainload their own Android ROM (basically, shutting down all the kernel services, killing off all the system threads besides one, then launching the new Android from that final thread). It was never about security, but about asserting control over end users and limiting what they could do. I'm convinced that Samsung tried to do the right thing, but when the largest mobile operator in America (Verizon) threatens to quit allowing its customers to use your phones, it's hard to fight back. Then AT&T joined the lockdown party, knowing that even though they're technically a GSM network, forcing Samsung to lock down its devices would ultimately cause Sprint & T-Mobile devices to end up locked down too, because at that point it would cost more for Samsung to maintain unlocked phones than T-Mobile would have been willing to single-handedly subsidize (Sprint was ambivalently neutral... it didn't care either way, but absolutely wouldn't have paid a premium to maintain a feature they were unenthusiastic about anyway).
The Galaxy Note 4 is a perfect example of why the impact of carrier evil extends beyond the users of the evil carrier itself. The T-Mobile version had an unlocked bootloader. And ultimately, had maybe a half-dozen useful ROM distros for it that ever progressed beyond the "unstable experiment" stage. Why? The number of users capable of RUNNING those ROMs had diminished to a tiny subset of T-Mobile customers. Back when Sprint and AT&T phones were locked with the equivalent of a skeleton key hidden under the doormat (and Verizon's bootloader could be sidestepped via chainloading), there was a large, thriving developer community that took advantage of the fact that the Galaxy S3 was basically the same hardware on every network in America (even the CDMA ones). With the Note 4, that same community was eviscerated & almost completely dried up.
Well, actually, in quite a few cases, you CAN replace stock Android with custom firmware regardless of whether or not the manufacturer wants to allow it. As a practical matter, though, those devices usually end up with dysfunctional custom ROMs that can't run newer versions of Android (because Linux intentionally sucks at dealing with binary kernel modules... a policy that mostly worked as intended to keep Linux open on x86 and AMD64 architectures, but has been a complete consumer DISASTER within the Android realm).
The sad irony is, Windows Mobile 6 (back in 2007) was almost as "open" (in the sense of being able to extend it in ways neither envisioned nor blessed by Microsoft or the phone's manufacturer) as Android is in 2016. Obviously, you couldn't build Windows Mobile 6 from scratch... but fuck, you can't even independently build a copy of the NEXUS GODDAMN 6P's ROM from source. You can build your own AOSP-derived approximation of it, of course... but you'll never be able to independently build your own ROM image that's ultimately identical to Huawei's (and use its source as the starting point for later modifications & improvements).
Ten years ago, Windows Mobile users at XDA-developers.com ripped files from newer phones and used the .dll files to upgrade older phones to newer versions of Windows Mobile. Today, with Android phones, we're STILL stuck doing more or less the same thing. AOSP has been seriously eroded away by Google over the past few years compared to its golden age (the Galaxy S3... probably the most thoroughly reflashed and extended phone in Android history). Sure, you can build a ROM "for Android" -- but 95% of the things most people regard AS fundamental characteristics of Android (Google Play, Google Maps, and everything that depends upon them to run) are as closed and binary now as Windows Mobile EVER was.
IMHO, the single biggest fuckup Microsoft made with Windows (Phone) was insisting upon locking it down. It didn't win them a single iPhone customer, and antagonized millions of disillusioned Android owners who are only still with Android because it's the least-evil option we have left. Had Windows (Phone) been at least as open (both as an operating system, and for running "unapproved" software) as Windows Mobile 6 was, I'd argue that several million people who currently have Android phones would have jumped ship and tried Windows (especially if Microsoft quietly made sure there was a fully-working distro comparable to Cyanogenmod that could be flashed to it if the user changed his mind, making the phone's purchase a nearly risk-free experiment). Instead, Microsoft managed to create a phone OS that combined the worst limitations of both competitors & nothing to mitigate them.
Bullshit. Look at any demo that animates a high-constrast white object horizontally on a black background at a rate of 120 pixels per second on three monitors side by side... one moving it by one pixel every 120th of a second, one moving it by 2 pixels every 1/60th of a second, and one moving it by 4 pixels every 1/30th of a second. I can absolutely GUARANTEE that nearly everyone can accurately and easily tell them apart (though some users might need to be told what to look for).
Yes, to some extent, motion blur can compensate for framerate (because you're replicating in source video what the eye itself would see with hard-edged motion at a high framerate), but unless you get it EXACTLY RIGHT (or more precisely, "at least twice as good as exactly right"), the brain is still going to notice that something isn't quite right & you'll crash-land into the uncanny valley.
I've worked with VR. In the medium term, at least, high-framerate is likely to be a much easier way to bridge the uncanny valley than attempting to perfectly simulate motion blur.
15 years ago, we had multisync CRTs that could do 120hz or more without breaking a sweat (at least, as long as you reduced your horizontal pixel clock and blurred it a bit to remain within the CRT's bandwidth limits), but unfortunately we didn't really have graphics chips, memory, or CPU horsepower to really put it to good use. Then, right around the time the graphics hardware started to become powerful enough, LCDs became dominant almost overnight (something that took a lot of people by surprise, because LCDs looked better than shit CRTs, but the best of the best flat-front CRT displays totally spanked them, even though they weighed a ton and took a huge amount of desk space... we HAD those best-of-breed CRTs, and underestimated just how awful mainstream CRT displays were for the unwashed masses). Simply put, the LCD market stagnated in terms of resolution and framerate, and focused almost entirely on cost & size (with a tiny bit of work on improving color fidelity and response times). Many people forget that there was a period around 2008 when it was nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy a laptop (or monitor) with a resolution besides 1920x1080 or 1366x768, and if you did, you'd have paid prices that would have made Apollo-era NASA gasp.
Thankfully, we're finally on the cusp of monitors that can be updated (at least partially) at effective framerates approaching 300fps (though we're probably still at least a decade away from seeing affordable monitors that can literally change 100% of their pixels from frame to frame at 300fps, partly because the industry has now fetishized "UHD" at the same slow external framerates [hence, the current glut of supposedly 240hz TVs that can't even be directly driven at 120fps]).
Is 300fps overkill for foveal vision? Mostly, yeah. The problem is, without putting a dedicated display in front of each eye and using gaze tracking to figure out WHERE you need to sacrifice resolution for raw framerate in realtime, your only alternative is to satisfy the most demanding requirements for both peripheral-motion and foveal-detail across the entire screen, since the user could conceivably be looking anywhere.
In Florida, we kind of take the middle ground... with very few exceptions, all private property ends at the high tide line and the beach itself is public. In most cases, public ACCESS to the beach (via pedestrian trail through a 10-foot wide easement from the nearest public road to the beach) is required by law, but there might not be anything like parking, restrooms, etc. within a half mile or more. So the easements mainly serve to guarantee access to the beach for other people who live NEAR the beach (but not ON the beach). Members of the general public end up packed into a small number of "park" beaches that have somewhat adequate parking facilities, usually with steep parking fees (for nonresidents, at least) and possibly some fee for use of the park itself (though the "use" fee is usually per-vehicle and rolled into the parking fee, to prevent people from getting out of the car and walking in from an adjacent property and paying only a single entrance fee for the driver). I believe there IS a small area in/near Bal Harbour where the county government agreed back in the 1960s or 70s to (temporarily?) waive public access in exchange for the property owners agreeing to pay the full costs of pumping new sand into the beach to rebuild eroded parts, but even THERE, if a member of the public can somehow get to it, there's nothing to stop them from going there (however, I think at least one stretch has no public access points between northern and southern inlets, so you'd literally have to park, walk up or down the beach, then swim across a dredged inlet/pass with substantial tidal forces and a non-insignificant amount of boat traffic.
That's not to say all of Florida's beaches meet that ideal... I remember that back when I was in high school in Naples (late 80s/early 90s), there was a lot of noise made about the fact that most of the county's and city's public beach access points had completely fallen into neglect and disrepair over the past 50 years. Most of them were overgrown and impassable, and a few of them were blocked by fences and walls. More than a few lawsuits ensued because many of the property owners who built the fences & walls did so because the access easement had essentially reverted to jungle, and the property owners had spent substantial amounts of their own money clearing away the native vegetation and turning it into an extension of their yard. Most of those property owners were partially compensated, at least for the amount the county would have had to spend to bulldoze away an overgrown path, as long as they removed the fence/wall at their own expense. In many other areas, the access path still semi-existed, but was overgrown on both sides of a worn dirt path & effectively inaccessible to anyone in a wheelchair (and exposed people walking down the path to things like poison ivy, hostile wildlife, and Florida's infamous sandspurs). It took about 20 years, but the access points are now mostly in the condition they were officially required to be all along. During the construction boom in the early 2000s (when most of the "small" original beachfront homes were flipped, bulldozed, and replaced by 10,000sf+ multi-story mansions, there was a constant battle between builders who "accidentally" blocked a public access point for months or years (always making excuses like "oops, sorry!" or "for public safety during construction") and nearby residents (who'd scream to the City, but the City itself would do little more than mail sternly-worded letters for a year or more, and often forgot about them after a few months unless residents kept pestering them).
IMHO, the ideal situation is like the one that now exists in most of South Beach and Fort Lauderdale Beach... a pedestrian-friendly public road & sidewalks, with public beach on one side, and the front doors of private properties on the other. Though making the road pedestrian-friendly is a lot harder than it sounds, since in many cases the road dividing the private and public realms is the one and only continuous north-south road ON t
You're insane if you think wealthy nations will do nothing to protect their beaches. In places like Florida, levees might not work due to limestone permeability, but that barely matters because Florida doesn't depend on levees ANYWAY, and never HAS. We just dredge out deep backyard lakes & canals, and use the fill dirt to raise the adjacent land high enough to be above the water table at all times. And when that's not enough to protect a building from storm surge, we build it on concrete pilings so occupied floors are high enough to remain undamaged (by flooding, at least).
Actually, it's worse than that. 90fps is the rock-bottom MINIMUM. If you want a frame rate that satisfies the Nyquist minimum for high-contrast peripheral vision, even 400fps is on the low side.
The human eye is really hard to fully satisfy with immersive video, because trying to define the eye's "resolution" or "frame rate" is kind of like trying to define the resolution of an Atari 2600 or an Apple IIe. The fovea has relatively high color resolution, but comparatively poor luminance resolution. Peripheral vision has poor color perception, but is extremely sensitive to motion.
That's why 60hz CRT multisync monitors looked OK when you looked directly at them, but visibly flickered if you saw the screen in peripheral vision while focusing on something else, like a book in your lap.