Actually, to legally copy a drug in India, you'd have to come up with a new process for manufacturing it. Indian IP law recognizes only manufacturing processes, not the final chemicals themselves or the purpose for which they're used.
Case in point: in America, you can take a drug like Proscar, approved in 5mg strength for treating prostate problems, and get a brand new patent for a 1mg strength used for hair growth. In India, you'd be politely told, "No" when you applied for the second patent, because as far as Indian IP law is concerned, unless you come up with a new way to manufacture the drug, you've done nothing worthy of patent protection.
The same goes for extended-release forms. If you're taking an old drug and coating bits with dissolving coating, India will yawn and say, "sorry, no new patent for you. " You'd have to come up with something groundbreaking, like OROS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... ), which makes drugs that would otherwise have intolerably-short half-lives viable.
Although Indian IP law doesn't regard ER forms as necessarily being special, India's unwillingness to allow patents on anything besides the manufacturing process actually opens the door to Indian pharmaceutical companies releasing ER forms LONG before the original patent expires, and before the American developer of the original drug comes out with its own version. If an Americana pharma company gets a patent on a drug & plans to wait until the first patent is about to expire before patenting an ER form, an Indian company who comes up with an alternate manufacturing process can blow their plan out of the water and release an improved ER form YEARS sooner.
So... you're thinking the introduction of government into this system will make the system cheaper and higher quality?
Cheaper? Probably not, if the government in question plays the role of neutral utility who lays the pipes, then provides service for end users to consume as they see fit, and doesn't screw things up with subsidies.
Higher quality? As long as the government literally does nothing besides lay and maintain the fiber, and keep the NOC running with five-nines uptime and off-grid backup power (providing switch fabric between fibers so OTHER companies can provide the actual service), almost certainly it'll be better than what we'd get NOW from Comcast and AT&T. We might end up paying "pure platinum" prices for service that's merely gold-plated, but overpriced gold-plating looks pretty damn appealing when the alternative is artificial scarcity and decaying infrastructure.
Nature is wildly overrated. A captive-bred tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar, or cougar in Florida or Texas has double the average lifespan of his or her cousins in the wild.
I think it's safe to say that if society is in a state of collapse and normal medical care doesn't exist anymore, the risk that a particular antibiotic will be sub-optimal due to age or storage conditions lies rather low on the hierarchy of concerns. Especially if it IS stored under optimal conditions from the moment of purchase.
One semi-drug that IS insanely unstable is methylcobalamin (which is actually vitamin B-12, in a form that can cross the blood-brain barrier and is a wonder drug for cats with diabetic neuropathy). The problem is, there's no shelf-stable form of it, so it has to be FedEx'ed in an ice chest every 2-3 months, stored in an opaque container in the refrigerator, and loaded into the syringe in the dimmest light possible to keep it from losing potency. You almost have to treat it like film in a darkroom. But god, that stuff was magic for my kitty and worth every penny. In two weeks, he went from being barely able to walk without twitching and resting with his nose on the floor to climbing stairs, climbing onto and off of the bed, and holding his head up.
There ARE oral sublingal forms of methylcobalamin, but every USP human formulation contains xylitol, which is toxic to cats. The only brand (as of last year) that's xylitol-free and explicitly made for cats is Zobaline (the feline-safe version of Xobaline). It's debatable how much benefit the cat will actually get from sublingal methylcobalamin compared to the injected form, but if you DO decide to try it, make SURE it's xylitol-free.
Exactly. Moto didn't lock bootloaders because they were forced to by evil carriers like Verizon... they did it out of religious zeal, and a belief that it was a moral imperative.
To remake Motorola in Google's image, they would have had to literally fire most of Motorola's managers, and would have probably had to fire at least 10-30% of their engineering staff as well. They were able to do enough housecleaning to make the Moto-X and Moto-G happen, but Google knew that the rest of the company was too toxic to ever fully decontaminate.
Question: did you literally upgrade to every version of OSX since 10.4? I could *swear* I remember seeing a lot of posts at GearSlutz about one Apple's past few releases (Lion or Mountain Lion, I think).
In my friend's case, he threw in the towel and bought a Muse Receptor2. It was the best $2k or so he ever spent. Instantly, all of his problems and misery went away. For those who are wondering, the Receptor2 is basically a PC in a rack case that's hand-tweaked to be a flawless dedicated VST host. Once you absolve your DAW of its softsynth VST-host duties, the misery and uncompromising hardware requirements imposed by them all basically go away. He uses it for live performances without worries, and now runs Cubase on a 3 year old HP EliteBook 2540p (with firewire audio) without problems. None. Prior to buying the R2, I spent entire days at his house trying to troubleshoot his VST glitch problems, and *nothing* could solve them, even with large sample buffers.
I managed to eliminate the glitches caused by everything besides the antivirus, Steam, and Windows deciding to maintain itself at inopportune moments, but that's when it became obvious that one way or another, he was going to need two computers... either a DAW that did absolutely nothing else besides be a DAW (and could never be safely allowed to touch the internet) and a second laptop for his normal computer use, or a standalone VST host that would allow him to use a fairly normal-spec laptop for everything BUT VST-hosting AND still run Windows normally.
I maintain that with most real-world hardware, trying to make a computer -- no matter how high-end -- be a glitch-free VST host, a DAW, AND a regular malware-protected Windows PC -- is a fundamentally lost cause, because the requirements of those three roles are fundamentally at odds with each other. Offload the VST to dedicated hardware, and everything Just Works.
Linux, Windows, and OSX all have problems with low-latency audio. The sad irony is that 15 years ago, you actually COULD connect a MIDI keyboard to a SB Pro AWE/32's MIDI port, run your sequencer app, and have it do a halfway decent job of both capture and playback. Then, host-based audio happened, and everything went to shit... accelerated by architectural changes to all three platforms that made matters even worse.
Forget about trying to do realtime CPU-based audio on any computer that needs to still be usable as a normal computer. It's impossible. You CAN hand-tweak Linux, Windows, and OS X in various ways to get the latency down (as others have noted, Linux has had realtime kernel audio available as an option for a while), but the tweaks you have to make will render it dysfunctional as a general-purpose computer.
It doesn't matter how fast your i7 or Xeon is, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, and it doesn't matter if you have a terabyte RAID 0 SSD array... nothing you do will ever make it fast enough to do low-latency host-based audio without ever glitching. You might reduce the glitches to something that happens every 5-10 minutes, instead of every 5-10 seconds, but you'll never eliminate them completely. It's just the nature of how Windows, Linux, and OS X now handle multitasking.
The solution? Re-discover dedicated synth modules. Or set up a second PC whose only reason for existence is to be a VST/soft synth host -- aggressively tweaked for low-latency audio in ways the main DAW PC can't be.
The problem isn't MIDI (that was solved YEARS ago by just using USB to give every physical MIDI port its own dedicated full-bandwidth MIDI cable), and the problem isn't raw data being shoveled around. The problem is that even with a multi-core CPU and abundant RAM, Windows/Linux/OS X will all starve the soft synth for CPU cycles for 3-7ms at a time (usually, more like 12-20ms) while the audio buffer drains. If it empties before the CPU calculates the next 5-10ms chunk of waveform data, you get a loud audio glitch. Audio-generation is a "realtime" activity, and Windows/Linux/OS X in their roles as desktop operating systems all fall flat on their faces when realtime becomes a necessity.
So... the moral of the story: forget about trying to use a single computer as both DAW and VST/softsynth host. If you can avoid live performances involving a softsynth (or pre-record the softsynth and fake the keyboard playing during the performance, you'll save a LOT of money. Audio glitches while jamming or capturing keyboard input suck, but at least they won't affect your real recordings. Use your DAW as a DAW, and give the soft synth host its own hardware that can be properly tweaked for realtime audio.
In this particular context, it doesn't really *matter* what the MMWA literally says. For the past ~35 years, the federal agency tasked with ENFORCING the MMWA has, without fail, put the entire burden of proof on the manufacturer.
In the real world, it's very dangerous for a manufacturer to risk denying warranty coverage over customer modifications unless they're BLATANTLY responsible for the failure. Even when large corporations COULD objectively deny warranty coverage, they rarely DO, because it would cost them more to document their reasons for denying coverage to the FTC's satisfaction than to just swap it out for a remanufactured replacement item and harvest the high-value parts from the broken one to use for repairing other phones.
What a company like GM or Ford COULD do, however, is require that consumers allow them to update their firmware to the latest version prior to doing anything else... and in the process, slam the door on the vulnerability that allowed you to hack it in the first place to enable the feature. You could end up in the same unhappy position as someone with a jailbroken iPad running 7.0.4 a few months from now, then has it develop a bad solder connection in the lightning port. If you send it to Apple, they'll fix it... but they'll also reflash it to 7.0.5 (or beyond), which probably won't have a working jailbreak for god knows how long. You'll have to choose between a phone with working USB, and a phone that's crippled by Apple to make sure you can't have a 5-row keyboard.
Nintendo's problem with phones lies with the fact that its home market (Japan) and biggest international market (America) have fucked up mobile phone networks that can even make a company with the market share of Samsung cry in frustrated rage. Sony and Microsoft bought Europe's two biggest mobile phone companies (Sony bought Ericsson, Microsoft bought Nokia). The only thing Nintendo could really do at this point is partner with someone... but that would put Nintendo in almost the same position as if they abandoned hardware and became a software brand.
I'll say this: Nintendo will never, EVER associate its name with an Android phone. Not even one that's an Android phone with independent Nintendo hardware strapped on through some kind of internal super-KVM that allows it to share the LCD and buttons with the phone. For obvious reasons, it can't do Windows. That basically leaves either Blackberry or some resurrected form of WebOS.
And even if Nintendo DOES manage to pull it off, they'll be stonewalled the moment they try to launch in the US. They'll be forced to choose between giving Verizon 6-12 months of exclusivity in exchange for access to slightly under half the US mobile market (and hoping Verizon doesn't botch the launch), or trying to launch on everyone else (with less risk of total failure, but more risk of poor sales) knowing that Verizon doesn't take kindly to companies who refuse to kiss its ring and kneel before them.
Could Nintendo get away with pushing for a European launch ahead of an American one? Probably not. The European market is big and GSM, but most of the gaming industry's influential decision-makers are in the US. Nokia thought it could ignore the US since it was a smaller GSM market at the time (in terms of units sold per year) than Portugal, but failed to anticipate the consequences of literally disappearing from review sites when those sites' American authors saw Nokia go away & just assumed they'd gone bankrupt or something. If Nintendo tried to pull a Europe-first strategy, it would HAVE to simultaneously mount a very, very expensive simultaneous US launch on T-Mobile in the hope of being relevant to influential reviewers who live in big cities where T-Mobile happens to have really good service.
That said... I disagree that only one device can win, or that it necessarily HAS to be a phone. It's like how there was a period when people used portable CD players in their cars, but as soon as they bought their next car (or next head unit), they said 'fuck it' and got one with CD player built in. We're seeing the same thing now with phones as car audio devices... people are using their phone with the radio/car they have NOW, but dedicated Android double-DIN head units are already appearing, and Apple is probably only 5 years away from making their own iCar units. Connecting your phone to the large-screen TV in the living room is a pain in the ass. Beyond a certain poverty point, what really matters is being able to buy a game, play it on your phone, then play it BETTER (without having to buy another copy) on your TV when you're at home. Car CD players REALLY took off after CD writers allowed people to burn their own CDs, so they didn't have to drive around with $800 worth of CDs sitting on the front seat for the first guy who smashes the window to grab.
Yes, and no. Buying a laptop with a really good keyboard is hard. God knows, I tried 3 months ago. The problem is, if you want a mobile workstation with pointer stick, sculpted keycaps, and tactile snap, you basically have 3 or 4 choices... and NONE of them are sold by normal stores. Every goddamn one of them is a blind act of faith and random dice roll unless you know somebody who has one.
The sad fact is, laptop keyboards all basically suck, it's hard & expensive to buy one that sucks a lot less than most, and nobody has ever really managed to come up with a viable standard for highly-portable (but non-laptop) mobile workstations that's enough of a standard to be able to buy a case-keyboard-monitor(s)-battery, then add your own motherboard & hard drives. I'd *kill* for something like that... say, with:
* 20-24" IPS main display, 2560x1440 resolution, flanked by a pair of portrait-oriented (including subpixels) 900-1280x1440 displays hinged to each side that fold over the main monitor and latch together like shutters over a window... all interconnected via displayport, with displayport hub in the case itself.
* Cherry keyboard (available with all switch colors, including Green and Blue) and pointer stick.
* power supply and battery to act like built-in UPS.
* space for microATX motherboard, and riser cards to allow one or two video cards to be mounted sideways. To make up for the 1x slots that the riser would obstruct, the case has a Thunderbolt to PCI Express interface and one or two sets of side-oriented slots elsewhere in the case.
* Ideally, a storage compartment or two that's big enough to store cables and a gaming mouse.
The only component for something like this that's still off the radar are the 900-1280 x 1440 portrait-mode LCDs (size-matched to be density-identical to the main monitor). Thanks to DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the other two problems that would have formerly plagued an open mobile workstation form factor are basically solved. DisplayPort solves the "how do we wire up 3 monitors in a way that's non-proprietary and foolproof" problem, and Thunderbolt provides an easy way to add additional PCI Express 1x ports, not to mention micro PCIe and ExpressCard, that aren't on the motherboard itself. If the LCD problem could be solved, this would be a product a company the size of pre-Dell Alienware could literally manufacture and sell, because all the remaining problems (case, keyboard) are relatively low-tech fabrication and assembly issues. But the LCD problem would be a bitch to solve, because AFAIK, there's literally nobody on earth who'll sell you matched panels suitable for P-L-P where the portrait-mode panels literally have the same subpixel layout and density as the more conventional landscape panel.
On average, you loose a full workday on switching to something like Dvorak.
On "average", maybe... but "average" is not necessarily the same as "norm".
When you're talking about people who've mastered QWERTY to the point where they can effortlessly type faster than 100WPM, a forced change to Dvorak wouldn't be a matter of mere "retraining" -- it would require outright physical therapy. At 100+ wpm, the keyboard is basically a synthetic synapse between the nervous system and target CPU. At that speed, typing occurs almost entirely through muscle memory.
I used to completely despise 16:9 monitors, too, until I discovered WinSplit Revolution (free, http://winsplit-revolution.com/ which makes it really easy to maximize windows to the left or right 1/2, 1/3, or 2/3 of the screen, and goes a long way towards making it behave like a pair of side-by-side 960x1080 monitors in portrait orientation.
Tip: I personally redefined WinSplit's default hotkeys to make them more laptop-friendly... ctrl up/down/left/right maximizes to left or right, while ctrl-alt left/right literally throws the window to the adjacent monitor when I'm running with two or more. There are other permutations, but 99.9% of my window moves are to the left or right size.
A 17" laptop with 16:9 1920x1080 treated like adjacent 640x1080 and 1280x1080 monitors is pretty good, once you have WinSplit handy to make it easy to maximize windows to fully-height partial-width against an edge.
Now that 15" monitors with 1920x1080 are available on most higher-end laptops, 16:9 is more tolerable at that size, too, and does have one concrete advantage over a 1400x1050 14.1" display... you can use the laptop on a plane without having to tilt the screen forward if the person in front of you reclines... or at least, you can if the laptop's manufacturer minimizes the bezel.
Let's compare apples to apples; if you access your bank using a non-jailbroken iOS device using Safari, that's going to be a lot more secure than any desktop browser.
Only if you're literally comparing (mobile) Apples(tm) to (desktop) Apples(tm).
Unlike OSX, iOS, and Safari, recent versions of Windows (when used with recent versions of IE to access web sites with recent SSL3/TLS implementations) successfully mitigate BEAST attacks, and can safely use CBC cipher suites. Apple hasn't bothered, so Safari is stuck with RC4.
The shit some alleged jour^h^h^h^h resear^h^h^h^h^h^h overpriced snake-oil salesmen and consultants keep spreading about the "risks" of allowing banking apps to run on jailbroken devices is getting old.
It's wrong, it's a lie, AND it's actively-harmful to the ultimate goal of banking security (fraud-prevention and losses).
There are exactly two things that would happen almost immediately if any major bank in the US with millions of customers tried to prevent customers from running its consumer banking app on jailbroken/rooted hardware:
1. It'll be treated like copy protection, cracked within days, and released online almost immediately... and 15 minutes later, copies with injected malware will be getting aggressively posted online in ways that will make Google rank them high in the search results.
2. Depending on the size of the bank, there will be one or more open-source reverse-engineered banking apps (probably spoofing a desktop browser and doing screen-scraping if necessary) on Github, Sourceforge, and other sites... until the bank tries to get them taken them down at lawyerpoint, they go underground (or get modularized in ways that make them impossible for lawyers to attack directly), and someone manages to slip a subtle trojan into it somehow, or malware authors start distributing precompiled copies with their own special payloads.
Just wait until some major American bank decides to try blocking their app from jailbroken/rooted devices. When it happens, grab a big bowl 'o popcorn, and watch the fun at XDA & Github.
A banking app running on a jailbroken/rooted device is NO LESS SECURE than the same bank's webapp would be if the same user went to it with the same phone (possibly setting it to spoof a desktop browser).
Any app that genuinely depends upon not being able to install from iTunes/Google Play on jailbroken/rooted hardware for security DESERVES to get pwn3d in the worst and most publicly-humiliating way possible.
Pin the certificates? Sure. The only people who'll notice or care are attackers, and they're going to decompile the program and rip it apart anyway. Obfuscate the code? Sure, have fun. Once again, nobody besides attackers will notice or care.
The moment you try to exclude users with jailbroken/rooted phones, you've instantly broken the app for a small, but very loud & opinion-influencing group of users who aren't the least bit shy about taking matters into their own hands AND have the technical skills to pull it off. If you're a major American bank with tens of millions of customers, the LAST thing you want to do unless you're completely insane is motivate a few thousand of them to become casual weekend hackers so they can check their bank account balance on their phone.
I'd kill for a product like this that could be mounted to a pole on my roof and viewed in realtime with host software running on a PC (or Android tablet, if it had the horsepower to do the realtime deconvolution and virtual PTZ).
This would also turn it into a kick-ass security camera for places where aesthetics are less important than performance and cost
To keep the base cost low, they could make the ethernet+PoE an optional second module that the main one screws into and feeds the raw bitstream that would otherwise be written to microSD. Module #2 could handle the PoE (or passively-injected) power conversion and wrapping of raw (presumably h.264) data as UDP multicast (and forward error correction), as well as keeping the actual connection weatherproof. Inside the house, the host PC could then buffer the raw data for a few frames, then implement the virtual PTZ.
Enhancements that would make it even better for this purpose:
* optional "hat" mount to shield the 3 main cameras from rain, with fourth camera pointing up that has a pinhole-sized lens and strong blower to keep it clear of water (obviously you'd lose camera #4 during active rain, but the blower would clear away the water as soon as it stopped raining).
* vapor-tight shell to protect the electronics from night/morning dew in places like Florida, where 99% humidity condenses on just about everything left outdoors overnight. Or "very tight" shell, with a clump of silica gel and a moisture sensor so the user knows when he has to climb up onto the roof, grab the camera, open it up, and bake the silica gel in the oven for a few hours to make it useful again.
I think a large part of it is due to the convenience of Jython, which makes it really easy to embed Python directly into a Java application as a user scripting engine that doesn't require explicit installation or configuration by the user. I'd go so far as to say that Jython is probably 99% of the reason WHY so many Java apps that support scripting do it via Python instead of some other language.
Jython only supports 2.x syntax.
There IS a way to bind a Python interpreter to Java so it can exchange objects directly (py4j), but it still requires separate installation of Python, with all the usual things that can go wrong (and frequently do, at least under Windows), like environment variables, path definitions, etc.
There's also IronPython, which is another 2.x-only Python that enjoys lots of "automatic" mindshare from Windows developers because it presents itself as the "official Microsoft-blessed.Net CLR Python" for Windows, and everyone remembers that a decade ago, Activestate Perl was the de-facto Perl for anyone running Windows (and eventually, the defacto Perl, period). It's basically abandonware at this point, but ActiveState doesn't go out of its way to make it obvious.
That said, I'd put most of the blame/credit for 2.x on the non-existence of "Jython 3".
"Planet Killer" is a bit extreme. Unlike, say, an asteroid strike, Yellowstone wouldn't do much to the other side of the earth (or even the east coast) besides block sunlight and bury soil in a foot of de-facto concrete sludge. In other words, nuclear power plants will still work, and so will anything else not directly destroyed by the explosion. We have something the dinosaurs (and early humans) didn't -- food that's edible for years, and the means to (expensively) grow it without sunlight. Life would suck, to be sure (especially in poorer countries), and war would probably erupt across the globe, but it's unlikely that it would literally kill all human life -- let alone all life -- on Earth.
The biggest immediate consequence would probably be the de-facto end of air travel (jet engines have insurmountable problems flying through ash) -- at least, for a few years. If cruise ships had to fill the gap, Miami would probably become the main port of entry for passenger travel into and out of the US... mainly, because it's one of the only cities that actually HAS the port facilities to handle large volumes of passengers RIGHT NOW. I'm guessing that Barcelona, Montpellier, and probably Rome, would become the main passenger terminals at the "Europe" end (by virtue of having cruise terminals of their own, as well as HSR connectivity to the rest of Europe). I'm sure there would be direct service between New York and Southampton (UK) too, but I don't see New York being capable of assuming a role as the main port of entry for passenger ships if it's under martial law and one major food riot away from civil breakdown.
There's a UK-based company that makes a REALLY cool product that, with some tweaking, could be WILDLY popular in the US -- SecurityBlinds Secur. Basically, it's a set of interior window bars camouflaged to look like working vertical blinds. The product they actually sell was apparently designed as a blast shield against bomb attacks, but if they reduced the "rugged" part down to just the strength needed to keep burglars out, and replaced the aluminum vanes with textured plastic shells in the usual colors that snapped over the steel rods like clamshells, they could sell them by the TRUCKLOAD through the special order department of stores like Home Depot or Lowes to Americans whose homeowners' associations won't allow burglar bars... but would have no way of knowing that there are actually hardcore burglar bars hidden inside the vertical blinds.
Of course, a product like that would ALSO be perfect for anybody with a big cat (tiger, cougar, leopard, jaguar, lion, etc), because then you could let your tiger lounge in front of the living room window without having to worry about his safety if someone broke the glass & he jumped out through the open window.:-)
If you don't care about out-of-the-box sexy experience, it's hard to beat the Elk M1 as a DYI'er. Their view of DIY'ers is largely ambivalent... they won't go out of their way to solve your problems, but the moment you furnish them with a valid M1 serial number, they'll give you access to the same training materials, downloads, firmware, and accessories as their pro installers. It's a strategy that works for them, partly because lots of those prosumers who buy one to install themselves end up starting companies to get certified officially and install the same alarm systems for other people.
Just one thing... do... not... even... THINK... about buying a cheap TCP/IP-UART bridge for ~$20 on eBay and connecting it directly to both the internet and the Elk serial bus. Make sure you have some kind of middleware sitting between the internet and Elk serial port that can only do specific things, like indicate an active alarm, arm the system, etc. And if you don't understand what I just said & want your alarm to be internet-connected, pony up the cash and buy a proper M1-XEP interface for it. The Elk RS-232 bus was NEVER designed to be directly exposed to attackers over the internet, and mostly depends upon being inside a locked box for security. If you interface it to the internet in a way that allows arbitrary values to get blindly relayed straight to the RS-232 bus after reading this, you deserve whatever happens to you for being a complete idiot.
The only thing it really lacks, IMHO, is the ability to implement Boolean logic for triggering alarms. For example, monitoring the state of the glass-break sensor, the door-shock sensor, and motion-detector and triggering an alarm ONLY if at 2 out of 3 fire within 20 seconds. And having similar logic in other rooms. The firmware in my controller allows you to "sort of" do something like that for a single zone, but IMHO it needs the ability to independently do this in multiple zones.
The nice thing about the M1 is that thanks to Arduinos w/Ethernet and the RPi, you can actually extend its logic pretty easily by using the M1 as your low-level sensor interface, and moving higher-level logic to a Pi or Arduino on the Elk RS-232 bus (relaying events from sensors as they happen to that serial bus, and triggering things like alarms by sending events back to the controller via that same serial bus).
Kludge-tip: if you're in a hurry to set up the system, don't feel like pulling wires right away to each room, and have an unused landline phone cable with 6 wires buried in the wall to hijack, you can buy input expanders and use the 6 repurposed phone wires to daisy-chain the Elk bus to strategic points in your house (1 pair for RS-485, 1 pair for +12v, 1 pair for ground). I had my own Elk M1 wired that way for almost 3 years, before I finally got proper conduit and wires pulled throughout the entire house. I had one M1XIN hidden behind the TV in the living room & plugged into the phone jack (which obviously wasn't used for an actual landline phone), and a second one upstairs behind the nightstand in the master bedroom, along with the equally-kludged keypad. Amazingly, it actually worked (if I had voltage issues, plan B was to add DC-DC converters to boost the voltage from 12v to 48v as it left the box, then drop it back down to 12v at the living room & master bedroom. Fortunately, everything used very little power, and the only time I ever had an issue was around year 4, when the backup battery finally died and the voltage started sagging.
Oh... also... Elk's M1 can interface directly with X10, Zwave, Insteon, and some other standard that escapes me at the moment. The MSRP of their expansion boards is pretty high, but you'll never actually pay those prices anyway because there's ALWAYS somebody selling them for a relatively small markup on eBay. However, make sure you buy the main alarm controller itself from an authorized dealer. Elk DOES track serial numbers of main system units, and if a serial number is reported as 'stolen' by a vendor, they'll re
That's also why summer in Antarctica can feel warmer than winter in Chicago, even if the dry-bulb temperature is lower. Inland from the coasts, Antarctica is basically a desert, while Chicago is relatively humid. When it's cold + humid, the moisture in contact with your body can absorb more heat than dry air can radiate away. Being in liquid water is just a more extreme case, with even faster negative consequences.
When I can have Windows or Linux with full eye candy and zero performance hit (vs Win2k or something XFCE-like) at 2560x1920@240fps, I'll accept current GPUs as "good enough".
When I can open a pdf document on my phone or tablet and effortlessly fling through it without any perceptible lag waiting for the fonts to render, current GPUs will be "good enough". Newsflash: 80% of the reason why ebooks suck so miserably is the fact that current hardware CAN'T effortlessly render them in realtime
OK, the last one is a bit unfair, because the blame for current shit pdf-rendering performance lies mostly at the feet of the videocard industry, for throwing away everything it learned and developed relating to 2D acceleration in the mad rush to cheap 3D. Basically, they took 3D GPUs developed for strap-on videocards, grafted on enough extra silicon to let them stand alone as their own self-hosted minimalist frame buffer, and called it a day.
It's both. Comparing OpenGL (ES) to sprite-based and tile-based 2D is kind of like comparing J2EE in all its distributed splendor to PHP.
OpenGL ES 2 was a pain, but dear Jesus God, I spent the better part of a day just TYPING IN the HelloWorld code for an OpenGL ES 3 Android app, and ended up with something like 8 or 10 classes that compiled into a.apk file several hundred kilobytes in size just to draw a yellow triangle on a black screen. Now, admittedly, the increased HelloWorld complexity eventually pays off by making it more straightforward to do COMPLICATED things, but GETTING to that point has absolutely become more painful over the years.
~25 years ago, I got a Vic-20 on Christmas Eve. By dinner on Christmas Eve, I was writing programs with custom characters, animation, and music. Today, you'd spend 2-3 days with a new computer just waiting for Windows Update to finish installing one or two service packs and several hundred individual updates. Some people might grouse about "cryptic code", but I dare anyone to compare the amount of code you need to open a native Window and make its background black under.net or Java to:
POKE 36879, 8 (*)
Butart is a big, huge problem too. Back when graphics were made from 8x8 characters that could either be 2 colors, or 4 colors at half-resolution, there were only *so* many ways to meaningfully make something, and most of them were dictated by a need to have at least 1 pixel separating major features (like eyes) so they'd be recognizable as such. The lack of resolution and subtle colors basically solved the problem for you.
If anything, having an artist involved 25 years ago usually made the gameplay worse, because they'd force the programmer to make horrible performance compromises to implement their artistic vision. Instead of being able to play tricks with barrel-shifting and video timing, the programmer would be stuck shoveling raw bits around the slowest way possible because the artist designed an image whose width wasn't a whole multiple of 8 pixels.
(*) of course, understanding WHY the value was 8, and not 0, as opposed to just blindly copying the value out of a book, required a few semesters in college;-)
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Actually, to legally copy a drug in India, you'd have to come up with a new process for manufacturing it. Indian IP law recognizes only manufacturing processes, not the final chemicals themselves or the purpose for which they're used.
Case in point: in America, you can take a drug like Proscar, approved in 5mg strength for treating prostate problems, and get a brand new patent for a 1mg strength used for hair growth. In India, you'd be politely told, "No" when you applied for the second patent, because as far as Indian IP law is concerned, unless you come up with a new way to manufacture the drug, you've done nothing worthy of patent protection.
The same goes for extended-release forms. If you're taking an old drug and coating bits with dissolving coating, India will yawn and say, "sorry, no new patent for you. " You'd have to come up with something groundbreaking, like OROS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... ), which makes drugs that would otherwise have intolerably-short half-lives viable.
Although Indian IP law doesn't regard ER forms as necessarily being special, India's unwillingness to allow patents on anything besides the manufacturing process actually opens the door to Indian pharmaceutical companies releasing ER forms LONG before the original patent expires, and before the American developer of the original drug comes out with its own version. If an Americana pharma company gets a patent on a drug & plans to wait until the first patent is about to expire before patenting an ER form, an Indian company who comes up with an alternate manufacturing process can blow their plan out of the water and release an improved ER form YEARS sooner.
So... you're thinking the introduction of government into this system will make the system cheaper and higher quality?
Cheaper? Probably not, if the government in question plays the role of neutral utility who lays the pipes, then provides service for end users to consume as they see fit, and doesn't screw things up with subsidies.
Higher quality? As long as the government literally does nothing besides lay and maintain the fiber, and keep the NOC running with five-nines uptime and off-grid backup power (providing switch fabric between fibers so OTHER companies can provide the actual service), almost certainly it'll be better than what we'd get NOW from Comcast and AT&T. We might end up paying "pure platinum" prices for service that's merely gold-plated, but overpriced gold-plating looks pretty damn appealing when the alternative is artificial scarcity and decaying infrastructure.
Nature is wildly overrated. A captive-bred tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar, or cougar in Florida or Texas has double the average lifespan of his or her cousins in the wild.
I think it's safe to say that if society is in a state of collapse and normal medical care doesn't exist anymore, the risk that a particular antibiotic will be sub-optimal due to age or storage conditions lies rather low on the hierarchy of concerns. Especially if it IS stored under optimal conditions from the moment of purchase.
One semi-drug that IS insanely unstable is methylcobalamin (which is actually vitamin B-12, in a form that can cross the blood-brain barrier and is a wonder drug for cats with diabetic neuropathy). The problem is, there's no shelf-stable form of it, so it has to be FedEx'ed in an ice chest every 2-3 months, stored in an opaque container in the refrigerator, and loaded into the syringe in the dimmest light possible to keep it from losing potency. You almost have to treat it like film in a darkroom. But god, that stuff was magic for my kitty and worth every penny. In two weeks, he went from being barely able to walk without twitching and resting with his nose on the floor to climbing stairs, climbing onto and off of the bed, and holding his head up.
There ARE oral sublingal forms of methylcobalamin, but every USP human formulation contains xylitol, which is toxic to cats. The only brand (as of last year) that's xylitol-free and explicitly made for cats is Zobaline (the feline-safe version of Xobaline). It's debatable how much benefit the cat will actually get from sublingal methylcobalamin compared to the injected form, but if you DO decide to try it, make SURE it's xylitol-free.
Exactly. Moto didn't lock bootloaders because they were forced to by evil carriers like Verizon... they did it out of religious zeal, and a belief that it was a moral imperative.
To remake Motorola in Google's image, they would have had to literally fire most of Motorola's managers, and would have probably had to fire at least 10-30% of their engineering staff as well. They were able to do enough housecleaning to make the Moto-X and Moto-G happen, but Google knew that the rest of the company was too toxic to ever fully decontaminate.
Question: did you literally upgrade to every version of OSX since 10.4? I could *swear* I remember seeing a lot of posts at GearSlutz about one Apple's past few releases (Lion or Mountain Lion, I think).
In my friend's case, he threw in the towel and bought a Muse Receptor2. It was the best $2k or so he ever spent. Instantly, all of his problems and misery went away. For those who are wondering, the Receptor2 is basically a PC in a rack case that's hand-tweaked to be a flawless dedicated VST host. Once you absolve your DAW of its softsynth VST-host duties, the misery and uncompromising hardware requirements imposed by them all basically go away. He uses it for live performances without worries, and now runs Cubase on a 3 year old HP EliteBook 2540p (with firewire audio) without problems. None. Prior to buying the R2, I spent entire days at his house trying to troubleshoot his VST glitch problems, and *nothing* could solve them, even with large sample buffers.
I managed to eliminate the glitches caused by everything besides the antivirus, Steam, and Windows deciding to maintain itself at inopportune moments, but that's when it became obvious that one way or another, he was going to need two computers... either a DAW that did absolutely nothing else besides be a DAW (and could never be safely allowed to touch the internet) and a second laptop for his normal computer use, or a standalone VST host that would allow him to use a fairly normal-spec laptop for everything BUT VST-hosting AND still run Windows normally.
I maintain that with most real-world hardware, trying to make a computer -- no matter how high-end -- be a glitch-free VST host, a DAW, AND a regular malware-protected Windows PC -- is a fundamentally lost cause, because the requirements of those three roles are fundamentally at odds with each other. Offload the VST to dedicated hardware, and everything Just Works.
Linux, Windows, and OSX all have problems with low-latency audio. The sad irony is that 15 years ago, you actually COULD connect a MIDI keyboard to a SB Pro AWE/32's MIDI port, run your sequencer app, and have it do a halfway decent job of both capture and playback. Then, host-based audio happened, and everything went to shit... accelerated by architectural changes to all three platforms that made matters even worse.
Forget about trying to do realtime CPU-based audio on any computer that needs to still be usable as a normal computer. It's impossible. You CAN hand-tweak Linux, Windows, and OS X in various ways to get the latency down (as others have noted, Linux has had realtime kernel audio available as an option for a while), but the tweaks you have to make will render it dysfunctional as a general-purpose computer.
It doesn't matter how fast your i7 or Xeon is, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, and it doesn't matter if you have a terabyte RAID 0 SSD array... nothing you do will ever make it fast enough to do low-latency host-based audio without ever glitching. You might reduce the glitches to something that happens every 5-10 minutes, instead of every 5-10 seconds, but you'll never eliminate them completely. It's just the nature of how Windows, Linux, and OS X now handle multitasking.
The solution? Re-discover dedicated synth modules. Or set up a second PC whose only reason for existence is to be a VST/soft synth host -- aggressively tweaked for low-latency audio in ways the main DAW PC can't be.
The problem isn't MIDI (that was solved YEARS ago by just using USB to give every physical MIDI port its own dedicated full-bandwidth MIDI cable), and the problem isn't raw data being shoveled around. The problem is that even with a multi-core CPU and abundant RAM, Windows/Linux/OS X will all starve the soft synth for CPU cycles for 3-7ms at a time (usually, more like 12-20ms) while the audio buffer drains. If it empties before the CPU calculates the next 5-10ms chunk of waveform data, you get a loud audio glitch. Audio-generation is a "realtime" activity, and Windows/Linux/OS X in their roles as desktop operating systems all fall flat on their faces when realtime becomes a necessity.
So... the moral of the story: forget about trying to use a single computer as both DAW and VST/softsynth host. If you can avoid live performances involving a softsynth (or pre-record the softsynth and fake the keyboard playing during the performance, you'll save a LOT of money. Audio glitches while jamming or capturing keyboard input suck, but at least they won't affect your real recordings. Use your DAW as a DAW, and give the soft synth host its own hardware that can be properly tweaked for realtime audio.
On Mars, a jet engine or turbine would burn silane ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... )
In this particular context, it doesn't really *matter* what the MMWA literally says. For the past ~35 years, the federal agency tasked with ENFORCING the MMWA has, without fail, put the entire burden of proof on the manufacturer.
In the real world, it's very dangerous for a manufacturer to risk denying warranty coverage over customer modifications unless they're BLATANTLY responsible for the failure. Even when large corporations COULD objectively deny warranty coverage, they rarely DO, because it would cost them more to document their reasons for denying coverage to the FTC's satisfaction than to just swap it out for a remanufactured replacement item and harvest the high-value parts from the broken one to use for repairing other phones.
What a company like GM or Ford COULD do, however, is require that consumers allow them to update their firmware to the latest version prior to doing anything else... and in the process, slam the door on the vulnerability that allowed you to hack it in the first place to enable the feature. You could end up in the same unhappy position as someone with a jailbroken iPad running 7.0.4 a few months from now, then has it develop a bad solder connection in the lightning port. If you send it to Apple, they'll fix it... but they'll also reflash it to 7.0.5 (or beyond), which probably won't have a working jailbreak for god knows how long. You'll have to choose between a phone with working USB, and a phone that's crippled by Apple to make sure you can't have a 5-row keyboard.
Nintendo's problem with phones lies with the fact that its home market (Japan) and biggest international market (America) have fucked up mobile phone networks that can even make a company with the market share of Samsung cry in frustrated rage. Sony and Microsoft bought Europe's two biggest mobile phone companies (Sony bought Ericsson, Microsoft bought Nokia). The only thing Nintendo could really do at this point is partner with someone... but that would put Nintendo in almost the same position as if they abandoned hardware and became a software brand.
I'll say this: Nintendo will never, EVER associate its name with an Android phone. Not even one that's an Android phone with independent Nintendo hardware strapped on through some kind of internal super-KVM that allows it to share the LCD and buttons with the phone. For obvious reasons, it can't do Windows. That basically leaves either Blackberry or some resurrected form of WebOS.
And even if Nintendo DOES manage to pull it off, they'll be stonewalled the moment they try to launch in the US. They'll be forced to choose between giving Verizon 6-12 months of exclusivity in exchange for access to slightly under half the US mobile market (and hoping Verizon doesn't botch the launch), or trying to launch on everyone else (with less risk of total failure, but more risk of poor sales) knowing that Verizon doesn't take kindly to companies who refuse to kiss its ring and kneel before them.
Could Nintendo get away with pushing for a European launch ahead of an American one? Probably not. The European market is big and GSM, but most of the gaming industry's influential decision-makers are in the US. Nokia thought it could ignore the US since it was a smaller GSM market at the time (in terms of units sold per year) than Portugal, but failed to anticipate the consequences of literally disappearing from review sites when those sites' American authors saw Nokia go away & just assumed they'd gone bankrupt or something. If Nintendo tried to pull a Europe-first strategy, it would HAVE to simultaneously mount a very, very expensive simultaneous US launch on T-Mobile in the hope of being relevant to influential reviewers who live in big cities where T-Mobile happens to have really good service.
That said... I disagree that only one device can win, or that it necessarily HAS to be a phone. It's like how there was a period when people used portable CD players in their cars, but as soon as they bought their next car (or next head unit), they said 'fuck it' and got one with CD player built in. We're seeing the same thing now with phones as car audio devices... people are using their phone with the radio/car they have NOW, but dedicated Android double-DIN head units are already appearing, and Apple is probably only 5 years away from making their own iCar units. Connecting your phone to the large-screen TV in the living room is a pain in the ass. Beyond a certain poverty point, what really matters is being able to buy a game, play it on your phone, then play it BETTER (without having to buy another copy) on your TV when you're at home. Car CD players REALLY took off after CD writers allowed people to burn their own CDs, so they didn't have to drive around with $800 worth of CDs sitting on the front seat for the first guy who smashes the window to grab.
Green! Green! Green!
Aw hell, ok, beggars can't be choosers. I guess blue will do in a pinch. ;-)
Yes, and no. Buying a laptop with a really good keyboard is hard. God knows, I tried 3 months ago. The problem is, if you want a mobile workstation with pointer stick, sculpted keycaps, and tactile snap, you basically have 3 or 4 choices... and NONE of them are sold by normal stores. Every goddamn one of them is a blind act of faith and random dice roll unless you know somebody who has one.
The sad fact is, laptop keyboards all basically suck, it's hard & expensive to buy one that sucks a lot less than most, and nobody has ever really managed to come up with a viable standard for highly-portable (but non-laptop) mobile workstations that's enough of a standard to be able to buy a case-keyboard-monitor(s)-battery, then add your own motherboard & hard drives. I'd *kill* for something like that... say, with:
* 20-24" IPS main display, 2560x1440 resolution, flanked by a pair of portrait-oriented (including subpixels) 900-1280x1440 displays hinged to each side that fold over the main monitor and latch together like shutters over a window... all interconnected via displayport, with displayport hub in the case itself.
* Cherry keyboard (available with all switch colors, including Green and Blue) and pointer stick.
* power supply and battery to act like built-in UPS.
* space for microATX motherboard, and riser cards to allow one or two video cards to be mounted sideways. To make up for the 1x slots that the riser would obstruct, the case has a Thunderbolt to PCI Express interface and one or two sets of side-oriented slots elsewhere in the case.
* Ideally, a storage compartment or two that's big enough to store cables and a gaming mouse.
The only component for something like this that's still off the radar are the 900-1280 x 1440 portrait-mode LCDs (size-matched to be density-identical to the main monitor). Thanks to DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the other two problems that would have formerly plagued an open mobile workstation form factor are basically solved. DisplayPort solves the "how do we wire up 3 monitors in a way that's non-proprietary and foolproof" problem, and Thunderbolt provides an easy way to add additional PCI Express 1x ports, not to mention micro PCIe and ExpressCard, that aren't on the motherboard itself. If the LCD problem could be solved, this would be a product a company the size of pre-Dell Alienware could literally manufacture and sell, because all the remaining problems (case, keyboard) are relatively low-tech fabrication and assembly issues. But the LCD problem would be a bitch to solve, because AFAIK, there's literally nobody on earth who'll sell you matched panels suitable for P-L-P where the portrait-mode panels literally have the same subpixel layout and density as the more conventional landscape panel.
On average, you loose a full workday on switching to something like Dvorak.
On "average", maybe... but "average" is not necessarily the same as "norm".
When you're talking about people who've mastered QWERTY to the point where they can effortlessly type faster than 100WPM, a forced change to Dvorak wouldn't be a matter of mere "retraining" -- it would require outright physical therapy. At 100+ wpm, the keyboard is basically a synthetic synapse between the nervous system and target CPU. At that speed, typing occurs almost entirely through muscle memory.
I used to completely despise 16:9 monitors, too, until I discovered WinSplit Revolution (free, http://winsplit-revolution.com/ which makes it really easy to maximize windows to the left or right 1/2, 1/3, or 2/3 of the screen, and goes a long way towards making it behave like a pair of side-by-side 960x1080 monitors in portrait orientation.
Tip: I personally redefined WinSplit's default hotkeys to make them more laptop-friendly... ctrl up/down/left/right maximizes to left or right, while ctrl-alt left/right literally throws the window to the adjacent monitor when I'm running with two or more. There are other permutations, but 99.9% of my window moves are to the left or right size.
A 17" laptop with 16:9 1920x1080 treated like adjacent 640x1080 and 1280x1080 monitors is pretty good, once you have WinSplit handy to make it easy to maximize windows to fully-height partial-width against an edge.
Now that 15" monitors with 1920x1080 are available on most higher-end laptops, 16:9 is more tolerable at that size, too, and does have one concrete advantage over a 1400x1050 14.1" display... you can use the laptop on a plane without having to tilt the screen forward if the person in front of you reclines... or at least, you can if the laptop's manufacturer minimizes the bezel.
Let's compare apples to apples; if you access your bank using a non-jailbroken iOS device using Safari, that's going to be a lot more secure than any desktop browser.
Only if you're literally comparing (mobile) Apples(tm) to (desktop) Apples(tm).
Unlike OSX, iOS, and Safari, recent versions of Windows (when used with recent versions of IE to access web sites with recent SSL3/TLS implementations) successfully mitigate BEAST attacks, and can safely use CBC cipher suites. Apple hasn't bothered, so Safari is stuck with RC4.
The shit some alleged jour^h^h^h^h resear^h^h^h^h^h^h overpriced snake-oil salesmen and consultants keep spreading about the "risks" of allowing banking apps to run on jailbroken devices is getting old.
It's wrong, it's a lie, AND it's actively-harmful to the ultimate goal of banking security (fraud-prevention and losses).
There are exactly two things that would happen almost immediately if any major bank in the US with millions of customers tried to prevent customers from running its consumer banking app on jailbroken/rooted hardware:
1. It'll be treated like copy protection, cracked within days, and released online almost immediately... and 15 minutes later, copies with injected malware will be getting aggressively posted online in ways that will make Google rank them high in the search results.
2. Depending on the size of the bank, there will be one or more open-source reverse-engineered banking apps (probably spoofing a desktop browser and doing screen-scraping if necessary) on Github, Sourceforge, and other sites... until the bank tries to get them taken them down at lawyerpoint, they go underground (or get modularized in ways that make them impossible for lawyers to attack directly), and someone manages to slip a subtle trojan into it somehow, or malware authors start distributing precompiled copies with their own special payloads.
Just wait until some major American bank decides to try blocking their app from jailbroken/rooted devices. When it happens, grab a big bowl 'o popcorn, and watch the fun at XDA & Github.
A banking app running on a jailbroken/rooted device is NO LESS SECURE than the same bank's webapp would be if the same user went to it with the same phone (possibly setting it to spoof a desktop browser).
Any app that genuinely depends upon not being able to install from iTunes/Google Play on jailbroken/rooted hardware for security DESERVES to get pwn3d in the worst and most publicly-humiliating way possible.
Pin the certificates? Sure. The only people who'll notice or care are attackers, and they're going to decompile the program and rip it apart anyway. Obfuscate the code? Sure, have fun. Once again, nobody besides attackers will notice or care.
The moment you try to exclude users with jailbroken/rooted phones, you've instantly broken the app for a small, but very loud & opinion-influencing group of users who aren't the least bit shy about taking matters into their own hands AND have the technical skills to pull it off. If you're a major American bank with tens of millions of customers, the LAST thing you want to do unless you're completely insane is motivate a few thousand of them to become casual weekend hackers so they can check their bank account balance on their phone.
I'd kill for a product like this that could be mounted to a pole on my roof and viewed in realtime with host software running on a PC (or Android tablet, if it had the horsepower to do the realtime deconvolution and virtual PTZ).
This would also turn it into a kick-ass security camera for places where aesthetics are less important than performance and cost
To keep the base cost low, they could make the ethernet+PoE an optional second module that the main one screws into and feeds the raw bitstream that would otherwise be written to microSD. Module #2 could handle the PoE (or passively-injected) power conversion and wrapping of raw (presumably h.264) data as UDP multicast (and forward error correction), as well as keeping the actual connection weatherproof. Inside the house, the host PC could then buffer the raw data for a few frames, then implement the virtual PTZ.
Enhancements that would make it even better for this purpose:
* optional "hat" mount to shield the 3 main cameras from rain, with fourth camera pointing up that has a pinhole-sized lens and strong blower to keep it clear of water (obviously you'd lose camera #4 during active rain, but the blower would clear away the water as soon as it stopped raining).
* vapor-tight shell to protect the electronics from night/morning dew in places like Florida, where 99% humidity condenses on just about everything left outdoors overnight. Or "very tight" shell, with a clump of silica gel and a moisture sensor so the user knows when he has to climb up onto the roof, grab the camera, open it up, and bake the silica gel in the oven for a few hours to make it useful again.
I think a large part of it is due to the convenience of Jython, which makes it really easy to embed Python directly into a Java application as a user scripting engine that doesn't require explicit installation or configuration by the user. I'd go so far as to say that Jython is probably 99% of the reason WHY so many Java apps that support scripting do it via Python instead of some other language.
Jython only supports 2.x syntax.
There IS a way to bind a Python interpreter to Java so it can exchange objects directly (py4j), but it still requires separate installation of Python, with all the usual things that can go wrong (and frequently do, at least under Windows), like environment variables, path definitions, etc.
There's also IronPython, which is another 2.x-only Python that enjoys lots of "automatic" mindshare from Windows developers because it presents itself as the "official Microsoft-blessed .Net CLR Python" for Windows, and everyone remembers that a decade ago, Activestate Perl was the de-facto Perl for anyone running Windows (and eventually, the defacto Perl, period). It's basically abandonware at this point, but ActiveState doesn't go out of its way to make it obvious.
That said, I'd put most of the blame/credit for 2.x on the non-existence of "Jython 3".
"Planet Killer" is a bit extreme. Unlike, say, an asteroid strike, Yellowstone wouldn't do much to the other side of the earth (or even the east coast) besides block sunlight and bury soil in a foot of de-facto concrete sludge. In other words, nuclear power plants will still work, and so will anything else not directly destroyed by the explosion. We have something the dinosaurs (and early humans) didn't -- food that's edible for years, and the means to (expensively) grow it without sunlight. Life would suck, to be sure (especially in poorer countries), and war would probably erupt across the globe, but it's unlikely that it would literally kill all human life -- let alone all life -- on Earth.
The biggest immediate consequence would probably be the de-facto end of air travel (jet engines have insurmountable problems flying through ash) -- at least, for a few years. If cruise ships had to fill the gap, Miami would probably become the main port of entry for passenger travel into and out of the US... mainly, because it's one of the only cities that actually HAS the port facilities to handle large volumes of passengers RIGHT NOW. I'm guessing that Barcelona, Montpellier, and probably Rome, would become the main passenger terminals at the "Europe" end (by virtue of having cruise terminals of their own, as well as HSR connectivity to the rest of Europe). I'm sure there would be direct service between New York and Southampton (UK) too, but I don't see New York being capable of assuming a role as the main port of entry for passenger ships if it's under martial law and one major food riot away from civil breakdown.
There's a UK-based company that makes a REALLY cool product that, with some tweaking, could be WILDLY popular in the US -- SecurityBlinds Secur. Basically, it's a set of interior window bars camouflaged to look like working vertical blinds. The product they actually sell was apparently designed as a blast shield against bomb attacks, but if they reduced the "rugged" part down to just the strength needed to keep burglars out, and replaced the aluminum vanes with textured plastic shells in the usual colors that snapped over the steel rods like clamshells, they could sell them by the TRUCKLOAD through the special order department of stores like Home Depot or Lowes to Americans whose homeowners' associations won't allow burglar bars... but would have no way of knowing that there are actually hardcore burglar bars hidden inside the vertical blinds.
Of course, a product like that would ALSO be perfect for anybody with a big cat (tiger, cougar, leopard, jaguar, lion, etc), because then you could let your tiger lounge in front of the living room window without having to worry about his safety if someone broke the glass & he jumped out through the open window. :-)
If you don't care about out-of-the-box sexy experience, it's hard to beat the Elk M1 as a DYI'er. Their view of DIY'ers is largely ambivalent... they won't go out of their way to solve your problems, but the moment you furnish them with a valid M1 serial number, they'll give you access to the same training materials, downloads, firmware, and accessories as their pro installers. It's a strategy that works for them, partly because lots of those prosumers who buy one to install themselves end up starting companies to get certified officially and install the same alarm systems for other people.
Just one thing... do... not... even... THINK... about buying a cheap TCP/IP-UART bridge for ~$20 on eBay and connecting it directly to both the internet and the Elk serial bus. Make sure you have some kind of middleware sitting between the internet and Elk serial port that can only do specific things, like indicate an active alarm, arm the system, etc. And if you don't understand what I just said & want your alarm to be internet-connected, pony up the cash and buy a proper M1-XEP interface for it. The Elk RS-232 bus was NEVER designed to be directly exposed to attackers over the internet, and mostly depends upon being inside a locked box for security. If you interface it to the internet in a way that allows arbitrary values to get blindly relayed straight to the RS-232 bus after reading this, you deserve whatever happens to you for being a complete idiot.
The only thing it really lacks, IMHO, is the ability to implement Boolean logic for triggering alarms. For example, monitoring the state of the glass-break sensor, the door-shock sensor, and motion-detector and triggering an alarm ONLY if at 2 out of 3 fire within 20 seconds. And having similar logic in other rooms. The firmware in my controller allows you to "sort of" do something like that for a single zone, but IMHO it needs the ability to independently do this in multiple zones.
The nice thing about the M1 is that thanks to Arduinos w/Ethernet and the RPi, you can actually extend its logic pretty easily by using the M1 as your low-level sensor interface, and moving higher-level logic to a Pi or Arduino on the Elk RS-232 bus (relaying events from sensors as they happen to that serial bus, and triggering things like alarms by sending events back to the controller via that same serial bus).
Kludge-tip: if you're in a hurry to set up the system, don't feel like pulling wires right away to each room, and have an unused landline phone cable with 6 wires buried in the wall to hijack, you can buy input expanders and use the 6 repurposed phone wires to daisy-chain the Elk bus to strategic points in your house (1 pair for RS-485, 1 pair for +12v, 1 pair for ground). I had my own Elk M1 wired that way for almost 3 years, before I finally got proper conduit and wires pulled throughout the entire house. I had one M1XIN hidden behind the TV in the living room & plugged into the phone jack (which obviously wasn't used for an actual landline phone), and a second one upstairs behind the nightstand in the master bedroom, along with the equally-kludged keypad. Amazingly, it actually worked (if I had voltage issues, plan B was to add DC-DC converters to boost the voltage from 12v to 48v as it left the box, then drop it back down to 12v at the living room & master bedroom. Fortunately, everything used very little power, and the only time I ever had an issue was around year 4, when the backup battery finally died and the voltage started sagging.
Oh... also... Elk's M1 can interface directly with X10, Zwave, Insteon, and some other standard that escapes me at the moment. The MSRP of their expansion boards is pretty high, but you'll never actually pay those prices anyway because there's ALWAYS somebody selling them for a relatively small markup on eBay. However, make sure you buy the main alarm controller itself from an authorized dealer. Elk DOES track serial numbers of main system units, and if a serial number is reported as 'stolen' by a vendor, they'll re
That's also why summer in Antarctica can feel warmer than winter in Chicago, even if the dry-bulb temperature is lower. Inland from the coasts, Antarctica is basically a desert, while Chicago is relatively humid. When it's cold + humid, the moisture in contact with your body can absorb more heat than dry air can radiate away. Being in liquid water is just a more extreme case, with even faster negative consequences.
Yeah, yeah. Discrete is dead, and IGP is good enough now... as long as you don't want hardware-accelerated realtime raytracing:
(drool)
http://www.siliconarts.co.kr/gpu-ip
(/drool)
When I can have Windows or Linux with full eye candy and zero performance hit (vs Win2k or something XFCE-like) at 2560x1920@240fps, I'll accept current GPUs as "good enough".
When I can open a pdf document on my phone or tablet and effortlessly fling through it without any perceptible lag waiting for the fonts to render, current GPUs will be "good enough". Newsflash: 80% of the reason why ebooks suck so miserably is the fact that current hardware CAN'T effortlessly render them in realtime
OK, the last one is a bit unfair, because the blame for current shit pdf-rendering performance lies mostly at the feet of the videocard industry, for throwing away everything it learned and developed relating to 2D acceleration in the mad rush to cheap 3D. Basically, they took 3D GPUs developed for strap-on videocards, grafted on enough extra silicon to let them stand alone as their own self-hosted minimalist frame buffer, and called it a day.
^^^ Argh. Proofreading typo-blindness. "~25 years ago, I got a Vic-20 on Christmas Eve. By dinner on Christmas Day, ..."
It's both. Comparing OpenGL (ES) to sprite-based and tile-based 2D is kind of like comparing J2EE in all its distributed splendor to PHP.
OpenGL ES 2 was a pain, but dear Jesus God, I spent the better part of a day just TYPING IN the HelloWorld code for an OpenGL ES 3 Android app, and ended up with something like 8 or 10 classes that compiled into a .apk file several hundred kilobytes in size just to draw a yellow triangle on a black screen. Now, admittedly, the increased HelloWorld complexity eventually pays off by making it more straightforward to do COMPLICATED things, but GETTING to that point has absolutely become more painful over the years.
~25 years ago, I got a Vic-20 on Christmas Eve. By dinner on Christmas Eve, I was writing programs with custom characters, animation, and music. Today, you'd spend 2-3 days with a new computer just waiting for Windows Update to finish installing one or two service packs and several hundred individual updates. Some people might grouse about "cryptic code", but I dare anyone to compare the amount of code you need to open a native Window and make its background black under .net or Java to:
POKE 36879, 8 (*)
Butart is a big, huge problem too. Back when graphics were made from 8x8 characters that could either be 2 colors, or 4 colors at half-resolution, there were only *so* many ways to meaningfully make something, and most of them were dictated by a need to have at least 1 pixel separating major features (like eyes) so they'd be recognizable as such. The lack of resolution and subtle colors basically solved the problem for you.
If anything, having an artist involved 25 years ago usually made the gameplay worse, because they'd force the programmer to make horrible performance compromises to implement their artistic vision. Instead of being able to play tricks with barrel-shifting and video timing, the programmer would be stuck shoveling raw bits around the slowest way possible because the artist designed an image whose width wasn't a whole multiple of 8 pixels.
(*) of course, understanding WHY the value was 8, and not 0, as opposed to just blindly copying the value out of a book, required a few semesters in college ;-)