> I can't for the life of me think of what the 'tri-tone' sounds like.
You know what's funny? I remember at one point (Miami, early 2000s) when you couldn't go *anywhere* without hearing it constantly. Then, almost overnight (circa 2005), it just kind of disappeared(*). Oh, for another year or two, you could still hear it occasionally if you were in South Beach, or someplace around lots of visitors from South America or Europe, but I can't even remember the last time I actually heard a phone playing it.
(*) Sometime around 2003 or 2004, Nokia decided they were too good to make phones capable of anything besides legacy GSM and 1900/2100 UMTS, which meant their phones were basically useless paperweights in the US. Nokia's fall from glory had its roots in their decision to abandon the US because it was (at the time) a smaller GSM market than Portugal, but what Nokia's management overlooked was the *immense* influence of American web sites and publications... the American authors of which all just kind of assumed that Nokia had gone bankrupt or something, or at least ceased to be relevant anywhere besides poor rural villages in Africa.
There's a *reason* why Sony[-Ericsson] practically bends over backwards to give its phones away like candy to American reviewers who live in cities with good T-Mobile HSPA+ coverage, even though they don't sell many phones here... they don't want to repeat Nokia's mistake.
> If it does, there's no good way to handle that unless you're doing fixed-layout content, which means > you need to deliver separate versions of your book for each reader screen size.
Yes. And for technical books, layout *does* matter, and I'd argue quite forcefully that publishers *do* need to lay out at least two different versions... one for pocket-sized displays, and one for larger ~7"-ish displays... with a third variant that assumes 2-up viewing on a larger display, with occasional charts and illustrations that span 2 full pages and the full display size (ie, 7" layout in 2-up form on a ~10" display with larger tables/charts, or 4" layout in 2-up form on a ~7" display with occasional page-spanning tables/charts).
Because freetype is wet-concrete SLOW on the typical low-end ARM hardware behind most tablet-like e-readers. The problem isn't that it can't look *good*, the fundamental problem is that you can't flip virtual pages like Wyle E. Coyote reading an Acme catalog with effortless, lag-free, effortless fluidity containing type that was laid out and rendered on the fly.
With current hardware, there are basically two ways to achieve sub-5ms page-flipping:
* ~1GHz dualcore ARM9 w/12GB ram, multi-terabyte-sized SATA3 SSD, and IPS LCD, so you can pre-render eBooks to raw bitmaps in their entirety, and keep the mostly cached in RAM. The terabytes of space are required because lossy compression isn't acceptable for compressing text images (at least, not JPEG). Oh, you can definitely take a few liberties to whack what would otherwise be a pre-rendered 1920x1080 4-byte bitmap down to something half the size, but you're still going to be shoveling around a MINIMUM of 2 megabytes of raw data per pre-rendered page, and shoveling ~6-8 megabytes of data into framebuffer ram every 5-10ms to achieve 60fps .
The first hypothetical e-reader (a.k.a. a fairly hefty desktop PC) would be beefy enough to render the ebook with lag-free immediacy in high quality in realtime. The second would hopefully be fast enough to present the illusion that it's equivalent to #1 by pre-rendering entire books in advance to minimally-compressed bitmaps that could be cached in ram, and read in near-realtime from a SSD if necessary.
No current e-ink display could come anywhere close to satisfying those kind of update-speed requirements. Until somebody makes an e-ink display that divides the screen up into zones and allows them to be cleared & redrawn in parallel, there won't be an e-ink display that truly allows satisfying interactive reading.
MicroSD won't cut it, except maybe as a place to keep the original pdf file before it gets pre-rendered to bitmaps stored on the SSD & cached in the huge ram buffer. Nor will the absurd 200-500MHz ARM CPUs that currently underpower pretty much every hardware e-reader on the market, let alone their miserly amounts of ram.
Text is not "just text". There's a world of difference between rendering quick & nasty output to a fake terminal screen, and rendering typeset-quality text with professional layout and publishing standards to a LCD that's sufficiently high-res for its physical resolution to be almost irrelevant.
Reflowed text is a cancer. The publishing industry needs to do at least 3 layouts:
* large-format 9:16, intended for reading on displays that are ~7-9" diagonal and 1920x1080 or better.
* small-format 9:16, intended for reading on displays that are ~4-5" diagonal and 1280x720 or better... or 2-up viewing on a large-format reader.
* epub, for "everything else", as distant & ugly "Plan C" when the first two formats can't be properly viewed.
Ideally, an ebook format should encapsulate all three layouts, so the end user can pick the one he thinks will render the best on his device. Note that I'm not saying the ebook format itself should encapsulate the pages in rendered-bitmap form, just that it should recognize that the way you lay out things like a table will likely differ for the small-format ebook. Think of it as starting with epub, then heavily-tweaking it page by page to optimize its presentation for the large format, then manually-redoing things like illustrations and tables wholesale for the small-format version.
Hmmm. If true, this is *catastrophically* bad, because it clouds the security of EVERY implementation of client-side cryptography under Android.
For years, java.util.SecureRandom has been the bedrock foundation of all encryption under Java (and by extension, Android, even if Android technically isn't Java). A vulnerability in SecureRandom doesn't just bork bitcoins... it screws up things like PBKDF2, DH key exchange (and by extension, SSL & RSA), and even AES (if you're using it client-side to generate a random AES encryption key).
It also means we're probably going to have to NOW mess around with yet another new class, like android.os.ReallySecureRandom (even if the bug DOES get fixed), simply because so many older phones will never see an update, and replacing it entirely with a new RNG class is the only way for an app developer to confidently know that he's not using a degenerate implementation.
I remember it quite well, thank you. Wordperfect 4.2 would mostly fit in its entirety on a bootable DOS disk, but WordPerfect 5.1 required some major manual surgery to shoehorn it onto a bootable DOS disk. Procomm+ itself easily fit on a bootable DOS disk, but it didn't take more than a few downloaded files to fill the disk. I also remember feeling dirty and scandalized after buying the first version of WordPerfect for Windows, and realizing that it had more floppy disks in the box than WINDOWS 95 did. And then, there was the day the UPS guy showed up with the small shipping crate from Borland containing the full edition of Borland C++. The box of disks ALONE had to have weighed at LEAST 30-40 pounds. And I still have nightmares about the one time in my life I was unfortunate enough at my first job after college to have to install Netware from scratch, and spent literally an entire day just feeding the installer disk after disk after disk.
Actually, it's been scientifically proven that you *do*. Even though English is nominally based upon letters and spelling, native speakers read by word shape, not letters or graphemes.
At the brain signal processing level, English is read and interpreted EXACTLY the same way that Chinese is. The only difference is that when a native English reader trips over an unfamiliar word, he tries to sound it out phonetically. When a native Chinese reader trips over an unfamiliar character, he breaks it down into "is-like/sounds-like" pieces (ie, Cat == "is-ClawedBeast, sounds-like meow". Mother == "is-woman, sounds-like ma".) Either way, if your native language is English or Chinese, the way your brain interpretes it is exactly the same regardless of which language you grew up speaking.
That's why you can often completely *mangle* an English sentence, but as long as you get the first & last letters of each word right, and the middle letters don't deviate TOO badly from what they're supposed to be, you can still read it. It's also why it's so hard to proofread your own writing... your brain knows what it's supposed to say, and as long as the word shapes are approximately right, you don't notice minor misspellings.
This is also why serif fonts are generally easier to read than sans-serif fonts, and why kerned text is easier to read than monospaced text. At the end of the day, an English word printed in Times New Roman (or some comparable font) really isn't all that different from a Chinese character... and a German sentence is even LESS different from a Chinese sentence [Chinese, like German, is polysynthetic... it creates new words by agglutination (combining old words into new, longer combinations to name new concepts)].
e-ink will never be viable for random-access tech books until they improve the controllers, the same way they improved STN LCD displays 20 years ago... by dividing the screen into smaller pieces that be cleared and rewritten in parallel. Current i-ink displays were optimized for cost and low power consumption to the detriment of everything else. 700ms latency is flat-out unacceptable for tech books. Even 100ms latency is perceptibly slow. To capture the lag-free spontaneous feel of a paper book, they have to get the time to wipe and re-render a page down to 5ms or less. 10 ms will nag at you occasionally, kind of like CRT flicker seen via peripheral vision. 25ms destroys the sense of effortless flowing. 50ms becomes downright irritating. 100ms is the point where lag and latency start to really annoy you. 700ms? Slogging through wet concrete.
Three words for e-ink display manufacturers: divide and conquer. At current 700ms rewrite speeds, achieving anything CLOSE to 5ms rewrite speeds is going to require somewhere between 128 and 256 parallel controllers, each responsible for rewriting 3-6 rows apiece.And before anyone mentions power... when it comes to e-ink, comparing a 256-controller display to a LCD is kind of like comparing a 150-watt multi-element LED array to a 500-1000 watt halogen torchiere that throws off comparable amounts of light at similar quality. Yes, the high-quality 150 watt light is a power hog compared to a 15 watt bulb with the color quality of a 1940s T40 fluorescent tube, but it's still a tiny fraction of the power used by a lamp that can do double-duty as a space heater or marshmallow-toaster. And in between rewrites, it would take no power at all, just like current e-ink. The increased power would apply only during active rewrites.
For tech books, it would also make sense to draw upon ideas from other technologies, like pentile color and bichromatic Technicolor. Current full-color e-ink looks muddy and gray, because most of the surface area is taken up by cyan, magenta, and yellow subpixels that reflect muddy color-tinged gray when combined. Suppose instead someone made color e-ink readers that dedicated most of their surface area to black/white, but alternated slivers of red with a slight orange tint and green with a slight blue tint. The net effect would be color that wasn't photorealistic, but would do a decent job of color for technical books, and would have approximately the color quality that American newspapers used to have before USA Today raised the stakes in the early 80s.
It's because ebooks are a piss poor substitute for paper books. They're underpowered, lack 2D acceleration relevant to font-rendering, tend to store data in flash that's connected via the slowest and least-random-access-agile means possible, and basically suck as a reading experience. I have lots of ebooks, most of which have never really been read because the readers piss me off and distract me too badly from the actual task of reading.
Flipping pages feels like wading through wet concrete, and a computer-literate high school student circa 1990 probably did a better job laying out school papers in Pagemaker than most ebooks. Even pdf versions feel half-baked... like they just let some automated algorithm rip through the layout for the real book, and nobody bothered to make sure that the output actually looked good. I've seen ebooks from big-name technical publishers render with weird pdf errors (a random mangled unicode character, maybe a few characters where the kerning engine just vomited something vaguely resembling mashed-together text onto a page, etc).
Epub tends to not have the mangled kerning and wacky rendering problems, but THOSE ebooks tend to just look like someone blindly converted the professionally-typeset book to html-like layout and let it land wherever random luck happened to reflow it.
Then, there's Kindle... where even on a fast PC, flipping to random pages inexplicably brings the whole program to its knees for a second or two while it seemingly struggles to get its act together, and it just plain *intolerably* slow and laggy for random-access tech book reading.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish. Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right. OpenGL desperately needs hardware-level support for spline acceleration, smoothing, hinting, and everything else. There are some interesting ways you can use OpenGL to render individual glyphs, but with all the ram and T&L processing they have, it's still not enough to pre-define complete triangle-based definitions for 3 font families in 4 styles (normal, bold, italic, bold+italic with even a single UTF-8 codepage, like the one corresponding to ISO-8859-1, let alone even a tiny subset of a language like Chinese.
In a way, triangle-based high-quality font rendering vs photorealistic 3D is kind of like 720p60 vs 1080i60. People who don't understand what's going on behind the scenes tend to think the latter is a harder task, but when you do the real math, you quickly discover that it's actually the FIRST item in the pair that's the truly *demanding* task, simply because unlike the second item in the pair, the first generally doesn't allow you to cut corners and hide your sins... they get splattered in full public view for everyone to see, and there's nowhere to hide them.
The value of his time, balanced against the pointless futility of it? I mean, seriously. If you're going to spend that much time on something like that, at least port Linux to something that's actually useful. In a world where you can buy a used Android phone on eBay for $5-25 that, when rooted, can be a USB host with color display, bluetooth, and wi-fi... and might even have a TTL serial port hanging off the USB port or headphone jack if you know how to activate it... what POINT is there in trying to run Linux from a 1.44mb floppy?
For God's sake, if you're going to spend THAT much time, at least do something useful, like find a way to pwn the bootloader on a Surface & reflash it to Ubuntu. Or find 3 GPIO pins that you can take control of, and implement your own homebrew MMC/SDCARD interface, then write the driver for it so you can run a non-crippled Linux build.
Fifteen years ago, there might have been halfway sensible reasons to run Linux from a floppy, especially when the biggest removable-media filesystem you could easily get your hands on was a 100mb Zip disk. But now? It's silly. It's pointless. Linux isn't Haiku. There's de-bloating, then there's indiscriminate hack & slash crippling for the sake of making it satisfy some constraint that hasn't really been a constraint in more than a decade.Flash in 64mb to 256mb sizes isn't just "affordable" or "cheap" -- it's basically yours for free if you find someone with a bucket full of old cards and say you can use them.
One chip package, maybe... one chunk of silicon, probably not. The fab processes are too different. You can fab RAM with a CPU process, but it's totally not cost effective. That's why even today, ARM9 microcontrollers normally max out around 256kB, and it's more like 16-64kB.
CPU-fabbed RAM is VERY expensive. The more recent crop of SoCs increase the ram by stacking 2 or 3 wafers in the same package, so each type (flash, ram, or CPU) can be made via the most cost-effective process, then combined into a single package at the very end. And even now, combining ram, flash, and CPU into a single package is a PREMIUM solution for space-constrained high-budget applications, not a cost-cutting measure.
Yeah... if you're lucky, and the BIOS can limp on the network enough to grab an IP address and do TFTP, you might even be able to use that floppy to bootstrap the rest of the Linux boot process.
Boot Linux from a floppy in any context meaningfully resembling a general-purpose operating system that can do at least as much as MS/DOS 5? No. Sorry, you can't.
For one thing, every Linux kernel since sometime around 2.6 has used fbdev instead of MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA textmode. I'm pretty sure fbdev ALONE needs more than a meg, especially when you add in the font definitions. So at best, you'd be limited to interacting with a remote serial terminal.
Networking? Forget it. Without tiptoeing into BIOS-land (if not outright UEFI-land), even getting TFTP to work enough to fetch chunks of raw data from the local network to continue booting from would be a major challenge.
Even during the golden era of DOS and hand-crafted assembly language apps, you'd have been spectacularly lucky to get something like a cut-down copy of WordPerfect 4.2 onto a floppy capable of booting DOS. Procomm+ fit onto bootable disks, but even THAT was kind of a battle.
The fact is, if you try to cut Linux down to something that can fully boot and run from a single floppy disc, you're going to be left with something that's basically DOS 6 + DOS4GW capability-wise. And you'll spend so much time trying to build it, you'd almost be better off just using the kernel as an inspirational starting point and writing your own OS from scratch. The harsh truth is, the need for networking and UTF-8 killed sub-megabyte kernels. RIP. You just can't do one, let alone both, and end up with less than 1.5 megs of binary boot data on an x86-architecture PC without relying on BIOS support, and even that's iffy.
Even worse, such an exercise is utterly and completely pointless when you consider that you can buy a brand new 4GB SD card for $5 and get change back, and could probably buy a Ziploc bag full of 256mb SD cards at a hamfest for a buck. Thanks to MMC mode's SPI interface, SD cards are dead easy to read and write (as long as you don't have to implement a filesystem anything ELSE can read or recognize).
> You'd have to prove that modifying the firmware isn't unreasonable use. > It would be cheaper just to buy a new $300 device
Wrong. That's what makes MMWA so potent. Once you file the complaint with the FTC, the onus is 100% on the manufacturer to demonstrate to the FTC's satisfaction that your modification of the firmware was the reason for the failure. It's cheaper for THEM to just re-JTAG your device to stock, run the factory diagnostics on it, and either return the original to you if it passes, or send you a remanufactured/new one if it doesn't.
Unlike most consumer-protection laws, MMWA has real teeth, and the FTC has little patience for companies that try to use warranty coverage as a weapon to enforce TOS compliance. The closest real-world scenario where a rooted phone might genuinely cause a hardware failure is if you repartitioned the flash to add a naïve Linux swap partition in a way that caused the same small block of flash to get repeatedly scrubbed, rewritten, and prematurely fail... but even then, it would probably cost the company more money to document how doing it literally caused the hardware failure to the FTC's satisfaction than to just toss your phone onto the scrap pile and send you a remanufactured one.
Elliptic key cryptography per se isn't patented, just the most efficient ways of using it. So, worst-case, we might end up with some horrific eternal kludge whose only reason for existing was to provide a commercially-safe route around patents not set to expire for another 2-3 years.
Likely example: the horrific clusterfuck of an abomination known as "little-endian binary". I don't know for sure it came about due to patent reasons, but I can't think of any sane reason why it would have ever come into existence otherwise.
His point is that many of the "clones" actually improve upon the original.
Examples:
AMD's 40MHz 386 (faster than the fastest "386" Intel itself ever made)
Hercules monochrome (allowed businesses that were "mostly" text-oriented to have bitmap graphics that were compatible with MDA displays & had the same high-quality (for the era) text (at the time, MDA was generally sharper & better-looking than VGA for text). It was never, EVER an official "IBM" standard, and was basically the first ding in IBM's monolithic armor.
SVGA (IBM's own official standard for the 8514 specified 16-color 1024x768 @ some horrid interlaced fieldrate)
The Cyrix 5x86/133, which gave you the performance of a 75MHz Pentium from a "486" motherboard.
Android phone clones with more ram, more flash, faster CPUs, and/or better cameras than the phone they're supposed to be a clone of.
Naw, if somebody steals my laptop, I *want* them to be able to casually log in and use it, so I can ssh into the box and remotely pwn them in every conceivable way, getting way more fun and value out of the laptop than I probably would have gotten from using it myself. Drive encryption keeps your data more secure, but maximizes the likelihood that you'll never see the laptop again or get any post-theft entertainment value from it. When life gives you lemons, make a honeypot;-)
Well... maybe not large zoos. But at the smaller end, there are plenty of zoolike entities that deal with big cats (leopards, jaguars, tigers, lions) that have official policies against "fraternizing with the animals", but quietly look the other way when a few select individuals get some quality time with the kitties. I'd say the fatality rates are probably pretty comparable... every few years, someone gets killed under circumstances that, in retrospect, make it clear that the individual wasn't quite in tune with the cats(*), but divided by thousands of daily interactions, the number really IS small.
Common themes to most of the orca attacks: someone was in the tank when they weren't supposed to, sometimes under rather questionable circumstances.
I do, however, agree that Sea World fucked up its handling of the situation badly by making it consequence-free for the Orca. Some kind of punishment would have certainly been appropriate, if only to make it think twice before attacking a human again in the future. Unfortunately, it's too late now, and if there WERE some kind of punishment imposed after the next killing, the Orca would be unlikely to make a direct connection between the attack and punishment since it's gotten away with it three times already.
(*) Strictly speaking, NO cat is "domesticated" in the sense dogs are. With cats, socialization early in life is everything. A fourth-generation feral tabby, Siamese, or moggy can mess you up as badly as any small wildcat... and will. A second- or third-generation leopard, cheetah, or cougar socialized with humans from an early age and raised like a house cat will snuggle with you on the couch and purr. Temperamentally, they really AREN'T any different from "house cats". When you really get down to it, ALL cats have a wild side, and socialization is what suppresses it.
Size matters. The difference between the size & strength of a human and a random house cat is pretty big. They might bite and scratch, but humans have a big enough size advantage to prevail 99.999% of the time. In contrast, an adult female leopard (the smallest of the big cats) is pretty much a dead-even match for an adult human, and any lion larger than a cub is likely to win in hand-to-hand combat with a human. A pissed-off tabby can scratch you badly enough to need sutures. A playful lion or tiger can seriously mess you up by mistake with an inappropriate "love swat", and demonstrably feel bad about doing it afterwards.
Almost without exception, the people who get killed by big cats are people who thought they could impose themselves upon them like a dog and/or feared them. Recognition of a cat's boundaries and respecting them is NOT the same thing as "fearing them". Even a tabby gets a headache or feels grumpy occasionally, and will lash out at you exactly the same way if you insist upon annoying them when they want to be left alone. A dog can be "trained" to be subservient to humans. Cats negotiate treaties on favorable terms;-)
> In the history of all consumer products in the world, I can think of no other product so publicly rejected as Microsoft's newest products.
In all fairness, I can think of a few that are in the same sad category:
* Sony's sad excuse for a digital Walkman, that made everything secondary to DRM-enforcement and was basically useless, with MiniDisc as a close second.
* Logitech Revue
* Motorola Photon Q (that's *Photon*, not *Nexus*. Google gets a free pass with the Nexus Q since they ended up giving them away for free).
Pink slime looks disgusting, but the truth is, if you were given a hamburger containing pink slime (with the usual artificial flavors and processing), and another hamburger made from low-quality pure ground beef, you'd probably think the one made with pink slime tasted better. At the very least, in double-blind taste tests, you'd probably give the pink slime burger a 4 or 5 out of 5 for "authentic barbecue flavor" and "savory texture", and say the all-beef (low-quality) burger was dry & tasteless. You'd be amazed/horrified if you knew about the miracles things like artificial smokehouse flavoring and MSG can work on your tastebuds.
The only reason why they don't sell artificial flavorings like the ones added to Burger King's hamburgers at grocery stores is because consumers would abuse them and consume levels a thousand times beyond any amount ever approved for direct human consumption by the FDA (or even tested for safety, period). I forget who it was, but some university actually did some studies with test kitchens and people allowed to prepare their own foods, just to see how much artificial flavor real people would put into their own food if they were allowed to. The researchers were *horrified*. One described it as being like giving a pound of crack to an addict & wishing him a Merry Christmas. People literally went *nuts* with the stuff. Supposedly, one lady actually basted her finger with the stuff, started to suck it, and got so caught up in the moment, she accidentally BIT IT badly enough to end up at the hospital.
It's the same reason why it's damn near impossible to get cats who've grown up with dry food to voluntarily switch to premium wet food. A cat who's grown up eating "kitty crack" will literally *starve himself* to death before voluntarily eating real tuna if you try to switch them "cold turkey" (yes, I know pure tuna isn't nutritionally-complete... I was using it as an example of something I literally tried to get my cats to eat at one time as an experiment after they rejected multiple brands of premium cat food. They wouldn't even look at it until I crumbled ground-up dry food over it, at which point they licked the dryfood-powder from the top).
> Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing.
Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable, if only as a premium high-margin item.
The big thing that's going to keep this from ever becoming cost-effective is the electricity it's going to take to exercise it by contracting the fibers over the course of their "life". Remember, most of what we call "meat" is REALLY "muscle", with incidental amounts of fat. Flabby muscle doesn't taste the same as exercised muscle. That's 90% of the reason why cows raised for meat are allowed to roam mostly out in the open instead of being kept in pens as veal. Pigs and chickens in close quarters will climb over each other and spend their lives trying to avoid getting trampled. Cows are just too big & heavy for that to work. They HAVE to be allowed to roam around for exercise. Otherwise, half of them would kill the other half long before they were old enough to slaughter.
As for opposition from "farmers", think about it for a minute. The poultry industry has basically perfected large-scale vertically-integrated corporate factory farming. The likelihood that any cultured meat could be even remotely cost-competitive with it is basically "nonexistent". That leaves beef, where there's a clear divide between ranchers and slaughterhouses. If ranchers decide it's more profitable to culture meat instead of ranch it, there's nothing the slaughterhouses can do about it. If slaughterhouses decide it's more profitable to culture meat than kill it, there's not much the farmers can do about it. More importantly, the states where ranchers are powerful aren't quite the states where slaughterhouses are powerful, so there's not going to be any kind of "united front".
The truth is, ranchers don't *like* sending animals to be slaughtered any more than the people who own the slaughterhouses *like* killing them. If they could cost-effectively get away with herding cattle into a robotic slaughter chamber, closing the soundproof doors, pressing the "go" button, and walking away to watch neatly-packaged meat emerge (regardless of the horrors that might occur inside the chamber), they'd do it in an instant.
Cultured meat will never replace good steak, and can't possibly be cost-competitive with factory-farmed poultry. That leaves hamburger & sausage as potentially-viable markets. My guess is that someday, nouveau-vegetarians will be able to enjoy guilt-free cultured hamburgers & sausage that's certified to be slaughter-free, and everyone else will eat hamburgers & sausage that are some cost-effective combination of ground beef/pork and cultured beef/pork.
We'll probably get to have some entertaining theatre when various sects of Judaism gets around to arguing about the 21st-century definition of "Kosher" in the context of meat that was technically never slaughtered, and might even see something truly perverse, like Kosher cultured meat guaranteed to be cloned from the cells of humanely-slaughtered animals (vs non-slaughtered animals), and a huge media orgy someday when Kosher cultured beef ends up getting served to a NewVegan who ordered cultured beef cloned from cells harvested from calves released into nature parks (where they're promptly killed & eaten by bears, cougars, wolves, and (in Florida) pythons).
> Growing population does not necessarily imply growth in electric power use. > Over time the amount of power used to do many tasks has been declining due to improved technology and government regulation.
On the grand hierarchy of "things that increase this month's electric bill", roughly 90% of it is "running the air conditioner". CFL-vs-incandescent isn't even background noise when you're talking about trying to cool a house to 20+ degrees below ambient temperature in 99% relative humidity. I don't care how many linear wall warts you replace with switching power supplies, nor however many 100w incandescent bulbs you replace with 23-30 watt fluorescents... it's NOT going to make a visible dent in an average Floridian's total electricity use.Compared to the pair of 50-ampere circuit breakers leading to the air conditioner, everything else is piss in the ocean.
Replacing a 20 year old air conditioner will probably cut your power use in half... for 10 years. Partly because the old unit was inefficient, and partly because the old unit was 20 years old. By now, probably 70% of the low-efficiency central AC units have been replaced. There are no comparable efficiency gains on the horizon. It was basically a one-shot deal, and we've already cashed in on it. Ditto, for insulation. Most of the houses in South Florida were built AFTER 1980, and ALREADY have 80-90% the insulation that a brand new house might have today. Factor in upgraded insulation as part of hurricane roof repairs, and the gap narrows even more.
Put another way, conservation and efficiency isn't going to save South Florida from needing more power plants. Thanks to a few big hurricanes forcing large-scale involuntary home improvement projects, plus the fact that 2/3 of the buildings in Florida today didn't even *exist* prior to aggressive insulation being the norm, we're living on borrowed time with respect to power generation capacity as it is, and it really wouldn't take much of a disruption to plunge most of the state into rolling blackouts for weeks.
> Do we actually need more power generating capacity?
Yes, we do. Compared to states like Texas, Florida has the power grid of a poor third-world country. We have power plants built for a projected population of 15 million, with a population approaching 20 million, and REAL "daily warm-body count" that's at least a million or two higher.
Case in point: the Naples metro area has an official population of ~150,000... and approximately 400,000 dwellings on the tax rolls. Fort Myers/Cape Coral is similarly-lopsided, with an official population somewhere around 400,000, and real-world "people sleeping in a bed somewhere in the county tonight" population of around a million. Population stats only count people who are legal residents eligible to vote, and ignore retirees who are still technically residents of Ohio or New York, citizens of Canada, etc. The population might be half that amount in July, but by January, you only have to look around southwest Florida to see just how many people are there.
Miami's population isn't quite that lopsided, but even our own stats undercount several hundred thousand visitors & transients who don't bother to declare official residency. And I'm not even talking about illegal aliens... I'm talking about twentysomethings working in South Beach who supposedly live with their parents in Long Island, Europeans who grab their laptop, board a jet, and work remotely from their job in London, Paris, or Berlin all winter next to a pool somewhere, and the usual assortment of retirees whose social security checks get direct-deposited in Connecticut or New Jersey.
I have two friends who were involved with Turkey Point's expansion study. Neither one of them is the slightest bit worried about a hurricane-induced meltdown. Regardless of the backup generator's structural integrity back in 1992, you can rest assured it's now quite a bit more fortified. Turkey Point is probably one of the safest nuclear power plants in the world.
Florida's biggest risk TODAY isn't meltdown, it's the multi-week rolling blackouts we'd have across the state if one or two hurricanes were to shred the long-distance power transmission lines that connect the southern 2/3 of Florida with Alabama & Georgia. They wouldn't even have to be particularly major hurricanes. The fact is, if you summed up the full-load generating capacity of every power plant in Florida south of Ocala and Daytona Beach, we have *maybe* 70% of the peak capacity needed to avoid rolling blackouts in a month like July if we were cut off from power sources outside of Florida. Begin shutdown procedures at Turkey Point as a precaution if a hurricane is approaching the area, and we could have 8-hour daily blackouts from Miami to Orlando to Tampa before the first rain band even comes ashore in Dade County.
IMHO, the ideal place in Florida to build a new nuclear power plant would be Everglades City (~35 miles southeast of Naples, ~80 miles west of downtown Miami).
Link to reference(s), please? I'll believe it when I see it confirmed at XDA & somebody has Cyanogen or OpenKANG running on it.
Motorola is the psychopath of the mobile phone industry. It tells lies that would have made Hitler's propaganda team blush, then lashes out at its customers & blames them for making it angry. Google didn't buy Motorola for their patents... Google bought Motorola because it needed an evil proxy to do their dirty work for them.
The really sad part: AT&T and T-Mobile are theoretically GSM, yet AT&T customers with a Galaxy S3 are *still* waiting for 4.1.2. I mean, Jesus Fsck'ing God, even VERIZON got 4.1 several MONTHS ago.
Time for Samsung to port new version of Android to every GSM phone on earth, except those running on AT&T or T-Mobile: N months.
Time for Samsung to port new version of Android to AT&T and T-Mobile: N + X months.
Time for AT&T to "validate" that the crippled AT&T-specific S3 camera app had "fixed focus to infinity" removed as an option, leaving only "autofocus" and "macro": N + X + F months.
Hacking your phone to make Google Wallet work, then using it to buy lunch at McDonalds using it and smiling when you realize that AT&T or Verizon is completely cut out of the revenue stream because they wouldn't cooperate with Google: priceless.
> I suppose you could root the phone and launch it from the debug shell?
This is Motorola we're talking about. I'd strongly advise NOT taking that for granted if it's a factor in your purchasing decision.
Motorola has a long, sordid history of locking down bootloaders, then abandoning once-flagship phones less than a year later. Did I mention that the Photon & Electrify have the nearly-exclusive notoriety of being just about the only known modern Android phones with a real risk of getting bricked while rooting?
Personally, I'd buy a pocket hostpot and haul around a wifi phablet for the rest of my life before I'll *ever* willingly buy another Motorola Android device with a locked bootloader. I totally bought into the mass delusion at XDA that Google would somehow clean house at Motorola, make them non-Evil, and turn our phones into de-facto (if officially-unsupported) Nexi. Obviously, we were wrong.
Motorola (with Google's blessing) didn't just abandon us... they chained us up first, then shoved us face-first onto an anthill just to make sure we were *really* fucked.
Don't buy a Motorola phone unless you're 100% cool with buying a dead-end phone that you'll never be allowed to fix when it ends up sucking.
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> I can't for the life of me think of what the 'tri-tone' sounds like.
You know what's funny? I remember at one point (Miami, early 2000s) when you couldn't go *anywhere* without hearing it constantly. Then, almost overnight (circa 2005), it just kind of disappeared(*). Oh, for another year or two, you could still hear it occasionally if you were in South Beach, or someplace around lots of visitors from South America or Europe, but I can't even remember the last time I actually heard a phone playing it.
(*) Sometime around 2003 or 2004, Nokia decided they were too good to make phones capable of anything besides legacy GSM and 1900/2100 UMTS, which meant their phones were basically useless paperweights in the US. Nokia's fall from glory had its roots in their decision to abandon the US because it was (at the time) a smaller GSM market than Portugal, but what Nokia's management overlooked was the *immense* influence of American web sites and publications... the American authors of which all just kind of assumed that Nokia had gone bankrupt or something, or at least ceased to be relevant anywhere besides poor rural villages in Africa.
There's a *reason* why Sony[-Ericsson] practically bends over backwards to give its phones away like candy to American reviewers who live in cities with good T-Mobile HSPA+ coverage, even though they don't sell many phones here... they don't want to repeat Nokia's mistake.
> If it does, there's no good way to handle that unless you're doing fixed-layout content, which means
> you need to deliver separate versions of your book for each reader screen size.
Yes. And for technical books, layout *does* matter, and I'd argue quite forcefully that publishers *do* need to lay out at least two different versions... one for pocket-sized displays, and one for larger ~7"-ish displays... with a third variant that assumes 2-up viewing on a larger display, with occasional charts and illustrations that span 2 full pages and the full display size (ie, 7" layout in 2-up form on a ~10" display with larger tables/charts, or 4" layout in 2-up form on a ~7" display with occasional page-spanning tables/charts).
Because freetype is wet-concrete SLOW on the typical low-end ARM hardware behind most tablet-like e-readers. The problem isn't that it can't look *good*, the fundamental problem is that you can't flip virtual pages like Wyle E. Coyote reading an Acme catalog with effortless, lag-free, effortless fluidity containing type that was laid out and rendered on the fly.
With current hardware, there are basically two ways to achieve sub-5ms page-flipping:
* quadcore i7 @ 2.5GHz+, 4GB ram, SATA3 SSD, IPS LCD
* ~1GHz dualcore ARM9 w/12GB ram, multi-terabyte-sized SATA3 SSD, and IPS LCD, so you can pre-render eBooks to raw bitmaps in their entirety, and keep the mostly cached in RAM. The terabytes of space are required because lossy compression isn't acceptable for compressing text images (at least, not JPEG). Oh, you can definitely take a few liberties to whack what would otherwise be a pre-rendered 1920x1080 4-byte bitmap down to something half the size, but you're still going to be shoveling around a MINIMUM of 2 megabytes of raw data per pre-rendered page, and shoveling ~6-8 megabytes of data into framebuffer ram every 5-10ms to achieve 60fps .
The first hypothetical e-reader (a.k.a. a fairly hefty desktop PC) would be beefy enough to render the ebook with lag-free immediacy in high quality in realtime. The second would hopefully be fast enough to present the illusion that it's equivalent to #1 by pre-rendering entire books in advance to minimally-compressed bitmaps that could be cached in ram, and read in near-realtime from a SSD if necessary.
No current e-ink display could come anywhere close to satisfying those kind of update-speed requirements. Until somebody makes an e-ink display that divides the screen up into zones and allows them to be cleared & redrawn in parallel, there won't be an e-ink display that truly allows satisfying interactive reading.
MicroSD won't cut it, except maybe as a place to keep the original pdf file before it gets pre-rendered to bitmaps stored on the SSD & cached in the huge ram buffer. Nor will the absurd 200-500MHz ARM CPUs that currently underpower pretty much every hardware e-reader on the market, let alone their miserly amounts of ram.
Text is not "just text". There's a world of difference between rendering quick & nasty output to a fake terminal screen, and rendering typeset-quality text with professional layout and publishing standards to a LCD that's sufficiently high-res for its physical resolution to be almost irrelevant.
Reflowed text is a cancer. The publishing industry needs to do at least 3 layouts:
* large-format 9:16, intended for reading on displays that are ~7-9" diagonal and 1920x1080 or better.
* small-format 9:16, intended for reading on displays that are ~4-5" diagonal and 1280x720 or better... or 2-up viewing on a large-format reader.
* epub, for "everything else", as distant & ugly "Plan C" when the first two formats can't be properly viewed.
Ideally, an ebook format should encapsulate all three layouts, so the end user can pick the one he thinks will render the best on his device. Note that I'm not saying the ebook format itself should encapsulate the pages in rendered-bitmap form, just that it should recognize that the way you lay out things like a table will likely differ for the small-format ebook. Think of it as starting with epub, then heavily-tweaking it page by page to optimize its presentation for the large format, then manually-redoing things like illustrations and tables wholesale for the small-format version.
Hmmm. If true, this is *catastrophically* bad, because it clouds the security of EVERY implementation of client-side cryptography under Android.
For years, java.util.SecureRandom has been the bedrock foundation of all encryption under Java (and by extension, Android, even if Android technically isn't Java). A vulnerability in SecureRandom doesn't just bork bitcoins... it screws up things like PBKDF2, DH key exchange (and by extension, SSL & RSA), and even AES (if you're using it client-side to generate a random AES encryption key).
It also means we're probably going to have to NOW mess around with yet another new class, like android.os.ReallySecureRandom (even if the bug DOES get fixed), simply because so many older phones will never see an update, and replacing it entirely with a new RNG class is the only way for an app developer to confidently know that he's not using a degenerate implementation.
Sigh.
I remember it quite well, thank you. Wordperfect 4.2 would mostly fit in its entirety on a bootable DOS disk, but WordPerfect 5.1 required some major manual surgery to shoehorn it onto a bootable DOS disk. Procomm+ itself easily fit on a bootable DOS disk, but it didn't take more than a few downloaded files to fill the disk. I also remember feeling dirty and scandalized after buying the first version of WordPerfect for Windows, and realizing that it had more floppy disks in the box than WINDOWS 95 did. And then, there was the day the UPS guy showed up with the small shipping crate from Borland containing the full edition of Borland C++. The box of disks ALONE had to have weighed at LEAST 30-40 pounds. And I still have nightmares about the one time in my life I was unfortunate enough at my first job after college to have to install Netware from scratch, and spent literally an entire day just feeding the installer disk after disk after disk.
> I feel like I read text in chunks
Actually, it's been scientifically proven that you *do*. Even though English is nominally based upon letters and spelling, native speakers read by word shape, not letters or graphemes.
At the brain signal processing level, English is read and interpreted EXACTLY the same way that Chinese is. The only difference is that when a native English reader trips over an unfamiliar word, he tries to sound it out phonetically. When a native Chinese reader trips over an unfamiliar character, he breaks it down into "is-like/sounds-like" pieces (ie, Cat == "is-ClawedBeast, sounds-like meow". Mother == "is-woman, sounds-like ma".) Either way, if your native language is English or Chinese, the way your brain interpretes it is exactly the same regardless of which language you grew up speaking.
That's why you can often completely *mangle* an English sentence, but as long as you get the first & last letters of each word right, and the middle letters don't deviate TOO badly from what they're supposed to be, you can still read it. It's also why it's so hard to proofread your own writing... your brain knows what it's supposed to say, and as long as the word shapes are approximately right, you don't notice minor misspellings.
This is also why serif fonts are generally easier to read than sans-serif fonts, and why kerned text is easier to read than monospaced text. At the end of the day, an English word printed in Times New Roman (or some comparable font) really isn't all that different from a Chinese character... and a German sentence is even LESS different from a Chinese sentence [Chinese, like German, is polysynthetic... it creates new words by agglutination (combining old words into new, longer combinations to name new concepts)].
e-ink will never be viable for random-access tech books until they improve the controllers, the same way they improved STN LCD displays 20 years ago... by dividing the screen into smaller pieces that be cleared and rewritten in parallel. Current i-ink displays were optimized for cost and low power consumption to the detriment of everything else. 700ms latency is flat-out unacceptable for tech books. Even 100ms latency is perceptibly slow. To capture the lag-free spontaneous feel of a paper book, they have to get the time to wipe and re-render a page down to 5ms or less. 10 ms will nag at you occasionally, kind of like CRT flicker seen via peripheral vision. 25ms destroys the sense of effortless flowing. 50ms becomes downright irritating. 100ms is the point where lag and latency start to really annoy you. 700ms? Slogging through wet concrete.
Three words for e-ink display manufacturers: divide and conquer. At current 700ms rewrite speeds, achieving anything CLOSE to 5ms rewrite speeds is going to require somewhere between 128 and 256 parallel controllers, each responsible for rewriting 3-6 rows apiece.And before anyone mentions power... when it comes to e-ink, comparing a 256-controller display to a LCD is kind of like comparing a 150-watt multi-element LED array to a 500-1000 watt halogen torchiere that throws off comparable amounts of light at similar quality. Yes, the high-quality 150 watt light is a power hog compared to a 15 watt bulb with the color quality of a 1940s T40 fluorescent tube, but it's still a tiny fraction of the power used by a lamp that can do double-duty as a space heater or marshmallow-toaster. And in between rewrites, it would take no power at all, just like current e-ink. The increased power would apply only during active rewrites.
For tech books, it would also make sense to draw upon ideas from other technologies, like pentile color and bichromatic Technicolor. Current full-color e-ink looks muddy and gray, because most of the surface area is taken up by cyan, magenta, and yellow subpixels that reflect muddy color-tinged gray when combined. Suppose instead someone made color e-ink readers that dedicated most of their surface area to black/white, but alternated slivers of red with a slight orange tint and green with a slight blue tint. The net effect would be color that wasn't photorealistic, but would do a decent job of color for technical books, and would have approximately the color quality that American newspapers used to have before USA Today raised the stakes in the early 80s.
It's because ebooks are a piss poor substitute for paper books. They're underpowered, lack 2D acceleration relevant to font-rendering, tend to store data in flash that's connected via the slowest and least-random-access-agile means possible, and basically suck as a reading experience. I have lots of ebooks, most of which have never really been read because the readers piss me off and distract me too badly from the actual task of reading.
Flipping pages feels like wading through wet concrete, and a computer-literate high school student circa 1990 probably did a better job laying out school papers in Pagemaker than most ebooks. Even pdf versions feel half-baked... like they just let some automated algorithm rip through the layout for the real book, and nobody bothered to make sure that the output actually looked good. I've seen ebooks from big-name technical publishers render with weird pdf errors (a random mangled unicode character, maybe a few characters where the kerning engine just vomited something vaguely resembling mashed-together text onto a page, etc).
Epub tends to not have the mangled kerning and wacky rendering problems, but THOSE ebooks tend to just look like someone blindly converted the professionally-typeset book to html-like layout and let it land wherever random luck happened to reflow it.
Then, there's Kindle... where even on a fast PC, flipping to random pages inexplicably brings the whole program to its knees for a second or two while it seemingly struggles to get its act together, and it just plain *intolerably* slow and laggy for random-access tech book reading.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish. Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right. OpenGL desperately needs hardware-level support for spline acceleration, smoothing, hinting, and everything else. There are some interesting ways you can use OpenGL to render individual glyphs, but with all the ram and T&L processing they have, it's still not enough to pre-define complete triangle-based definitions for 3 font families in 4 styles (normal, bold, italic, bold+italic with even a single UTF-8 codepage, like the one corresponding to ISO-8859-1, let alone even a tiny subset of a language like Chinese.
In a way, triangle-based high-quality font rendering vs photorealistic 3D is kind of like 720p60 vs 1080i60. People who don't understand what's going on behind the scenes tend to think the latter is a harder task, but when you do the real math, you quickly discover that it's actually the FIRST item in the pair that's the truly *demanding* task, simply because unlike the second item in the pair, the first generally doesn't allow you to cut corners and hide your sins... they get splattered in full public view for everyone to see, and there's nowhere to hide them.
The value of his time, balanced against the pointless futility of it? I mean, seriously. If you're going to spend that much time on something like that, at least port Linux to something that's actually useful. In a world where you can buy a used Android phone on eBay for $5-25 that, when rooted, can be a USB host with color display, bluetooth, and wi-fi... and might even have a TTL serial port hanging off the USB port or headphone jack if you know how to activate it... what POINT is there in trying to run Linux from a 1.44mb floppy?
For God's sake, if you're going to spend THAT much time, at least do something useful, like find a way to pwn the bootloader on a Surface & reflash it to Ubuntu. Or find 3 GPIO pins that you can take control of, and implement your own homebrew MMC/SDCARD interface, then write the driver for it so you can run a non-crippled Linux build.
Fifteen years ago, there might have been halfway sensible reasons to run Linux from a floppy, especially when the biggest removable-media filesystem you could easily get your hands on was a 100mb Zip disk. But now? It's silly. It's pointless. Linux isn't Haiku. There's de-bloating, then there's indiscriminate hack & slash crippling for the sake of making it satisfy some constraint that hasn't really been a constraint in more than a decade.Flash in 64mb to 256mb sizes isn't just "affordable" or "cheap" -- it's basically yours for free if you find someone with a bucket full of old cards and say you can use them.
One chip package, maybe... one chunk of silicon, probably not. The fab processes are too different. You can fab RAM with a CPU process, but it's totally not cost effective. That's why even today, ARM9 microcontrollers normally max out around 256kB, and it's more like 16-64kB.
CPU-fabbed RAM is VERY expensive. The more recent crop of SoCs increase the ram by stacking 2 or 3 wafers in the same package, so each type (flash, ram, or CPU) can be made via the most cost-effective process, then combined into a single package at the very end. And even now, combining ram, flash, and CPU into a single package is a PREMIUM solution for space-constrained high-budget applications, not a cost-cutting measure.
Yeah... if you're lucky, and the BIOS can limp on the network enough to grab an IP address and do TFTP, you might even be able to use that floppy to bootstrap the rest of the Linux boot process.
Boot Linux from a floppy in any context meaningfully resembling a general-purpose operating system that can do at least as much as MS/DOS 5? No. Sorry, you can't.
For one thing, every Linux kernel since sometime around 2.6 has used fbdev instead of MDA/CGA/EGA/VGA textmode. I'm pretty sure fbdev ALONE needs more than a meg, especially when you add in the font definitions. So at best, you'd be limited to interacting with a remote serial terminal.
Networking? Forget it. Without tiptoeing into BIOS-land (if not outright UEFI-land), even getting TFTP to work enough to fetch chunks of raw data from the local network to continue booting from would be a major challenge.
Even during the golden era of DOS and hand-crafted assembly language apps, you'd have been spectacularly lucky to get something like a cut-down copy of WordPerfect 4.2 onto a floppy capable of booting DOS. Procomm+ fit onto bootable disks, but even THAT was kind of a battle.
The fact is, if you try to cut Linux down to something that can fully boot and run from a single floppy disc, you're going to be left with something that's basically DOS 6 + DOS4GW capability-wise. And you'll spend so much time trying to build it, you'd almost be better off just using the kernel as an inspirational starting point and writing your own OS from scratch. The harsh truth is, the need for networking and UTF-8 killed sub-megabyte kernels. RIP. You just can't do one, let alone both, and end up with less than 1.5 megs of binary boot data on an x86-architecture PC without relying on BIOS support, and even that's iffy.
Even worse, such an exercise is utterly and completely pointless when you consider that you can buy a brand new 4GB SD card for $5 and get change back, and could probably buy a Ziploc bag full of 256mb SD cards at a hamfest for a buck. Thanks to MMC mode's SPI interface, SD cards are dead easy to read and write (as long as you don't have to implement a filesystem anything ELSE can read or recognize).
> You'd have to prove that modifying the firmware isn't unreasonable use.
> It would be cheaper just to buy a new $300 device
Wrong. That's what makes MMWA so potent. Once you file the complaint with the FTC, the onus is 100% on the manufacturer to demonstrate to the FTC's satisfaction that your modification of the firmware was the reason for the failure. It's cheaper for THEM to just re-JTAG your device to stock, run the factory diagnostics on it, and either return the original to you if it passes, or send you a remanufactured/new one if it doesn't.
Unlike most consumer-protection laws, MMWA has real teeth, and the FTC has little patience for companies that try to use warranty coverage as a weapon to enforce TOS compliance. The closest real-world scenario where a rooted phone might genuinely cause a hardware failure is if you repartitioned the flash to add a naïve Linux swap partition in a way that caused the same small block of flash to get repeatedly scrubbed, rewritten, and prematurely fail... but even then, it would probably cost the company more money to document how doing it literally caused the hardware failure to the FTC's satisfaction than to just toss your phone onto the scrap pile and send you a remanufactured one.
Elliptic key cryptography per se isn't patented, just the most efficient ways of using it. So, worst-case, we might end up with some horrific eternal kludge whose only reason for existing was to provide a commercially-safe route around patents not set to expire for another 2-3 years.
Likely example: the horrific clusterfuck of an abomination known as "little-endian binary". I don't know for sure it came about due to patent reasons, but I can't think of any sane reason why it would have ever come into existence otherwise.
His point is that many of the "clones" actually improve upon the original.
Examples:
AMD's 40MHz 386 (faster than the fastest "386" Intel itself ever made)
Hercules monochrome (allowed businesses that were "mostly" text-oriented to have bitmap graphics that were compatible with MDA displays & had the same high-quality (for the era) text (at the time, MDA was generally sharper & better-looking than VGA for text). It was never, EVER an official "IBM" standard, and was basically the first ding in IBM's monolithic armor.
SVGA (IBM's own official standard for the 8514 specified 16-color 1024x768 @ some horrid interlaced fieldrate)
The Cyrix 5x86/133, which gave you the performance of a 75MHz Pentium from a "486" motherboard.
Android phone clones with more ram, more flash, faster CPUs, and/or better cameras than the phone they're supposed to be a clone of.
> you forgot to select encrypt harddrive
Naw, if somebody steals my laptop, I *want* them to be able to casually log in and use it, so I can ssh into the box and remotely pwn them in every conceivable way, getting way more fun and value out of the laptop than I probably would have gotten from using it myself. Drive encryption keeps your data more secure, but maximizes the likelihood that you'll never see the laptop again or get any post-theft entertainment value from it. When life gives you lemons, make a honeypot ;-)
Well... maybe not large zoos. But at the smaller end, there are plenty of zoolike entities that deal with big cats (leopards, jaguars, tigers, lions) that have official policies against "fraternizing with the animals", but quietly look the other way when a few select individuals get some quality time with the kitties. I'd say the fatality rates are probably pretty comparable... every few years, someone gets killed under circumstances that, in retrospect, make it clear that the individual wasn't quite in tune with the cats(*), but divided by thousands of daily interactions, the number really IS small.
Common themes to most of the orca attacks: someone was in the tank when they weren't supposed to, sometimes under rather questionable circumstances.
I do, however, agree that Sea World fucked up its handling of the situation badly by making it consequence-free for the Orca. Some kind of punishment would have certainly been appropriate, if only to make it think twice before attacking a human again in the future. Unfortunately, it's too late now, and if there WERE some kind of punishment imposed after the next killing, the Orca would be unlikely to make a direct connection between the attack and punishment since it's gotten away with it three times already.
(*) Strictly speaking, NO cat is "domesticated" in the sense dogs are. With cats, socialization early in life is everything. A fourth-generation feral tabby, Siamese, or moggy can mess you up as badly as any small wildcat... and will. A second- or third-generation leopard, cheetah, or cougar socialized with humans from an early age and raised like a house cat will snuggle with you on the couch and purr. Temperamentally, they really AREN'T any different from "house cats". When you really get down to it, ALL cats have a wild side, and socialization is what suppresses it.
Size matters. The difference between the size & strength of a human and a random house cat is pretty big. They might bite and scratch, but humans have a big enough size advantage to prevail 99.999% of the time. In contrast, an adult female leopard (the smallest of the big cats) is pretty much a dead-even match for an adult human, and any lion larger than a cub is likely to win in hand-to-hand combat with a human. A pissed-off tabby can scratch you badly enough to need sutures. A playful lion or tiger can seriously mess you up by mistake with an inappropriate "love swat", and demonstrably feel bad about doing it afterwards.
Almost without exception, the people who get killed by big cats are people who thought they could impose themselves upon them like a dog and/or feared them. Recognition of a cat's boundaries and respecting them is NOT the same thing as "fearing them". Even a tabby gets a headache or feels grumpy occasionally, and will lash out at you exactly the same way if you insist upon annoying them when they want to be left alone. A dog can be "trained" to be subservient to humans. Cats negotiate treaties on favorable terms ;-)
> In the history of all consumer products in the world, I can think of no other product so publicly rejected as Microsoft's newest products.
In all fairness, I can think of a few that are in the same sad category:
* Sony's sad excuse for a digital Walkman, that made everything secondary to DRM-enforcement and was basically useless, with MiniDisc as a close second.
* Logitech Revue
* Motorola Photon Q (that's *Photon*, not *Nexus*. Google gets a free pass with the Nexus Q since they ended up giving them away for free).
* Pretty much every version of Windows Phone
Pink slime looks disgusting, but the truth is, if you were given a hamburger containing pink slime (with the usual artificial flavors and processing), and another hamburger made from low-quality pure ground beef, you'd probably think the one made with pink slime tasted better. At the very least, in double-blind taste tests, you'd probably give the pink slime burger a 4 or 5 out of 5 for "authentic barbecue flavor" and "savory texture", and say the all-beef (low-quality) burger was dry & tasteless. You'd be amazed/horrified if you knew about the miracles things like artificial smokehouse flavoring and MSG can work on your tastebuds.
The only reason why they don't sell artificial flavorings like the ones added to Burger King's hamburgers at grocery stores is because consumers would abuse them and consume levels a thousand times beyond any amount ever approved for direct human consumption by the FDA (or even tested for safety, period). I forget who it was, but some university actually did some studies with test kitchens and people allowed to prepare their own foods, just to see how much artificial flavor real people would put into their own food if they were allowed to. The researchers were *horrified*. One described it as being like giving a pound of crack to an addict & wishing him a Merry Christmas. People literally went *nuts* with the stuff. Supposedly, one lady actually basted her finger with the stuff, started to suck it, and got so caught up in the moment, she accidentally BIT IT badly enough to end up at the hospital.
It's the same reason why it's damn near impossible to get cats who've grown up with dry food to voluntarily switch to premium wet food. A cat who's grown up eating "kitty crack" will literally *starve himself* to death before voluntarily eating real tuna if you try to switch them "cold turkey" (yes, I know pure tuna isn't nutritionally-complete... I was using it as an example of something I literally tried to get my cats to eat at one time as an experiment after they rejected multiple brands of premium cat food. They wouldn't even look at it until I crumbled ground-up dry food over it, at which point they licked the dryfood-powder from the top).
> Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing.
Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable, if only as a premium high-margin item.
The big thing that's going to keep this from ever becoming cost-effective is the electricity it's going to take to exercise it by contracting the fibers over the course of their "life". Remember, most of what we call "meat" is REALLY "muscle", with incidental amounts of fat. Flabby muscle doesn't taste the same as exercised muscle. That's 90% of the reason why cows raised for meat are allowed to roam mostly out in the open instead of being kept in pens as veal. Pigs and chickens in close quarters will climb over each other and spend their lives trying to avoid getting trampled. Cows are just too big & heavy for that to work. They HAVE to be allowed to roam around for exercise. Otherwise, half of them would kill the other half long before they were old enough to slaughter.
As for opposition from "farmers", think about it for a minute. The poultry industry has basically perfected large-scale vertically-integrated corporate factory farming. The likelihood that any cultured meat could be even remotely cost-competitive with it is basically "nonexistent". That leaves beef, where there's a clear divide between ranchers and slaughterhouses. If ranchers decide it's more profitable to culture meat instead of ranch it, there's nothing the slaughterhouses can do about it. If slaughterhouses decide it's more profitable to culture meat than kill it, there's not much the farmers can do about it. More importantly, the states where ranchers are powerful aren't quite the states where slaughterhouses are powerful, so there's not going to be any kind of "united front".
The truth is, ranchers don't *like* sending animals to be slaughtered any more than the people who own the slaughterhouses *like* killing them. If they could cost-effectively get away with herding cattle into a robotic slaughter chamber, closing the soundproof doors, pressing the "go" button, and walking away to watch neatly-packaged meat emerge (regardless of the horrors that might occur inside the chamber), they'd do it in an instant.
Cultured meat will never replace good steak, and can't possibly be cost-competitive with factory-farmed poultry. That leaves hamburger & sausage as potentially-viable markets. My guess is that someday, nouveau-vegetarians will be able to enjoy guilt-free cultured hamburgers & sausage that's certified to be slaughter-free, and everyone else will eat hamburgers & sausage that are some cost-effective combination of ground beef/pork and cultured beef/pork.
We'll probably get to have some entertaining theatre when various sects of Judaism gets around to arguing about the 21st-century definition of "Kosher" in the context of meat that was technically never slaughtered, and might even see something truly perverse, like Kosher cultured meat guaranteed to be cloned from the cells of humanely-slaughtered animals (vs non-slaughtered animals), and a huge media orgy someday when Kosher cultured beef ends up getting served to a NewVegan who ordered cultured beef cloned from cells harvested from calves released into nature parks (where they're promptly killed & eaten by bears, cougars, wolves, and (in Florida) pythons).
> Growing population does not necessarily imply growth in electric power use.
> Over time the amount of power used to do many tasks has been declining due to improved technology and government regulation.
On the grand hierarchy of "things that increase this month's electric bill", roughly 90% of it is "running the air conditioner". CFL-vs-incandescent isn't even background noise when you're talking about trying to cool a house to 20+ degrees below ambient temperature in 99% relative humidity. I don't care how many linear wall warts you replace with switching power supplies, nor however many 100w incandescent bulbs you replace with 23-30 watt fluorescents... it's NOT going to make a visible dent in an average Floridian's total electricity use.Compared to the pair of 50-ampere circuit breakers leading to the air conditioner, everything else is piss in the ocean.
Replacing a 20 year old air conditioner will probably cut your power use in half... for 10 years. Partly because the old unit was inefficient, and partly because the old unit was 20 years old. By now, probably 70% of the low-efficiency central AC units have been replaced. There are no comparable efficiency gains on the horizon. It was basically a one-shot deal, and we've already cashed in on it. Ditto, for insulation. Most of the houses in South Florida were built AFTER 1980, and ALREADY have 80-90% the insulation that a brand new house might have today. Factor in upgraded insulation as part of hurricane roof repairs, and the gap narrows even more.
Put another way, conservation and efficiency isn't going to save South Florida from needing more power plants. Thanks to a few big hurricanes forcing large-scale involuntary home improvement projects, plus the fact that 2/3 of the buildings in Florida today didn't even *exist* prior to aggressive insulation being the norm, we're living on borrowed time with respect to power generation capacity as it is, and it really wouldn't take much of a disruption to plunge most of the state into rolling blackouts for weeks.
> Do we actually need more power generating capacity?
Yes, we do. Compared to states like Texas, Florida has the power grid of a poor third-world country. We have power plants built for a projected population of 15 million, with a population approaching 20 million, and REAL "daily warm-body count" that's at least a million or two higher.
Case in point: the Naples metro area has an official population of ~150,000... and approximately 400,000 dwellings on the tax rolls. Fort Myers/Cape Coral is similarly-lopsided, with an official population somewhere around 400,000, and real-world "people sleeping in a bed somewhere in the county tonight" population of around a million. Population stats only count people who are legal residents eligible to vote, and ignore retirees who are still technically residents of Ohio or New York, citizens of Canada, etc. The population might be half that amount in July, but by January, you only have to look around southwest Florida to see just how many people are there.
Miami's population isn't quite that lopsided, but even our own stats undercount several hundred thousand visitors & transients who don't bother to declare official residency. And I'm not even talking about illegal aliens... I'm talking about twentysomethings working in South Beach who supposedly live with their parents in Long Island, Europeans who grab their laptop, board a jet, and work remotely from their job in London, Paris, or Berlin all winter next to a pool somewhere, and the usual assortment of retirees whose social security checks get direct-deposited in Connecticut or New Jersey.
I have two friends who were involved with Turkey Point's expansion study. Neither one of them is the slightest bit worried about a hurricane-induced meltdown. Regardless of the backup generator's structural integrity back in 1992, you can rest assured it's now quite a bit more fortified. Turkey Point is probably one of the safest nuclear power plants in the world.
Florida's biggest risk TODAY isn't meltdown, it's the multi-week rolling blackouts we'd have across the state if one or two hurricanes were to shred the long-distance power transmission lines that connect the southern 2/3 of Florida with Alabama & Georgia. They wouldn't even have to be particularly major hurricanes. The fact is, if you summed up the full-load generating capacity of every power plant in Florida south of Ocala and Daytona Beach, we have *maybe* 70% of the peak capacity needed to avoid rolling blackouts in a month like July if we were cut off from power sources outside of Florida. Begin shutdown procedures at Turkey Point as a precaution if a hurricane is approaching the area, and we could have 8-hour daily blackouts from Miami to Orlando to Tampa before the first rain band even comes ashore in Dade County.
IMHO, the ideal place in Florida to build a new nuclear power plant would be Everglades City (~35 miles southeast of Naples, ~80 miles west of downtown Miami).
> The Moto X ships with an unlocked bootloader.
Link to reference(s), please? I'll believe it when I see it confirmed at XDA & somebody has Cyanogen or OpenKANG running on it.
Motorola is the psychopath of the mobile phone industry. It tells lies that would have made Hitler's propaganda team blush, then lashes out at its customers & blames them for making it angry. Google didn't buy Motorola for their patents... Google bought Motorola because it needed an evil proxy to do their dirty work for them.
The really sad part: AT&T and T-Mobile are theoretically GSM, yet AT&T customers with a Galaxy S3 are *still* waiting for 4.1.2. I mean, Jesus Fsck'ing God, even VERIZON got 4.1 several MONTHS ago.
Time for Samsung to port new version of Android to every GSM phone on earth, except those running on AT&T or T-Mobile: N months.
Time for Samsung to port new version of Android to AT&T and T-Mobile: N + X months.
Time for AT&T to "validate" that the crippled AT&T-specific S3 camera app had "fixed focus to infinity" removed as an option, leaving only "autofocus" and "macro": N + X + F months.
Hacking your phone to make Google Wallet work, then using it to buy lunch at McDonalds using it and smiling when you realize that AT&T or Verizon is completely cut out of the revenue stream because they wouldn't cooperate with Google: priceless.
> I suppose you could root the phone and launch it from the debug shell?
This is Motorola we're talking about. I'd strongly advise NOT taking that for granted if it's a factor in your purchasing decision.
Motorola has a long, sordid history of locking down bootloaders, then abandoning once-flagship phones less than a year later. Did I mention that the Photon & Electrify have the nearly-exclusive notoriety of being just about the only known modern Android phones with a real risk of getting bricked while rooting?
Personally, I'd buy a pocket hostpot and haul around a wifi phablet for the rest of my life before I'll *ever* willingly buy another Motorola Android device with a locked bootloader. I totally bought into the mass delusion at XDA that Google would somehow clean house at Motorola, make them non-Evil, and turn our phones into de-facto (if officially-unsupported) Nexi. Obviously, we were wrong.
Motorola (with Google's blessing) didn't just abandon us... they chained us up first, then shoved us face-first onto an anthill just to make sure we were *really* fucked.
Don't buy a Motorola phone unless you're 100% cool with buying a dead-end phone that you'll never be allowed to fix when it ends up sucking.