No, bath salts are what likely caused the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal attack last year (truly, one of those classic "only in Miami" incidents that horrify the world, and leave Dade County residents convinced that we live in an ever-so-slightly fucked up parallel universe where normal sanity doesn't necessarily apply.
The fact that John McAfee ended up in Miami is just a coincidence. Now, had McAfee's neighbor face been *eaten*...
> millions of Windows Mobile Phones are sitting in a warehouse somewhere?
or reflashed to Android. Don't laugh. The Htc Touch HD ended up being one of the best Android phones, ever... and firmly convinced most of Microsoft's remaining mobile developer ecosystem to say "Fuck Microsoft" after their flagship phone with 16 months left on-contract was cruelly & prematurely EOL'ed for the crime of having 4 hardkeys instead of 3. Yes, read that again. It had 4, and some tool @ Microsoft decided to officially shun it because Windows Phone devices were required to have exactly 3 buttons.
Did MSX even *exist* as a computer you could buy at any halfway normal retail store in the US, as opposed to importing one from Japan & paying more than you'd have spent to buy an Amiga 500?
The only remotely interesting exotic (by US standards) computer I remember from that era was the Sinclair QL.
Does there exist any program that's basically a lightweight Windows auto-starting (but 99.999% asleep and inert unless you're actively using it) background service that does nothing besides act like an abstraction layer between some kind of reasonable file-based mailstore roughly analogous to an Outlook.pst file (AFAIK, canonical Maildir is a physical impossibility under Windows) and any IMAP-compatible email client?
I don't care about being able to access it from anywhere besides my local PC... binding to localhost, and refusing to talk to anything external to my PC is fine. I've just had it with the mess Thunderbird's developers made of their local mailstore right around the time it completely went to hell ~4 years ago (well, and the mess they made with Thunderbird in general). For years, I just moved mailstore files around. Then, for some insane reason, it seems like Thunderbird's files just kind of exploded and proliferated... and worse, did so in ways that seem to screw up and confuse newer versions if you try to make them use files from an older version. If I could just run a semi-fake local IMAP server on my PC to abstract my mail storage away from Thunderbird itself, I could try other mail clients without having to worry about how I'm going to get my mail into them (a remote IMAP server is out of the question... I literally have gigabytes of email, some that literally came from Eudora Pro more than 18 years ago and just got converted and converted as I went along.
I thought about the usual option of an ARM-based mini-server or an old laptop, but I also have zero-tolerance for server slowness. Stutters and hiccups are bad enough without adding a server that has the resources & performance of a 500MHz Pentium III (on a good day) into the equation. At least if I'm running it locally & it spends 99.999% of its time harmlessly asleep, when I *do* go to access it, it'll have the full resources of a quadcore 3.2GHz i7 behind it for nearly-instantaneous response. The problem with running a full-blown IMAP4 server on my PC is that it's going to always be soaking up ram, and running at a higher background level (anticipating constant remote users it'll never actually see). I just want something that runs as fast and hard as it needs to and can when called upon to do so, then goes and silently hides in the corner until the next time I speak to it.
Yes and no. Not every device that uses (micro)SD cards can do encryption, and not every card that's the shape and size of a (micro)SD card is necessarily a real (micro)SD card that supports encryption. Remember, SD is a superset of MMC, and 99% of devices that don't support encryption really just treat the "(micro)SD" card like a MMC card.
I believe that in the US, anybody can read and write (micro)SD using the 1-bit MMC-compatible SPI interface without encryption royalty-free, but if you want to either use its built-in encryption or communicate in 4-bit mode, you have to pay royalties and obtain a license to use the superset of capabilities that (micro)SD adds to MMC.
Three big things you can do to de-target-ify yourself:
* use SQL prepared statements, never concatenate strings
* never touch the user's real password... key-stretch it client-side using PBKDF2, and only send the salt & hash to your server. People use the same password everywhere, and attackers know it. If you don't KNOW the passwords of your own users, your site is a lot less interesting to attackers.
* block outbound traffic on port 25.
ok, I lied... here are a few more...
* Don't allow connections to your sql server from anywhere besides localhost... then use ssh to connect to it remotely
* never, ever, EVER think you can omit logins & rely on secret URLs. Http-Referrer is a nasty bitch, and she'll bite you eventually... probably via your phone's browser, which doesn't allow you to disable it, and sends https referrers, too.
* (the hard one) make sure your site isn't vulnerable to XSS, so others can't use it as their own attack vector.
Naw, Sprint will probably do it too, then AT&T and Verizon will offer token no-contract plans that are such a bad deal, nobody will care. Sprint, in particular, has nothing to lose. Their phones are (or might as well be) locked to Sprint, and they're able to forcibly be the wholesaler & middleman of every phone used on that network. Even IF you got it to work on Verizon, it would never do EVDO -- only 1xRTT. And if you got it to do EVDO on MetroPCS, it still wouldn't be able to do LTE (all American LTE is non-interoperable).
Well, speaking only for myself, after ~14 years of sending "messages" to Sprint with my dollars, I finally left in disgust over their dysfunctional 28kbps so-called 3G and loss of 4G for some unknown length of time greater than at least 3 months if I dumped my newly-crippled (by Motorola's infamous "May Surprise" bootloader permalock) for a Sprint Galaxy S3. Finding out that their *goal* for 4g was 6mbps was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I pay ~$20/month more to AT&T, and it's worth every penny. Android phones, in particular, don't work well when they're "connected", but have almost no actual working "connectivity"... and with Sprint, it happened *all the time*. I called it, "5 bars and 5k(bps)". August 2012 was the worst... 20% of Sprint's towers down here were like wireless access points that were powered up, but not actually connected to a working network.
AT&T might be expensive and legislatively-evil, but damn, 28mbps (vs Sprint's 28Kbps) is a nice consolation prize.
Visit the Florida Everglades, the AT&T-Verizon roles are swapped. AT&T has LTE in places where Verizon is limping on EVDO, 1-6mbps UMTS in places where Verizon can barely use 1xRTT, and you can force GPRS and nurse Google Maps into working on some godforsaken mangrove island somewhere in southeast Collier County, 15 miles south of the point where your friends with Verizon had their obligatory panic attack upon losing all service. It's all the lingering legacy of BellSouth Mobility's former "make it work everywhere" mission, and AT&T's new management will probably let those towers stay dark & rust away after the next major hurricane takes them down, but for now... it's kind of nice;-)
Unless you use lots of data. Ting is utterly non-viable for anybody whose monthly data usage has to be measured in 'gigabytes'. Anything beyond ~250-500mb or so, and Ting will get *really* expensive. Ting is *not* for people who treat Youtube like a free on-demand music streaming service in their car;-)
> How did that regulatory action "help" AT&T customers?
By keeping T-mobile independent, so it can do stuff like this & allow us to have an open GSM network that doesn't limit phone choice (Sprint) or lock down its bootloaders (Verizon) to flee to if we decide we're annoyed by AT&T.
It's really disgraceful how inefficient package delivery is in both directions between the US and Canada. Instead of treating each other like alien postal systems, USPS & CanadaPost should work together to treat each other's major regional sorting facilities like their own, pre-sort outbound items (ie, a package from Toronto to Miami would get transported directly to Jacksonville by CanPost, and a package from Miami to Montreal would get sorted and flown to Dorval by USPS), and reduce their operating costs (& pass along the savings) so that, worst-case, the cost to ship a package either way between the US & Canada would be equal to a comparable domestic shipment (or, worst-case, the more expensive of the two countries). It's not like Canadian mail carriers make enormously more or less than their American counterparts, so why should it really matter if a letter/package that gets dropped into a mailbox in Buffalo gets sorted onto a truck driving ~2 hours to Toronto instead of ~2 hours to Boston? Add up the total letters/packages delivered by USPS for CanPost, subtract the ones delivered by CanPost for USPS, come up with a fair marginal cost for the remainder if the volume ends up being hugely asymmetric, and let everyone be happy on both sides.
Oh, right... I forgot... both governments make shitloads of money by cooperating to screw everyone in both directions, while trying to blame it all on the other. Sigh.
$76?!? Was that "international ExpressMail" (next day from US to Europe), with a box larger than a padded envelope? I've found USPS-RoyalMail between the US & Britain to be pretty decent, though UPS & FedEx *do* seem to be a lot more expensive.
The two most expensive countries I've found have been Germany & (surprisingly) Canada. Shipping *anything* to or from Germany is slow (customs-wise) and expensive. To/from Canada is just outrageously expensive... it's like they add up the maximum domestic chargss for both sides, then tack on another 50-100% to cover the cost of putting it in a truck and driving it 5 miles to a post office on the other side of the border. In contrast, China apparently handles the shipping on their side, then flies them to FedEx's sort facility in Fairbanks and hands them over neatly pre-sorted by destination and service class.
Netherlands to US FedEx is surprisingly good... not much more than what you'd pay for Miami to San Francisco, and fast. FedEx seems to just treat the Netherlands as if it were Hawaii, and handles everything from end to end.
Australia to US sucks. Not hugely expensive, but the slowest shipping that's existed since the invention of aircraft. 30-60% of the stuff I've ordered from there seems to spend 3-10 weeks in transit limbo... officially 'in transit', but ${deity} only knows *where*. It's like they just let stuff pile up in Australia until they have "enough" (with no firm schedule), then charter a cargo jet, load it up, and dump it in USPS's lap in California whenever they happen to get around to it.
> What the hell are you talking about ? You can get the Pi here for $35+ shipping from element14. Quit trolling.
Yes, and it's the "+ shipping" part where the RPi folks have totally fucked up, dropped the ball, and basically screwed the pooch in every meaningful way possible when it comes to American fulfillment logistics.
OK, so the shipping charges have gone from being "criminally expensive" ($40 "plus taxes" a year ago, and you can read abundant angry complaints that the "plus taxes" usually ended up being around $10-20) to just plain "rip-off expensive" (approximately $15 for slow ground shipping) as of a few days ago.
The fact of the matter is, they either don't have the slightest fscking clue how to cost-effectively handle American shipping logistics -- open an Amazon Marketplace account, ship 50,000 boxed Pi boards straight to their warehouse from China, let Amazon handle the fulfillment, set a price that includes free Amazon Prime shipping at whatever price makes RPi's organization the same per-board profit it makes now, and call it a day. Or, as mentioned in my previous post, pay someone in China 25 cents per board to sell them on eBay and ship them straight from China (with real-world shipping charges that are something like $2.60, and no import duties or sales taxes that anybody I know of has ever actually seen on stuff bought on eBay from China).
Either that, or they somehow get pleasure from the knowledge that they picked as partners the two most fucking expensive electronics vendors in the entire USA, despite the fact that companies like Mouser and Digikey (whose shipping charges are pretty much "whatever discounted wholesale rate FedEx/UPS/USPS charges THEM") would have totally *wet* themselves to be able to buy them at wholesale price.
Newark/Element14's "prices" look reasonable... until you see their shipping. Then it all goes up in flames. There have been 4 or 5 times they've induced me to go far enough to get to the checkout page, only to angrily close the browser window in disgust after seeing their inflated shipping charges.
Look, the truth of the matter is that pretty much EVERYONE, at every level of government, actively fucked up when it came to Katrina -- Federal, State, Parish ("county") *and* New Orleans itself, and the public misdeeds of *some* locals were the frosting on the most dysfunctional disaster cake in American history. There's so much blame to go around, it'll take historians another 50 years just to sift through the obvious low-hanging fruit and get to the *good* stuff. The state and local incompetence and corruption there were *so* breathtaking, it almost makes FEMA's *own* epic fuckup of biblical proportions look tame by comparison.
The Pi's problem isn't that it wasn't invented in America. The Pi's problem is that the only way to get one in America is from a distributor who imported it from Britain (paying import duties to the US) from a distributor who imported it into Britain from China (paying more import duties, and probably VAT, to the EU and Britain), ultimately shipping it halfway around the world, then halfway back... turning it into a $29 board with ~$60 worth of shipping charges & taxes.
If Rasberry would just get a fscking local in Shenzhen to sell them on eBay & ship directly to the US from China, they'd cost ~$35 here instead (China-US shipping is practically free, and the US Customs agents responsible for scrutinizing packages from China alleged to be "samples" worth "$10" seems to have permanently gone to lunch).
Does anybody know of any widely-available Android phone that directly exposes 2 or more GPIO pins via some usable-connection point, like the headphone jack or Samsung USB port pins (via some officially-nondocumented WDC USB crossbar-chip setting or resistor value)?
I know some phones expose a UART (with nonstandard levels) on the headphone jack (Original G1) and repurposed usb pins (original Galaxy S?), but I've never come across a real reverse-engineered schematic for the HTC HeroC, Samsung Galaxy S/Epic4g, Motorola Photon (as if it would matter, since the evil bastards permalocked the bootloader & ruined it), or Krait/US-variety Galaxy S3 that shows what's sitting between the headphone jack & SoC and what the jack is physically wired to inside.
The big prize: if the 3 headphone jack pins (plus gnd) are connected to real gpio pins (normally tristated, or even directly-driving/sampling the headset)... THEN bitbanged SPI becomes possible. A real UART is a distant second consolation prize, moving up a notch if it can do Atmel-like 1mbps and/or 9-bit serial. I2C would be cool, but I won't hold my breath. DMA-able ADC (== mic) and DAC (== audio out) would be nice IF they aren't forcibly intercepted by a codec chip that can ONLY do mp3 &| audio-bitrate P[W|C]M.
As others have noted, IOIO is great, but USB limits you in some serious ways if you're trying to do raw realtime bitbanging. The main problem with USB is that it basically forces you to move your realtime logic to dedicated hardware at the other end of a USB cable (like ioio, or an AVR-based ADP. A Raspberry Pi gives you directly-bitbangable gpio. AFAIK, no Android phone does.
Backup power logistics. Especially in a big, corporate-managed skyscraper with lots of "normal" tenants who'd frown upon things like a diesel generator indoors, let alone a post-storm bucket brigade of diesel fuel in the stairwell.
The most obvious explanation: until a few years ago ("few" ~= 10), 1 Australian dollar had been roughly equal to ~50 US cents since as long as anybody could remember. My guess is that the original prices were set based on that logic (double the US nominal price, then add some more), and as the Australian Dollar achieved nominal parity with the US Dollar, the prices just stayed with the same multiplier and markup because companies like Adobe realized they could get away with it.
Ever encounter a T61p with display-panel ribbon cable that somehow comes loose at the point where it's taped(!!!) to the socket on the rear of the panel?
My T61 has a terrible problem with that... every 2 or 3 months, I have to spend a few hours disassembling the whole thing to re-seat the cable in the socket and replace the tape. It works fine for a couple of months, then it starts all over again... first, a random screen flicker or two. Then, occasional bits of noise as it temporarily loses its ability to update the lower part of the screen. Then, periods lasting a few seconds when the screen either appears to freeze (because it can't be updated), or goes mad with noise until I touch the screen and nudge it on the hinge to make it go away... followed by rapid deterioration over the next week or two until it's so bad, the laptop is basically unusable without an external monitor. Stir, rinse, and repeat. I've had to do it 4 or 5 times already.
I can't say for sure whether embedding the credit card number in the code would be illegal in most countries, but it would absolutely get your merchant account fried and get you (as the merchant) blacklisted forever if your bank caught you doing it. Remember, piracy isn't the only way that info could get out... someone could literally get his laptop stolen, malware could scrape the info, etc.
The best way to sell it is to make it easier and more convenient for users to buy than to pirate. There's an opportunity cost to piracy, like the risk of having some rootkit sink its hooks into Windows that you'll never get rid of. It takes time for pirates to verify that a pirated app is at least somewhat likely to be safe & non-trojan'ed. That's your window of opportunity -- users can pay $10, get it now without further ceremony, and have it painlessly work forever, or they can roll the dice and take their chances with a crack from Belarus.
^^^ Fatal flaw: no Trackpoint, and the same indexfinger-optimized touchpad as every other PC laptop on the planet(*). God knows, that's just about the only reason TO buy a Thinkpad anymore.
Giving credit where credit is due, Lenovo DOES have one truly kick-ass new product that they could make a KILLING if they were to sell it as a thirdparty accessory compatible with other laptop brands: their combination power supply + powered USB hub. Others make power supplies that can act like a source of 5v power, but only Lenovo makes one that's a real powered USB hub in its own right. Now, if only they'd let us have one that's big enough to supply the laptop with 95 watts (so it can run at full speed AND charge)... or better yet, supply 95 watts to the laptop, AND power a bright LED-backlit USB LCD screen with the same dimensions and resolution as the built-in display. Maybe make it for the W-series, and design it to piggyback onto the back of the main display for travel (protecting the back of the built-in display from crushing, protecting its front from cracks, and eliminating the need to bother with yet another carrying case). When running on batteries, you'd just leave it clamped onto the back. When at someplace where you're going to do real work, unlatch it, fold out the kickstand, pull the recessed USB cord out, and plug it into the power brick-USB hub. (before anyone brings up weight, ask yourself... seriously... if you had this, how often would you really, truly have the laptop someplace where you wouldn't be carrying the display with you *anyway*?)
(*)Back in the ancient days of yore, sometime around 1997, I remember the very first touchpads... they emulated the ballistics of a thumb trackball, and understood that a curved sweep with a tiny bit of vertical motion and a moderate amount of horizontal motion meant "move the pointer in a straight line". Then, sometime around 2000, it all went to hell... I don't know whether it was value-engineering, or just pandering to people who don't know how to type properly & use touchpads with their index fingers instead of their thumbs, but all the manufacturers changed their touchpad ballistics, and within a year they went from being "eeeew. I like Trackpoint better" to "utterly and completely unusable". Every now and then, I'll stumble upon some random laptop whose touchpad doesn't completely suck, and try to figure out what makes it different from the other 98% -- but if there's any particular brand, firmware-version, set of configuration settings, or whatever... I've never discovered it/them, nor figured out what precisely differentiates a trackpad that sucks completely from one that's merely a piss-poor substitute for a Trackpoint.
Once in a great while, I'll stumble across a laptop that goes a step further, and puts a real IBM trackpoint in what's (IMHO) the ideal location for it -- below the spacebar. The story I've patched together over the years is that IBM patented the Trackpoint mechanism, GHB location, and rubber tip, then Fujitsu patented their own (inferior) mechanism and below-spacebar location. As a result, anyone who tries to put an IBM-style Trackpoint under the spacebar risks an infringement lawsuit from Fujitsu, so the only companies who dare are companies like Sony (who Fujitsu wouldn't dare to sue, because they have plenty of ammunition to fire back at them). In my dream world, my keyboard would have a Trackpoint directly below the spacebar (able to slide up to an inch to the left or right of center, then lock it down tightly with a tiny screw) flanked by two buttons on each side (nw, sw, se, and ne of the stick) so you could have one thumb on the stick, and easily press the left or right (really, top or bottom) mouse button with the other thumb. And a pair of thin, rubbery wheels between the F|G and H|J keys, serving as the scroll wheel (two, because I'd rather not strain to reach one between G and H, and there are both left- and right-handed users to accommodate).
Normally, I'd agree with you about Betteridge... but as a life-long Thinkpad owner, yeah... compared to 5-10 years ago, their quality has gone down the toilet, and they're slowly turning their laptops into cheap shadows of their former glory.
Being a "Thinkpad" used to mean something... it meant you were buying a laptop built to survive Armageddon (well, at least one that's neither wet nor sandy) that you'd feel compelled to hang on to forever as a future family heirloom, because it just seemed morally wrong to ever throw one away. Compaq's high-end laptops used to be the same way, until HP destroyed them & turned them into the same throw-away crap they sell at Walmart (but with enterprise management features added to their BIOS, a TPM module, and drive encryption enabled by default).
It used to be, if your Thinkpad died, it was almost guaranteed to be your fault (or the fault of somebody in your general vicinity, or to whom you made the mistake of temporarily delegating possession or stewardship of it). If you were on board a hijacked jet, you could remove the battery, put it in a pillocase, and go after the boxcutter-wielding hijackers using your battery as a hybrid club-mace, and your beloved Thinkpad as a shield.
I just pray to ${deity} that the Trackpoint IV patents all expire before the dark day that they decide to start eliminating them from even their expensive models in a misguided attempt to shave another $1.17 from the manufacturing cost, and take away my last remaining reason to stick with them instead of trying to hack my own guerrilla lunchbox PC with a microATX mobo, a body-transplanted Model M (with Trackpoint), a suitable 2560x1440 display, and the fruit of a Makerbot & a week or two of printing & gluing-together a new case, one 4x4 inch piece at a time.
I don't have time to cite references right now, but one of the more interesting theories I saw involved RH factor (the gene that determines whether you're A+/B+/AB+/O+ or A-/B-/AB-/O-. Apparently, RH-negative women have a MUCH higher chance of dying in childbirth if the baby is RH-positive. Suppose, for a moment, that in the very beginning, Neanderthal women were universally RH-negative, and Homo Sapiens (men and women) moving into Europe from Africa were universally RH-positive.
Assume that for whatever reason, Human men and women have sex with Neanderthal women and men. As the number of Human-Neanderthal hybrids increased, a RH-negative Neanderthal woman would be spinning the roulette wheel of death every time she gave birth. Even if the baby's father was "Neanderthal", if the mother and father were both RH-negative, but recessive for RH-positive blood, the mother's risk of death would go up. Factor in the nonexistence of birth control and perpetual pregnancy, and a Neanderthal woman's likelihood of living to see her 30th birthday would be pretty grim. At some point, just about any male she could possibly have sex with would be RH+... and if she herself were recessive for RH+, every single child would be a round of Russian Roulette for her.
Net result: Neanderthals were quickly, within a few generations, wiped out as a distinct group, but not before their genes had firmly entrenched themselves in the pool. If RH factor is a significant marker for Neanderthal genes, one might even expect to see the percentage INCREASE going forward, since RH-discordant mothers rarely die in childbirth anymore.
Obviously, your cone cells have the same medium/green and low/red peaks as the majority (as many as ~90%, possibly as few as ~65%). Those of us with deuteranopic green, protanopic red, or both, aren't so lucky. An "energy-efficient" LED that tries to get by with 3 narrow peaks, or a 6500k CFL that sprinkles just a few bands (and neglects the yellowgreen-orangered region where deutan/protan peaks lie) looks like complety intolerable *shit* to us.
A lot has been learned about deuteranomaly in particular over the past ~5 years, in no small part because LED mfrs. (like Osram, in particular) were trying to figure out why a small (but increasingly vocal) subset of customers found them to be so incredibly objectionable. To us, "energy-efficient" LED lights feel kind of like we're sitting under a pair of orange sodium-vapor and bluegreen mercury lights (not exactly, but you get the idea).
Companies like Osram & GE *do* have broad-spectrum LED light designs that look even better than halogen... but their energy-efficiency is a lot lower than other LED lamps, because they can't game the lumen ratings by packing brightness into aresa where the formula rewards them the most... and because augmenting the uv-excited "white" phosphor gaps with additional discrete LEDs to fill in the holes takes more power.
Osram, in particular, has realized that LED lights MUST have a BARE MINIMUM of 6 peaks (or augment standard blue-excited white phosphors with amber and yellow-green discrete LEDs) to be remotely acceptable to both normal and deuteranomalous trichromats (the white paper I saw didn't address protan defects or dichromats), and even 6 is on the low side.
What we really need is for manufacturers to be required to make their lamp spectra details available online, so we can avoid buying lamps that skimp on spectrum. I literally have a pile of CFL and LED lamps at home that I bought, but couldn't stand to use, but can't just throw away, because they were so goddamn expensive.
For the record, there's a good reason why 5000k+ lights usually look so dreadful compared to warmer color lights... they have the same number of spectral peaks, and starve the yellow-orange region to add more green & blue peaks.
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No, bath salts are what likely caused the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal attack last year (truly, one of those classic "only in Miami" incidents that horrify the world, and leave Dade County residents convinced that we live in an ever-so-slightly fucked up parallel universe where normal sanity doesn't necessarily apply.
The fact that John McAfee ended up in Miami is just a coincidence. Now, had McAfee's neighbor face been *eaten*...
> millions of Windows Mobile Phones are sitting in a warehouse somewhere?
or reflashed to Android. Don't laugh. The Htc Touch HD ended up being one of the best Android phones, ever... and firmly convinced most of Microsoft's remaining mobile developer ecosystem to say "Fuck Microsoft" after their flagship phone with 16 months left on-contract was cruelly & prematurely EOL'ed for the crime of having 4 hardkeys instead of 3. Yes, read that again. It had 4, and some tool @ Microsoft decided to officially shun it because Windows Phone devices were required to have exactly 3 buttons.
Did MSX even *exist* as a computer you could buy at any halfway normal retail store in the US, as opposed to importing one from Japan & paying more than you'd have spent to buy an Amiga 500?
The only remotely interesting exotic (by US standards) computer I remember from that era was the Sinclair QL.
Does there exist any program that's basically a lightweight Windows auto-starting (but 99.999% asleep and inert unless you're actively using it) background service that does nothing besides act like an abstraction layer between some kind of reasonable file-based mailstore roughly analogous to an Outlook .pst file (AFAIK, canonical Maildir is a physical impossibility under Windows) and any IMAP-compatible email client?
I don't care about being able to access it from anywhere besides my local PC... binding to localhost, and refusing to talk to anything external to my PC is fine. I've just had it with the mess Thunderbird's developers made of their local mailstore right around the time it completely went to hell ~4 years ago (well, and the mess they made with Thunderbird in general). For years, I just moved mailstore files around. Then, for some insane reason, it seems like Thunderbird's files just kind of exploded and proliferated... and worse, did so in ways that seem to screw up and confuse newer versions if you try to make them use files from an older version. If I could just run a semi-fake local IMAP server on my PC to abstract my mail storage away from Thunderbird itself, I could try other mail clients without having to worry about how I'm going to get my mail into them (a remote IMAP server is out of the question... I literally have gigabytes of email, some that literally came from Eudora Pro more than 18 years ago and just got converted and converted as I went along.
I thought about the usual option of an ARM-based mini-server or an old laptop, but I also have zero-tolerance for server slowness. Stutters and hiccups are bad enough without adding a server that has the resources & performance of a 500MHz Pentium III (on a good day) into the equation. At least if I'm running it locally & it spends 99.999% of its time harmlessly asleep, when I *do* go to access it, it'll have the full resources of a quadcore 3.2GHz i7 behind it for nearly-instantaneous response. The problem with running a full-blown IMAP4 server on my PC is that it's going to always be soaking up ram, and running at a higher background level (anticipating constant remote users it'll never actually see). I just want something that runs as fast and hard as it needs to and can when called upon to do so, then goes and silently hides in the corner until the next time I speak to it.
Yes and no. Not every device that uses (micro)SD cards can do encryption, and not every card that's the shape and size of a (micro)SD card is necessarily a real (micro)SD card that supports encryption. Remember, SD is a superset of MMC, and 99% of devices that don't support encryption really just treat the "(micro)SD" card like a MMC card.
I believe that in the US, anybody can read and write (micro)SD using the 1-bit MMC-compatible SPI interface without encryption royalty-free, but if you want to either use its built-in encryption or communicate in 4-bit mode, you have to pay royalties and obtain a license to use the superset of capabilities that (micro)SD adds to MMC.
Three big things you can do to de-target-ify yourself:
* use SQL prepared statements, never concatenate strings
* never touch the user's real password... key-stretch it client-side using PBKDF2, and only send the salt & hash to your server. People use the same password everywhere, and attackers know it. If you don't KNOW the passwords of your own users, your site is a lot less interesting to attackers.
* block outbound traffic on port 25.
ok, I lied... here are a few more...
* Don't allow connections to your sql server from anywhere besides localhost... then use ssh to connect to it remotely
* never, ever, EVER think you can omit logins & rely on secret URLs. Http-Referrer is a nasty bitch, and she'll bite you eventually... probably via your phone's browser, which doesn't allow you to disable it, and sends https referrers, too.
* (the hard one) make sure your site isn't vulnerable to XSS, so others can't use it as their own attack vector.
Naw, Sprint will probably do it too, then AT&T and Verizon will offer token no-contract plans that are such a bad deal, nobody will care. Sprint, in particular, has nothing to lose. Their phones are (or might as well be) locked to Sprint, and they're able to forcibly be the wholesaler & middleman of every phone used on that network. Even IF you got it to work on Verizon, it would never do EVDO -- only 1xRTT. And if you got it to do EVDO on MetroPCS, it still wouldn't be able to do LTE (all American LTE is non-interoperable).
Well, speaking only for myself, after ~14 years of sending "messages" to Sprint with my dollars, I finally left in disgust over their dysfunctional 28kbps so-called 3G and loss of 4G for some unknown length of time greater than at least 3 months if I dumped my newly-crippled (by Motorola's infamous "May Surprise" bootloader permalock) for a Sprint Galaxy S3. Finding out that their *goal* for 4g was 6mbps was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I pay ~$20/month more to AT&T, and it's worth every penny. Android phones, in particular, don't work well when they're "connected", but have almost no actual working "connectivity"... and with Sprint, it happened *all the time*. I called it, "5 bars and 5k(bps)". August 2012 was the worst... 20% of Sprint's towers down here were like wireless access points that were powered up, but not actually connected to a working network.
AT&T might be expensive and legislatively-evil, but damn, 28mbps (vs Sprint's 28Kbps) is a nice consolation prize.
Visit the Florida Everglades, the AT&T-Verizon roles are swapped. AT&T has LTE in places where Verizon is limping on EVDO, 1-6mbps UMTS in places where Verizon can barely use 1xRTT, and you can force GPRS and nurse Google Maps into working on some godforsaken mangrove island somewhere in southeast Collier County, 15 miles south of the point where your friends with Verizon had their obligatory panic attack upon losing all service. It's all the lingering legacy of BellSouth Mobility's former "make it work everywhere" mission, and AT&T's new management will probably let those towers stay dark & rust away after the next major hurricane takes them down, but for now... it's kind of nice ;-)
Unless you use lots of data. Ting is utterly non-viable for anybody whose monthly data usage has to be measured in 'gigabytes'. Anything beyond ~250-500mb or so, and Ting will get *really* expensive. Ting is *not* for people who treat Youtube like a free on-demand music streaming service in their car ;-)
> How did that regulatory action "help" AT&T customers?
By keeping T-mobile independent, so it can do stuff like this & allow us to have an open GSM network that doesn't limit phone choice (Sprint) or lock down its bootloaders (Verizon) to flee to if we decide we're annoyed by AT&T.
It's really disgraceful how inefficient package delivery is in both directions between the US and Canada. Instead of treating each other like alien postal systems, USPS & CanadaPost should work together to treat each other's major regional sorting facilities like their own, pre-sort outbound items (ie, a package from Toronto to Miami would get transported directly to Jacksonville by CanPost, and a package from Miami to Montreal would get sorted and flown to Dorval by USPS), and reduce their operating costs (& pass along the savings) so that, worst-case, the cost to ship a package either way between the US & Canada would be equal to a comparable domestic shipment (or, worst-case, the more expensive of the two countries). It's not like Canadian mail carriers make enormously more or less than their American counterparts, so why should it really matter if a letter/package that gets dropped into a mailbox in Buffalo gets sorted onto a truck driving ~2 hours to Toronto instead of ~2 hours to Boston? Add up the total letters/packages delivered by USPS for CanPost, subtract the ones delivered by CanPost for USPS, come up with a fair marginal cost for the remainder if the volume ends up being hugely asymmetric, and let everyone be happy on both sides.
Oh, right... I forgot... both governments make shitloads of money by cooperating to screw everyone in both directions, while trying to blame it all on the other. Sigh.
$76?!? Was that "international ExpressMail" (next day from US to Europe), with a box larger than a padded envelope? I've found USPS-RoyalMail between the US & Britain to be pretty decent, though UPS & FedEx *do* seem to be a lot more expensive.
The two most expensive countries I've found have been Germany & (surprisingly) Canada. Shipping *anything* to or from Germany is slow (customs-wise) and expensive. To/from Canada is just outrageously expensive... it's like they add up the maximum domestic chargss for both sides, then tack on another 50-100% to cover the cost of putting it in a truck and driving it 5 miles to a post office on the other side of the border. In contrast, China apparently handles the shipping on their side, then flies them to FedEx's sort facility in Fairbanks and hands them over neatly pre-sorted by destination and service class.
Netherlands to US FedEx is surprisingly good... not much more than what you'd pay for Miami to San Francisco, and fast. FedEx seems to just treat the Netherlands as if it were Hawaii, and handles everything from end to end.
Australia to US sucks. Not hugely expensive, but the slowest shipping that's existed since the invention of aircraft. 30-60% of the stuff I've ordered from there seems to spend 3-10 weeks in transit limbo... officially 'in transit', but ${deity} only knows *where*. It's like they just let stuff pile up in Australia until they have "enough" (with no firm schedule), then charter a cargo jet, load it up, and dump it in USPS's lap in California whenever they happen to get around to it.
> What the hell are you talking about ? You can get the Pi here for $35+ shipping from element14. Quit trolling.
Yes, and it's the "+ shipping" part where the RPi folks have totally fucked up, dropped the ball, and basically screwed the pooch in every meaningful way possible when it comes to American fulfillment logistics.
OK, so the shipping charges have gone from being "criminally expensive" ($40 "plus taxes" a year ago, and you can read abundant angry complaints that the "plus taxes" usually ended up being around $10-20) to just plain "rip-off expensive" (approximately $15 for slow ground shipping) as of a few days ago.
The fact of the matter is, they either don't have the slightest fscking clue how to cost-effectively handle American shipping logistics -- open an Amazon Marketplace account, ship 50,000 boxed Pi boards straight to their warehouse from China, let Amazon handle the fulfillment, set a price that includes free Amazon Prime shipping at whatever price makes RPi's organization the same per-board profit it makes now, and call it a day. Or, as mentioned in my previous post, pay someone in China 25 cents per board to sell them on eBay and ship them straight from China (with real-world shipping charges that are something like $2.60, and no import duties or sales taxes that anybody I know of has ever actually seen on stuff bought on eBay from China).
Either that, or they somehow get pleasure from the knowledge that they picked as partners the two most fucking expensive electronics vendors in the entire USA, despite the fact that companies like Mouser and Digikey (whose shipping charges are pretty much "whatever discounted wholesale rate FedEx/UPS/USPS charges THEM") would have totally *wet* themselves to be able to buy them at wholesale price.
Newark/Element14's "prices" look reasonable... until you see their shipping. Then it all goes up in flames. There have been 4 or 5 times they've induced me to go far enough to get to the checkout page, only to angrily close the browser window in disgust after seeing their inflated shipping charges.
Look, the truth of the matter is that pretty much EVERYONE, at every level of government, actively fucked up when it came to Katrina -- Federal, State, Parish ("county") *and* New Orleans itself, and the public misdeeds of *some* locals were the frosting on the most dysfunctional disaster cake in American history. There's so much blame to go around, it'll take historians another 50 years just to sift through the obvious low-hanging fruit and get to the *good* stuff. The state and local incompetence and corruption there were *so* breathtaking, it almost makes FEMA's *own* epic fuckup of biblical proportions look tame by comparison.
The Pi's problem isn't that it wasn't invented in America. The Pi's problem is that the only way to get one in America is from a distributor who imported it from Britain (paying import duties to the US) from a distributor who imported it into Britain from China (paying more import duties, and probably VAT, to the EU and Britain), ultimately shipping it halfway around the world, then halfway back... turning it into a $29 board with ~$60 worth of shipping charges & taxes.
If Rasberry would just get a fscking local in Shenzhen to sell them on eBay & ship directly to the US from China, they'd cost ~$35 here instead (China-US shipping is practically free, and the US Customs agents responsible for scrutinizing packages from China alleged to be "samples" worth "$10" seems to have permanently gone to lunch).
Does anybody know of any widely-available Android phone that directly exposes 2 or more GPIO pins via some usable-connection point, like the headphone jack or Samsung USB port pins (via some officially-nondocumented WDC USB crossbar-chip setting or resistor value)?
I know some phones expose a UART (with nonstandard levels) on the headphone jack (Original G1) and repurposed usb pins (original Galaxy S?), but I've never come across a real reverse-engineered schematic for the HTC HeroC, Samsung Galaxy S/Epic4g, Motorola Photon (as if it would matter, since the evil bastards permalocked the bootloader & ruined it), or Krait/US-variety Galaxy S3 that shows what's sitting between the headphone jack & SoC and what the jack is physically wired to inside.
The big prize: if the 3 headphone jack pins (plus gnd) are connected to real gpio pins (normally tristated, or even directly-driving/sampling the headset)... THEN bitbanged SPI becomes possible. A real UART is a distant second consolation prize, moving up a notch if it can do Atmel-like 1mbps and/or 9-bit serial. I2C would be cool, but I won't hold my breath. DMA-able ADC (== mic) and DAC (== audio out) would be nice IF they aren't forcibly intercepted by a codec chip that can ONLY do mp3 &| audio-bitrate P[W|C]M.
As others have noted, IOIO is great, but USB limits you in some serious ways if you're trying to do raw realtime bitbanging. The main problem with USB is that it basically forces you to move your realtime logic to dedicated hardware at the other end of a USB cable (like ioio, or an AVR-based ADP. A Raspberry Pi gives you directly-bitbangable gpio. AFAIK, no Android phone does.
Backup power logistics. Especially in a big, corporate-managed skyscraper with lots of "normal" tenants who'd frown upon things like a diesel generator indoors, let alone a post-storm bucket brigade of diesel fuel in the stairwell.
The most obvious explanation: until a few years ago ("few" ~= 10), 1 Australian dollar had been roughly equal to ~50 US cents since as long as anybody could remember. My guess is that the original prices were set based on that logic (double the US nominal price, then add some more), and as the Australian Dollar achieved nominal parity with the US Dollar, the prices just stayed with the same multiplier and markup because companies like Adobe realized they could get away with it.
Ever encounter a T61p with display-panel ribbon cable that somehow comes loose at the point where it's taped(!!!) to the socket on the rear of the panel?
My T61 has a terrible problem with that... every 2 or 3 months, I have to spend a few hours disassembling the whole thing to re-seat the cable in the socket and replace the tape. It works fine for a couple of months, then it starts all over again... first, a random screen flicker or two. Then, occasional bits of noise as it temporarily loses its ability to update the lower part of the screen. Then, periods lasting a few seconds when the screen either appears to freeze (because it can't be updated), or goes mad with noise until I touch the screen and nudge it on the hinge to make it go away... followed by rapid deterioration over the next week or two until it's so bad, the laptop is basically unusable without an external monitor. Stir, rinse, and repeat. I've had to do it 4 or 5 times already.
I can't say for sure whether embedding the credit card number in the code would be illegal in most countries, but it would absolutely get your merchant account fried and get you (as the merchant) blacklisted forever if your bank caught you doing it. Remember, piracy isn't the only way that info could get out... someone could literally get his laptop stolen, malware could scrape the info, etc.
The best way to sell it is to make it easier and more convenient for users to buy than to pirate. There's an opportunity cost to piracy, like the risk of having some rootkit sink its hooks into Windows that you'll never get rid of. It takes time for pirates to verify that a pirated app is at least somewhat likely to be safe & non-trojan'ed. That's your window of opportunity -- users can pay $10, get it now without further ceremony, and have it painlessly work forever, or they can roll the dice and take their chances with a crack from Belarus.
^^^ Fatal flaw: no Trackpoint, and the same indexfinger-optimized touchpad as every other PC laptop on the planet(*). God knows, that's just about the only reason TO buy a Thinkpad anymore.
Giving credit where credit is due, Lenovo DOES have one truly kick-ass new product that they could make a KILLING if they were to sell it as a thirdparty accessory compatible with other laptop brands: their combination power supply + powered USB hub. Others make power supplies that can act like a source of 5v power, but only Lenovo makes one that's a real powered USB hub in its own right. Now, if only they'd let us have one that's big enough to supply the laptop with 95 watts (so it can run at full speed AND charge)... or better yet, supply 95 watts to the laptop, AND power a bright LED-backlit USB LCD screen with the same dimensions and resolution as the built-in display. Maybe make it for the W-series, and design it to piggyback onto the back of the main display for travel (protecting the back of the built-in display from crushing, protecting its front from cracks, and eliminating the need to bother with yet another carrying case). When running on batteries, you'd just leave it clamped onto the back. When at someplace where you're going to do real work, unlatch it, fold out the kickstand, pull the recessed USB cord out, and plug it into the power brick-USB hub. (before anyone brings up weight, ask yourself... seriously... if you had this, how often would you really, truly have the laptop someplace where you wouldn't be carrying the display with you *anyway*?)
(*)Back in the ancient days of yore, sometime around 1997, I remember the very first touchpads... they emulated the ballistics of a thumb trackball, and understood that a curved sweep with a tiny bit of vertical motion and a moderate amount of horizontal motion meant "move the pointer in a straight line". Then, sometime around 2000, it all went to hell... I don't know whether it was value-engineering, or just pandering to people who don't know how to type properly & use touchpads with their index fingers instead of their thumbs, but all the manufacturers changed their touchpad ballistics, and within a year they went from being "eeeew. I like Trackpoint better" to "utterly and completely unusable". Every now and then, I'll stumble upon some random laptop whose touchpad doesn't completely suck, and try to figure out what makes it different from the other 98% -- but if there's any particular brand, firmware-version, set of configuration settings, or whatever... I've never discovered it/them, nor figured out what precisely differentiates a trackpad that sucks completely from one that's merely a piss-poor substitute for a Trackpoint.
Once in a great while, I'll stumble across a laptop that goes a step further, and puts a real IBM trackpoint in what's (IMHO) the ideal location for it -- below the spacebar. The story I've patched together over the years is that IBM patented the Trackpoint mechanism, GHB location, and rubber tip, then Fujitsu patented their own (inferior) mechanism and below-spacebar location. As a result, anyone who tries to put an IBM-style Trackpoint under the spacebar risks an infringement lawsuit from Fujitsu, so the only companies who dare are companies like Sony (who Fujitsu wouldn't dare to sue, because they have plenty of ammunition to fire back at them). In my dream world, my keyboard would have a Trackpoint directly below the spacebar (able to slide up to an inch to the left or right of center, then lock it down tightly with a tiny screw) flanked by two buttons on each side (nw, sw, se, and ne of the stick) so you could have one thumb on the stick, and easily press the left or right (really, top or bottom) mouse button with the other thumb. And a pair of thin, rubbery wheels between the F|G and H|J keys, serving as the scroll wheel (two, because I'd rather not strain to reach one between G and H, and there are both left- and right-handed users to accommodate).
Normally, I'd agree with you about Betteridge... but as a life-long Thinkpad owner, yeah... compared to 5-10 years ago, their quality has gone down the toilet, and they're slowly turning their laptops into cheap shadows of their former glory.
Being a "Thinkpad" used to mean something... it meant you were buying a laptop built to survive Armageddon (well, at least one that's neither wet nor sandy) that you'd feel compelled to hang on to forever as a future family heirloom, because it just seemed morally wrong to ever throw one away. Compaq's high-end laptops used to be the same way, until HP destroyed them & turned them into the same throw-away crap they sell at Walmart (but with enterprise management features added to their BIOS, a TPM module, and drive encryption enabled by default).
It used to be, if your Thinkpad died, it was almost guaranteed to be your fault (or the fault of somebody in your general vicinity, or to whom you made the mistake of temporarily delegating possession or stewardship of it). If you were on board a hijacked jet, you could remove the battery, put it in a pillocase, and go after the boxcutter-wielding hijackers using your battery as a hybrid club-mace, and your beloved Thinkpad as a shield.
I just pray to ${deity} that the Trackpoint IV patents all expire before the dark day that they decide to start eliminating them from even their expensive models in a misguided attempt to shave another $1.17 from the manufacturing cost, and take away my last remaining reason to stick with them instead of trying to hack my own guerrilla lunchbox PC with a microATX mobo, a body-transplanted Model M (with Trackpoint), a suitable 2560x1440 display, and the fruit of a Makerbot & a week or two of printing & gluing-together a new case, one 4x4 inch piece at a time.
I don't have time to cite references right now, but one of the more interesting theories I saw involved RH factor (the gene that determines whether you're A+/B+/AB+/O+ or A-/B-/AB-/O-. Apparently, RH-negative women have a MUCH higher chance of dying in childbirth if the baby is RH-positive. Suppose, for a moment, that in the very beginning, Neanderthal women were universally RH-negative, and Homo Sapiens (men and women) moving into Europe from Africa were universally RH-positive.
Assume that for whatever reason, Human men and women have sex with Neanderthal women and men. As the number of Human-Neanderthal hybrids increased, a RH-negative Neanderthal woman would be spinning the roulette wheel of death every time she gave birth. Even if the baby's father was "Neanderthal", if the mother and father were both RH-negative, but recessive for RH-positive blood, the mother's risk of death would go up. Factor in the nonexistence of birth control and perpetual pregnancy, and a Neanderthal woman's likelihood of living to see her 30th birthday would be pretty grim. At some point, just about any male she could possibly have sex with would be RH+... and if she herself were recessive for RH+, every single child would be a round of Russian Roulette for her.
Net result: Neanderthals were quickly, within a few generations, wiped out as a distinct group, but not before their genes had firmly entrenched themselves in the pool. If RH factor is a significant marker for Neanderthal genes, one might even expect to see the percentage INCREASE going forward, since RH-discordant mothers rarely die in childbirth anymore.
Obviously, your cone cells have the same medium/green and low/red peaks as the majority (as many as ~90%, possibly as few as ~65%). Those of us with deuteranopic green, protanopic red, or both, aren't so lucky. An "energy-efficient" LED that tries to get by with 3 narrow peaks, or a 6500k CFL that sprinkles just a few bands (and neglects the yellowgreen-orangered region where deutan/protan peaks lie) looks like complety intolerable *shit* to us.
A lot has been learned about deuteranomaly in particular over the past ~5 years, in no small part because LED mfrs. (like Osram, in particular) were trying to figure out why a small (but increasingly vocal) subset of customers found them to be so incredibly objectionable. To us, "energy-efficient" LED lights feel kind of like we're sitting under a pair of orange sodium-vapor and bluegreen mercury lights (not exactly, but you get the idea).
Companies like Osram & GE *do* have broad-spectrum LED light designs that look even better than halogen... but their energy-efficiency is a lot lower than other LED lamps, because they can't game the lumen ratings by packing brightness into aresa where the formula rewards them the most... and because augmenting the uv-excited "white" phosphor gaps with additional discrete LEDs to fill in the holes takes more power.
Osram, in particular, has realized that LED lights MUST have a BARE MINIMUM of 6 peaks (or augment standard blue-excited white phosphors with amber and yellow-green discrete LEDs) to be remotely acceptable to both normal and deuteranomalous trichromats (the white paper I saw didn't address protan defects or dichromats), and even 6 is on the low side.
What we really need is for manufacturers to be required to make their lamp spectra details available online, so we can avoid buying lamps that skimp on spectrum. I literally have a pile of CFL and LED lamps at home that I bought, but couldn't stand to use, but can't just throw away, because they were so goddamn expensive.
For the record, there's a good reason why 5000k+ lights usually look so dreadful compared to warmer color lights... they have the same number of spectral peaks, and starve the yellow-orange region to add more green & blue peaks.