Or just use BD-R (*non*-LTH) discs. Millenniata discs are basically BD-R media burned to look like a DVD to the player. They're great when DVD-compatibility is important, but kind of a waste if you can make use of 25-gig BD-R capacity (BD-R is cheaper per-disc than Millenniata).
Just insist on *original*-type inorganic BD-R, and stay awy from "LTH" BD-R. The same way that Millenniata is like BD R media in DVD form, LTH is DVD media in Blu-Ray form.
I'm kind of surprised that they don't go a step further, sandwich a pair of microSD card guts together inside a small box of lead (not much, maybe a gram's worth), and hang them from a secondary SPI interface & use them as a last-ditch garbage dump for all the stuff they've captured, but don't have the bandwidth to relay back to earth & don't have enough hardened flash to store indefinitely. That way, if the rover got itself into a position someday where it permanently lost its mobility, but could still broadcast to the satellite orbiting Mars, it could still make itself useful by spending the rest of its life uploading the secondary data that got skipped the first time around. If the non-hardened flash failed... well... it failed. But if it mostly worked, with maybe a few bit errors that something like Reed-Solomon could fix (and less intense algorithms could at least detect), it would be almost like a free bonus and "Plan B". Or, if it collected a LOT of potentially useful data it couldn't uplink to the satellite for power reasons, and they were planning to send another rover someday, they could add a relay station to the next rover & eject it so it landed close enough to the first to wake up the first rover, download its data, then uplink it to the satellite during periods when the new rover was inactive & the satellite would otherwise just be listening to silence from the ground.
How do you deal with sites whose stupid password "complexity" rules disallow the passwords generated by an app like LastPass? You know, the braindead rules that ignore total length, and only care that 3fa456d9eee71e8b doesn't have uppercase characters, has three 'e' characters in a row, has a 3-character sequence like '456', and/or lacks punctuation? Or worse, sites that reject it for HAVING digits, or being 16 characters instead of 12(max)?
I tried a program like that ~6 years ago (I forget which one... it was for PalmOS), and ended up getting totally frustrated because more than half the sites I used were intolerant of the passwords it generated. Even when I forced the program to generate what I thought might be the least-common denominator acceptable to most sites (exactly 8 characters, forcibly mixed-case with at least one digit), I STILL ran into sites that rejected them for stupid reasons that had nothing to do with real entropy, and everything to do with the fact that the web app's author apparently didn't know how to use Javascript properly (half the time, they only did client-side validation, and it was obvious that the main reason for some of the rules was the author's inability to do proper Javascript regular expressions).
Of course, let's not forget the joy of trying to use an app like that with a mobile phone and banking apps that bend over backwards to prevent you from entering the password in any manner besides one character at a time, by hand, using an onscreen keyboard that shuffles itself around after each character, from rote memory. Or even the stupid mobile website for an unnamed pizza chain that acts like your online ordering credentials are the arming keys to America's nuclear missiles (despite not actually storing your credit card or any other sensitive info online), and hasn't gotten an order from me in years because I don't have the patience to deal with them.
> Make it legal to confiscate all the wealth of the countries that goes to war
Do you have any idea how much foreign money is invested in the United States? Or the EU, for that matter? And more importantly, how much of that money is invested by citizens of the few remaining countries capable of even pretending they could TRY to enforce such an edict against the US or EU, without getting themselves wiped off the map in retaliation?
War is not a board game. The highest-raking Generals and Admirals in the US Army, Air Force, and Navy aren't required to walk around with a team of lawyers and get their decisions approved by them first. The rules are defined (often retroactively) and enforced by the victors. Nuenburg wasn't about punishing German military leaders for technical rule violations, it was about "getting revenge". The UN has the power to punish countries because (and IF) it's able to get members states to contribute military forces to back it up, not because someone, somewhere, made a grand declaration that it should be thus. To believe otherwise is completely delusional, or at best, an act of philosophical masturbation.
And let's not forget the "Fu-Go" (Fire Balloon) attack --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
On the other side of the US, the Germans sank a few ships off the coast of Florida, and had at least one sub that we know of in Biscayne Bay. Two German spies (planning to blow up targets in Florida) were captured near Jacksonville. http://fcit.usf.edu/Florida/lessons/ww_ii/ww_ii1.htm
> If the supervolcano went off, the only states that would still be livable are the three Pacific ones
Er... no. Florida south of Orlando probably wouldn't even get to see ash on the palm trees. The only ash we'd see is ash-sludge from the Gulf washing ashore making a mess of the beach, unless the eruption coincided with a freak weather pattern or hurricane that made landfall from the Gulf of Mexico. Otherwise, the Gulf Stream & wind from it would carry the ash out towards Europe before it made it far enough south to fall on Miami.
> SSDs have a propensity to just die like a normal HDD.
No, normal drives tend to become flaky, then get super-slow, then start to make grinding noises and die outright a short time later. SSDs just commit data-suicide, then go into "panic" mode and lock the entire drive if they sense that you're trying to do data recovery on them. Ask anybody unfortunate enough to own a drive based on the Sandforce SF-1200 controller, like the OCZ Velocity2. OCZ's forums are *littered* with post after post after post (continuing to the present) from people who've had the drive just spontaneously decide to fail.
The problem isn't flash-wear... the problem is a perfect storm of buggy firmware, drive-level encryption, and paranoid firmware that views aggressive attempts to recover data lost due to that buggy firmware as a hacking attempt & locks out the entire drive in a way that can't be fixed by end users (mostly, because Sandforce won't allow the recovery/repair tools to be released to end users). IMHO, it's completely inexcusable. At the VERY least, they should have made the encryption and protection something that can be disabled by end users (probably requiring complete reformatting, but at least present as an option). Then, they could have made a recovery mode that allows drives that had the encryption disabled to just sequentially rip the raw bits from the flash for offline recovery. But no. They have to protect their shit IP that nobody who's been burned by them will EVER purchase again anyway, and casually write off petabytes of lost user data due to their brittle embedded firmware and protection as "not our problem".
OCZ and Sandforce are the best poster children for a class-action lawsuit since the day HP decided to sell CD writers without cache (that their engineers GUARANTEED would turn at least a quarter of the discs they touched into coasters). The sad part is that such a suit could only have things like piddling amounts of money as the penalty, instead of compelling Sandforce to furnish all source, signing keys, and in-house utilities relevant to the SF-1200 to anybody who's ever had the misfortune of purchasing a drive based on it.
On the "plus" side, each of the mast cameras has a traditional GR/BG bayer array. On the "minus" side, ALL of the bayer elements are sensitive to low infrared (beyond 700nm). On the other hand, so are basically all CMOS cameras (they require external IR cut filters, which the rover has).
So, it looks like I can be happy. The colors might not be 100% flawless, but they're almost certainly better than even the best DSLRs can produce. The main drawback is resolution. From the description, it's not clear whether 1200x1200 is the Bayer-adjusted "image detail" resolution, or whether they really mean each row has 600 green, and 600 pixels that are either red or blue.
Where it could potentially get ugly and awkward is when things like h.264 encoding get involved. Given the same HuffyUV-encoded source, not all h.264 encodings are created equal. Further muddying matters is the fact that the encoding transformation itself is "mechanical" and "automated", but the choice of encoding parameters that dictate that strategy is arguably creative black magic (especially if you stray from the beaten path with x264 and get into exotic motion-search strategies), and both time and work with measurable cost is required.
Once again, where it would get muddy is if the extent of your creative process was loading it into Adobe Premiere & choosing a preset from a list of 5 options. Tweaking with x264 is arguably creative. Choosing a present, not so much. But deciding where to draw the line, or appropriate penalties for intentionally crossing it...
Then again, it could be argued that this is akin to translating a work into another language. I can't legally translate Harry Potter into Klingon and publish it without risking a lawsuit by JKR and/or her publisher, but neither could I pre-emptively translate it into Klingon (or Russian, or Chinese, etc), then use my pre-existing translation to blackmail her and threaten to sue HER for infringement if she ends up having sentences that match verbatim.
The big question on everybody's mind, though... did they finally send a lander equipped with at least one camera designed to capture images in true human color? Previous landers had cameras equipped with RGB filters, but the filters were optimized for scientific analysis instead of accurate color rendition, and deviated significantly from the filters you'd use to capture monochrome images through red, green, and blue filters for producing accurate color photos as a human would see them.
Put another way, the red, green, and blue filters used by NASA were very different from the red, green, and blue filters used by Technicolor & similar film processes years ago. They're all narrower in the range of colors they pass, and the red filter in particular is centered much closer to near-infrared than a photographic "red" filter used for accurate photography would be. The net result is that the color images reconstructed by combining the three image channels look kind of like the color you see at a nightclub when something is illuminated by only red, green, and blue LED stage lights (or really low-CRI cheap fluorescent light bulbs) -- they have red, green, and blue components... but they're wrong, or at least incomplete.
NASA spent years babbling about the ambiguities of human vision & context-sensitive calibration before someone finally called them out and demanded to know why their camera gear couldn't do auto white-balance, auto color-calibration, and gamma correction the way any halfway decent USB webcam has been able to do for more than a decade.
NASA finally admitted sometime around 2006 that producing color photos that were color-accurate -- as well as high-res and pretty -- somehow never made it into the official specs, and yeah, it WAS kind of an oversight, and one they'd work on correcting for future missions.The question is, did this lander get spec'ed, built, and launched before that point, or were they able to slip an additional camera on board that's basically a radiation-hardened version of what you'd find in a decent $100 CCD color webcam, with auto-exposure & auto white-balance, so they can at least grab some photos and send them back for color reference purposes?
Actually, it probably doesn't... it's just that now, your expectations about what constitutes "proficiency" are a lot higher, and you're more careful to avoid screwing things beyond your current project up. Thinking back to middle school, I really had no understanding of most of what I did. The fact that the OS was in ROM was hugely liberating -- short of having a program that did disk i/o go wildly wrong with a disc I cared about in the 1541, nothing we did software-wise really had any lasting consequences. And even overwriting a floppy was rarely a big deal -- everything we had, our friends had copies of (or we got our own copies from them), so it was kind of like universal sneakernet cloud backup via late-night copy parties;-)
Contrast that to now, where you can smoke Windows or Linux badly enough to need reinstallation and blow away literally terrabytes of data without even trying. Pretty much the only consequence-free programming environment that exists on a modern PC is browser-hosted Javascript in a web page (as opposed to "Windows Scripting Host").
> And that if you got something wrong you could just power cycle and start over.
If you used assembly, it was even easier. I (and many others) had a momentary-contact SPST button from Radio Shack soldered onto the motherboard that did a warm restart. As long as you didn't use self-modifying code, all it took to recover from a crash was pressing the red button, and typing ! and (Enter) to relaunch Fastload's machine language monitor.;-)
Jumpman, Pogo Joe, Toy Bizarre, Impossible Mission, Telengard, Suspended.
and of course, the app that made the C64 usable in the first place: Epyx FastLoad.
Oh, and my Alien Group Voicebox. Somewhere... SOMEWHERE at my parents' house, it's in a box. Must. Find. It. And the floppy that animated the funky alien face singing cheesy songs that I could never (at the time) figure out how to program myself.
Actually, I really do have to find my Alien Group voicebox. I blew my childhood's life savings on that thing, and it'll be totally cool if I can make a USB adapter for it to give it a second life today. The sad thing is, I had NO IDEA back then (or even before a few months ago) that it actually had a Votrax SC-01 inside. I totally loved playing with it, but had I known it had a SC-01, I probably would have stored it in a gold tabernacle and worshiped it;-)
I connected my Vic-20 to my TV a few months ago, but I think something inside went bad -- all I could get was monochrome.
Someday, I'm going to learn how BASIC was tokenized, and try to recover my first real programming project from the cassette tape. The tape drive choked on it the last time I tried loading it, but I digitized the tape with another cassette player and burned it to archival-grade BD-R as a.wav file for safekeeping. I figure it's only ~1800 bytes. If I have to, I can go through byte by byte, compare the two values, and either pick the right one, or fill in the gaps crossword-style.
$FFD2 is burned into my brain forever. Someday, I'm going to be old, senile, and drooling on myself... but deep down inside, I'll still remember that loading a PETSCII value into the accumulator & calling $FFD2 will print it to the screen.
Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.
Amount of time it took me as an adult ~20 years later, with ~7 years of postgraduate professional development experience, to figure out how to create a JFrame, open a JPanel on it, and fill it with black: about 3 hours, and that was with a few years of Java experience already under my belt. I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.
30 years ago, the essence of programming a Commodore 64 could be boiled down into a book with 500 pages, and made comfortably accessible with the addition of 2 or 3 more good books. Now, the fucking EULA pdf ALONE rambles on for close to 80, and a fairly complete set of books documenting nothing but J2SE 7 (with comprehensive treatment of Swing) would fill a bookcase, and a comprehensive set of books with everything you need to know about Windows to do anything from write miniport drivers to create.net webapps would fill a building the size of my childhood's small town public library.
Plus, expectations of artistry were much lower. You could write a program that created an 8x8 smiley face in 2 colors. You weren't expected to master DirectX or OpenGL and learn about 47 different shadowing modes, or read a book the size of War & Peace on T&L theory. You didn't even have to be much of an artist. It helped if you were, but when you're dealing with the world one 8x8 custom character at a time, artistic finesse really didn't add much to the equation.
Ditto, for music. You could get a piece of sheet music, and your main programming task was figuring out how to efficiently represent frequency+duration with a finite number of DATA statements. Today, you practically need to have the background knowledge of a professional recording engineer. Even in the Amiga era, the hardest part about dealing with SoundTracker was the fact that it crashed like a third-world discount airline. Learning to use SoundTracker itself took maybe an hour, and learning how to play it back with assembly was almost a no-brainer.
I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.
The sad thing is, if Windows Phone devices were at least as open as Windows Mobile was on real phones like the PPC6700 (ie, not open source, but no bootloader locks or other impediments to having fun), it would probably be a viable contender, if only because Android has been out now for ~3-4 years, fatigue over locked-down hardware and the stupid kernel-ABI problem that breaks every fscking non-opensource driver on phones every time Google releases a new version is setting in, and claims about its "openness" are starting to feel more like cruel teasing.
Unfortunately, Windows Phone is a Microsoft Cargo Cult. Microsoft makes design decisions blindly mimicking Apple, with no apparent understanding of why Apple did it and/or the practical consequences of doing so. It's a phone with random, conflicting agendas that serves none of them well. Imagine how Android would have stagnated during its first 2 years if XDA-Developers.com hadn't existed to push the envelope and give it features it didn't officially have yet. It's like Microsoft studied everything that Android owners hate about Android, then made a point of doing the same things even more forcefully. It's like a repeat of pre-Nexus One Android. Windows Phone devices are sold with underpowered hardware that doesn't have enough flash or ram to survive even a single major OS upgrade, and Microsoft tries to sell devices that are basically paperweights after 3-9 months because they refuse to even go through the MOTIONS of giving them enough headroom to grow and evolve for at least a year or two.
Nobody sane is going to knowingly buy a phone that has no short-term future. When somebody buys a new phone, they don't give a damn if the PLATFORM will be around for years. They care about the specific piece of hardware they're holding in their hands. If that device has no future and has a visible EOL before it's even a month old, the platform itself might as well shrivel up and die, because nobody is going to view it as anything besides a waste of time. It's like Microsoft learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from the OVERNIGHT (literally) loss of 97% of their Windows Mobile user base to Android the moment they announced that Windows Mobile was officially dead, and their final phone officially had no future because it had 4 buttons with the wrong symbols printed on them instead of the three officially-approved ones. Apparently, they were deluded enough to think people would keep buying an EOL'ed phone whose future was officially declared to be nonexistent.
> Play semantic word games all you want - but they reality is that if you're trying to use someone else's reputation, you're a thief.
You're the one playing fast and loose with semantics & redefining words as it suits you. If 'infringement' were equal to 'theft', there would be 2,000 years of common law calling it 'theft', not 'infringement'.
Here's the fundamental difference: if a thief steals your Maybach, you no longer have it in the garage. It's gone, and you can't use it anymore. If an infringer copies your Maybach, you might be pissed, but your own Maybach still runs perfectly well. If a million infringers clone your Maybach, its resale value might be destroyed and people might assume yours is a cheap copy too, but its utilitarian value for transportation is still undiminished.
On top of that, the whole concept of IP is a social construct anyway. Strictly speaking, one single well-argued appeal heard by a sympathetic Supreme Court could instantly cast Steamboat Willie, if not Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi, and Song of the South into the public domain. The argument? In the US, copyrights exist to promote advances in the sciences and useful arts. It says so right in the constitution. If you could objectively demonstrate that current copyright laws actively *harm* that official objective, and convince the court to buy into your argument, most of America's copyright-related laws would instantly be overturned and ruled unconstitutional.
Infringement is not theft. Infringement is infringement. There's a reason why infringement is classified as a distinct tort, instead of simply classified as theft.
JD certainly could have used the opportunity to be a narcissistic sociopath, beaten him up and bullied him into bankruptcy or complete submission, and generally ruined his life. They didn't. They took a moment to see what the book was about, realized he was writing nice things about them, and handled it exactly the right way.
The fact that it's a de-facto publicly-traded private company (one family owns 70% of the voting shares) probably explains the non-sociopathy. It seems like the most openly-sociopathic (no, make that *psychotic*) corporations are those that are owned and run by institutional investors who descend like locusts, pick the bones clean, wring every drop of equity they can out of it while running it into the ground, then fly off to destroy their next victim. The owners of JD actually care about more than the next quarter's profits. They have a personal stake in the company. It's not just part of their investment portfolio... it's part of their *identity*.
I believe that up until at least 2.0 or 2.1, your phone had to be rooted if you wanted to use Connectbot to connect to a remote host and forward local port traffic to the remote host (ie, run an Android SQL client and connect to an instance of MySQL running on the remote host that only accepted incoming connections from localhost). For all I know, it's still required (my phones have been continuously rooted since late 2009, so I'm often not really sure what non-rooted users can even do or not do anymore), but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that it's not quite mandatory anymore.
True, but the developing world was never a profit center for Microsoft, anyway. If Microsoft sold N copies of Windows in the developing world 5 years ago when there were N/100 smart phones, and today sells 1.7 x N copies of windows when there are 250 x N smart phones now, they might have had their market share in the developing world decline to a negligible percentage, but they're still selling 1.7 times as many copies as they were before.
Yes, we get the point. A desktop PC is gross overkill for facebook and twitter. Microsoft's suicidal strategy is that it's trying to bridge the gap by eliminating the one strategic advantage desktop PCs will always have over mobile devices -- raw, unapologetic power, and the ability for users to run anything they damn well feel like running, instead of being jailed in a walled garden and told what they're allowed to do. Microsoft has forgotten its own history: PCs weren't so much a more powerful alternative to mainframes as much as they were a way to do an end run around bureaucracy and arbitrary restrictions on what you could do. They were corporate middle America's way to give the mainframe folks the finger, take matters into their own hands, and show what they could do when 17 layers of IT bureaucracy were avoided. Microsoft has spent most of the past 20 years trying as hard as it can to abolish its original rationale for existing by re-empowering the Enterprise over individual users.
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Or just use BD-R (*non*-LTH) discs. Millenniata discs are basically BD-R media burned to look like a DVD to the player. They're great when DVD-compatibility is important, but kind of a waste if you can make use of 25-gig BD-R capacity (BD-R is cheaper per-disc than Millenniata).
Just insist on *original*-type inorganic BD-R, and stay awy from "LTH" BD-R. The same way that Millenniata is like BD R media in DVD form, LTH is DVD media in Blu-Ray form.
I'm kind of surprised that they don't go a step further, sandwich a pair of microSD card guts together inside a small box of lead (not much, maybe a gram's worth), and hang them from a secondary SPI interface & use them as a last-ditch garbage dump for all the stuff they've captured, but don't have the bandwidth to relay back to earth & don't have enough hardened flash to store indefinitely. That way, if the rover got itself into a position someday where it permanently lost its mobility, but could still broadcast to the satellite orbiting Mars, it could still make itself useful by spending the rest of its life uploading the secondary data that got skipped the first time around. If the non-hardened flash failed... well... it failed. But if it mostly worked, with maybe a few bit errors that something like Reed-Solomon could fix (and less intense algorithms could at least detect), it would be almost like a free bonus and "Plan B". Or, if it collected a LOT of potentially useful data it couldn't uplink to the satellite for power reasons, and they were planning to send another rover someday, they could add a relay station to the next rover & eject it so it landed close enough to the first to wake up the first rover, download its data, then uplink it to the satellite during periods when the new rover was inactive & the satellite would otherwise just be listening to silence from the ground.
How do you deal with sites whose stupid password "complexity" rules disallow the passwords generated by an app like LastPass? You know, the braindead rules that ignore total length, and only care that 3fa456d9eee71e8b doesn't have uppercase characters, has three 'e' characters in a row, has a 3-character sequence like '456', and/or lacks punctuation? Or worse, sites that reject it for HAVING digits, or being 16 characters instead of 12(max)?
I tried a program like that ~6 years ago (I forget which one... it was for PalmOS), and ended up getting totally frustrated because more than half the sites I used were intolerant of the passwords it generated. Even when I forced the program to generate what I thought might be the least-common denominator acceptable to most sites (exactly 8 characters, forcibly mixed-case with at least one digit), I STILL ran into sites that rejected them for stupid reasons that had nothing to do with real entropy, and everything to do with the fact that the web app's author apparently didn't know how to use Javascript properly (half the time, they only did client-side validation, and it was obvious that the main reason for some of the rules was the author's inability to do proper Javascript regular expressions).
Of course, let's not forget the joy of trying to use an app like that with a mobile phone and banking apps that bend over backwards to prevent you from entering the password in any manner besides one character at a time, by hand, using an onscreen keyboard that shuffles itself around after each character, from rote memory. Or even the stupid mobile website for an unnamed pizza chain that acts like your online ordering credentials are the arming keys to America's nuclear missiles (despite not actually storing your credit card or any other sensitive info online), and hasn't gotten an order from me in years because I don't have the patience to deal with them.
> Make it legal to confiscate all the wealth of the countries that goes to war
Do you have any idea how much foreign money is invested in the United States? Or the EU, for that matter? And more importantly, how much of that money is invested by citizens of the few remaining countries capable of even pretending they could TRY to enforce such an edict against the US or EU, without getting themselves wiped off the map in retaliation?
War is not a board game. The highest-raking Generals and Admirals in the US Army, Air Force, and Navy aren't required to walk around with a team of lawyers and get their decisions approved by them first. The rules are defined (often retroactively) and enforced by the victors. Nuenburg wasn't about punishing German military leaders for technical rule violations, it was about "getting revenge". The UN has the power to punish countries because (and IF) it's able to get members states to contribute military forces to back it up, not because someone, somewhere, made a grand declaration that it should be thus. To believe otherwise is completely delusional, or at best, an act of philosophical masturbation.
> What state of the US was attacked in WWII?
(keeping in mind that Hawaii wasn't technically a state at the time)
California -- http://www.militarymuseum.org/Ellwood.html
Oregon -- http://www.kilroywashere.org/006-Pages/06-BombOregon.html
And let's not forget the "Fu-Go" (Fire Balloon) attack --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
On the other side of the US, the Germans sank a few ships off the coast of Florida, and had at least one sub that we know of in Biscayne Bay. Two German spies (planning to blow up targets in Florida) were captured near Jacksonville. http://fcit.usf.edu/Florida/lessons/ww_ii/ww_ii1.htm
> If the supervolcano went off, the only states that would still be livable are the three Pacific ones
Er... no. Florida south of Orlando probably wouldn't even get to see ash on the palm trees. The only ash we'd see is ash-sludge from the Gulf washing ashore making a mess of the beach, unless the eruption coincided with a freak weather pattern or hurricane that made landfall from the Gulf of Mexico. Otherwise, the Gulf Stream & wind from it would carry the ash out towards Europe before it made it far enough south to fall on Miami.
^^^ Argh. Vertex2, not Velocity2.
> SSDs have a propensity to just die like a normal HDD.
No, normal drives tend to become flaky, then get super-slow, then start to make grinding noises and die outright a short time later. SSDs just commit data-suicide, then go into "panic" mode and lock the entire drive if they sense that you're trying to do data recovery on them. Ask anybody unfortunate enough to own a drive based on the Sandforce SF-1200 controller, like the OCZ Velocity2. OCZ's forums are *littered* with post after post after post (continuing to the present) from people who've had the drive just spontaneously decide to fail.
The problem isn't flash-wear... the problem is a perfect storm of buggy firmware, drive-level encryption, and paranoid firmware that views aggressive attempts to recover data lost due to that buggy firmware as a hacking attempt & locks out the entire drive in a way that can't be fixed by end users (mostly, because Sandforce won't allow the recovery/repair tools to be released to end users). IMHO, it's completely inexcusable. At the VERY least, they should have made the encryption and protection something that can be disabled by end users (probably requiring complete reformatting, but at least present as an option). Then, they could have made a recovery mode that allows drives that had the encryption disabled to just sequentially rip the raw bits from the flash for offline recovery. But no. They have to protect their shit IP that nobody who's been burned by them will EVER purchase again anyway, and casually write off petabytes of lost user data due to their brittle embedded firmware and protection as "not our problem".
OCZ and Sandforce are the best poster children for a class-action lawsuit since the day HP decided to sell CD writers without cache (that their engineers GUARANTEED would turn at least a quarter of the discs they touched into coasters). The sad part is that such a suit could only have things like piddling amounts of money as the penalty, instead of compelling Sandforce to furnish all source, signing keys, and in-house utilities relevant to the SF-1200 to anybody who's ever had the misfortune of purchasing a drive based on it.
> You can have any FedEx delivery being shipped to your home held at the nearest FedEx-Kinko's location for pickup.
You forgot, "... and pick it up *tomorrow*."
It adds a day to the delivery time. :-(
Well, partly found the answer -- http://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/Mastcam/
On the "plus" side, each of the mast cameras has a traditional GR/BG bayer array. On the "minus" side, ALL of the bayer elements are sensitive to low infrared (beyond 700nm). On the other hand, so are basically all CMOS cameras (they require external IR cut filters, which the rover has).
So, it looks like I can be happy. The colors might not be 100% flawless, but they're almost certainly better than even the best DSLRs can produce. The main drawback is resolution. From the description, it's not clear whether 1200x1200 is the Bayer-adjusted "image detail" resolution, or whether they really mean each row has 600 green, and 600 pixels that are either red or blue.
Where it could potentially get ugly and awkward is when things like h.264 encoding get involved. Given the same HuffyUV-encoded source, not all h.264 encodings are created equal. Further muddying matters is the fact that the encoding transformation itself is "mechanical" and "automated", but the choice of encoding parameters that dictate that strategy is arguably creative black magic (especially if you stray from the beaten path with x264 and get into exotic motion-search strategies), and both time and work with measurable cost is required.
Once again, where it would get muddy is if the extent of your creative process was loading it into Adobe Premiere & choosing a preset from a list of 5 options. Tweaking with x264 is arguably creative. Choosing a present, not so much. But deciding where to draw the line, or appropriate penalties for intentionally crossing it...
Then again, it could be argued that this is akin to translating a work into another language. I can't legally translate Harry Potter into Klingon and publish it without risking a lawsuit by JKR and/or her publisher, but neither could I pre-emptively translate it into Klingon (or Russian, or Chinese, etc), then use my pre-existing translation to blackmail her and threaten to sue HER for infringement if she ends up having sentences that match verbatim.
The big question on everybody's mind, though... did they finally send a lander equipped with at least one camera designed to capture images in true human color? Previous landers had cameras equipped with RGB filters, but the filters were optimized for scientific analysis instead of accurate color rendition, and deviated significantly from the filters you'd use to capture monochrome images through red, green, and blue filters for producing accurate color photos as a human would see them.
Put another way, the red, green, and blue filters used by NASA were very different from the red, green, and blue filters used by Technicolor & similar film processes years ago. They're all narrower in the range of colors they pass, and the red filter in particular is centered much closer to near-infrared than a photographic "red" filter used for accurate photography would be. The net result is that the color images reconstructed by combining the three image channels look kind of like the color you see at a nightclub when something is illuminated by only red, green, and blue LED stage lights (or really low-CRI cheap fluorescent light bulbs) -- they have red, green, and blue components... but they're wrong, or at least incomplete.
NASA spent years babbling about the ambiguities of human vision & context-sensitive calibration before someone finally called them out and demanded to know why their camera gear couldn't do auto white-balance, auto color-calibration, and gamma correction the way any halfway decent USB webcam has been able to do for more than a decade.
NASA finally admitted sometime around 2006 that producing color photos that were color-accurate -- as well as high-res and pretty -- somehow never made it into the official specs, and yeah, it WAS kind of an oversight, and one they'd work on correcting for future missions.The question is, did this lander get spec'ed, built, and launched before that point, or were they able to slip an additional camera on board that's basically a radiation-hardened version of what you'd find in a decent $100 CCD color webcam, with auto-exposure & auto white-balance, so they can at least grab some photos and send them back for color reference purposes?
Maybe, but I personally think this guy is way cooler. He didn't write a "retro 8-bit demo" -- he designed a whole 8-bit FPGA-based computer for itt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h42neZVvoMY&list=UU8ge7La_vq48PVEmR-DJ5Wg&index=1&feature=plcp
He won 1st place ("wild" competition, for people who build their own FPGA/Microcontroller-based demo platforms) at Revision 2011 with it :-)
Actually, it probably doesn't... it's just that now, your expectations about what constitutes "proficiency" are a lot higher, and you're more careful to avoid screwing things beyond your current project up. Thinking back to middle school, I really had no understanding of most of what I did. The fact that the OS was in ROM was hugely liberating -- short of having a program that did disk i/o go wildly wrong with a disc I cared about in the 1541, nothing we did software-wise really had any lasting consequences. And even overwriting a floppy was rarely a big deal -- everything we had, our friends had copies of (or we got our own copies from them), so it was kind of like universal sneakernet cloud backup via late-night copy parties ;-)
Contrast that to now, where you can smoke Windows or Linux badly enough to need reinstallation and blow away literally terrabytes of data without even trying. Pretty much the only consequence-free programming environment that exists on a modern PC is browser-hosted Javascript in a web page (as opposed to "Windows Scripting Host").
> And that if you got something wrong you could just power cycle and start over.
If you used assembly, it was even easier. I (and many others) had a momentary-contact SPST button from Radio Shack soldered onto the motherboard that did a warm restart. As long as you didn't use self-modifying code, all it took to recover from a crash was pressing the red button, and typing ! and (Enter) to relaunch Fastload's machine language monitor. ;-)
Jumpman, Pogo Joe, Toy Bizarre, Impossible Mission, Telengard, Suspended.
and of course, the app that made the C64 usable in the first place: Epyx FastLoad.
Oh, and my Alien Group Voicebox. Somewhere... SOMEWHERE at my parents' house, it's in a box. Must. Find. It. And the floppy that animated the funky alien face singing cheesy songs that I could never (at the time) figure out how to program myself.
Actually, I really do have to find my Alien Group voicebox. I blew my childhood's life savings on that thing, and it'll be totally cool if I can make a USB adapter for it to give it a second life today. The sad thing is, I had NO IDEA back then (or even before a few months ago) that it actually had a Votrax SC-01 inside. I totally loved playing with it, but had I known it had a SC-01, I probably would have stored it in a gold tabernacle and worshiped it ;-)
I connected my Vic-20 to my TV a few months ago, but I think something inside went bad -- all I could get was monochrome.
Someday, I'm going to learn how BASIC was tokenized, and try to recover my first real programming project from the cassette tape. The tape drive choked on it the last time I tried loading it, but I digitized the tape with another cassette player and burned it to archival-grade BD-R as a .wav file for safekeeping. I figure it's only ~1800 bytes. If I have to, I can go through byte by byte, compare the two values, and either pick the right one, or fill in the gaps crossword-style.
$FFD2 is burned into my brain forever. Someday, I'm going to be old, senile, and drooling on myself... but deep down inside, I'll still remember that loading a PETSCII value into the accumulator & calling $FFD2 will print it to the screen.
^^^ Amen.
Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.
Amount of time it took me as an adult ~20 years later, with ~7 years of postgraduate professional development experience, to figure out how to create a JFrame, open a JPanel on it, and fill it with black: about 3 hours, and that was with a few years of Java experience already under my belt. I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.
30 years ago, the essence of programming a Commodore 64 could be boiled down into a book with 500 pages, and made comfortably accessible with the addition of 2 or 3 more good books. Now, the fucking EULA pdf ALONE rambles on for close to 80, and a fairly complete set of books documenting nothing but J2SE 7 (with comprehensive treatment of Swing) would fill a bookcase, and a comprehensive set of books with everything you need to know about Windows to do anything from write miniport drivers to create .net webapps would fill a building the size of my childhood's small town public library.
Plus, expectations of artistry were much lower. You could write a program that created an 8x8 smiley face in 2 colors. You weren't expected to master DirectX or OpenGL and learn about 47 different shadowing modes, or read a book the size of War & Peace on T&L theory. You didn't even have to be much of an artist. It helped if you were, but when you're dealing with the world one 8x8 custom character at a time, artistic finesse really didn't add much to the equation.
Ditto, for music. You could get a piece of sheet music, and your main programming task was figuring out how to efficiently represent frequency+duration with a finite number of DATA statements. Today, you practically need to have the background knowledge of a professional recording engineer. Even in the Amiga era, the hardest part about dealing with SoundTracker was the fact that it crashed like a third-world discount airline. Learning to use SoundTracker itself took maybe an hour, and learning how to play it back with assembly was almost a no-brainer.
I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.
The sad thing is, if Windows Phone devices were at least as open as Windows Mobile was on real phones like the PPC6700 (ie, not open source, but no bootloader locks or other impediments to having fun), it would probably be a viable contender, if only because Android has been out now for ~3-4 years, fatigue over locked-down hardware and the stupid kernel-ABI problem that breaks every fscking non-opensource driver on phones every time Google releases a new version is setting in, and claims about its "openness" are starting to feel more like cruel teasing.
Unfortunately, Windows Phone is a Microsoft Cargo Cult. Microsoft makes design decisions blindly mimicking Apple, with no apparent understanding of why Apple did it and/or the practical consequences of doing so. It's a phone with random, conflicting agendas that serves none of them well. Imagine how Android would have stagnated during its first 2 years if XDA-Developers.com hadn't existed to push the envelope and give it features it didn't officially have yet. It's like Microsoft studied everything that Android owners hate about Android, then made a point of doing the same things even more forcefully. It's like a repeat of pre-Nexus One Android. Windows Phone devices are sold with underpowered hardware that doesn't have enough flash or ram to survive even a single major OS upgrade, and Microsoft tries to sell devices that are basically paperweights after 3-9 months because they refuse to even go through the MOTIONS of giving them enough headroom to grow and evolve for at least a year or two.
Nobody sane is going to knowingly buy a phone that has no short-term future. When somebody buys a new phone, they don't give a damn if the PLATFORM will be around for years. They care about the specific piece of hardware they're holding in their hands. If that device has no future and has a visible EOL before it's even a month old, the platform itself might as well shrivel up and die, because nobody is going to view it as anything besides a waste of time. It's like Microsoft learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from the OVERNIGHT (literally) loss of 97% of their Windows Mobile user base to Android the moment they announced that Windows Mobile was officially dead, and their final phone officially had no future because it had 4 buttons with the wrong symbols printed on them instead of the three officially-approved ones. Apparently, they were deluded enough to think people would keep buying an EOL'ed phone whose future was officially declared to be nonexistent.
The outbreak in Reston wasn't Marburg... it was Ebola. "Reston ebolavirus", to be exact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_Reston
> Play semantic word games all you want - but they reality is that if you're trying to use someone else's reputation, you're a thief.
You're the one playing fast and loose with semantics & redefining words as it suits you. If 'infringement' were equal to 'theft', there would be 2,000 years of common law calling it 'theft', not 'infringement'.
Here's the fundamental difference: if a thief steals your Maybach, you no longer have it in the garage. It's gone, and you can't use it anymore. If an infringer copies your Maybach, you might be pissed, but your own Maybach still runs perfectly well. If a million infringers clone your Maybach, its resale value might be destroyed and people might assume yours is a cheap copy too, but its utilitarian value for transportation is still undiminished.
On top of that, the whole concept of IP is a social construct anyway. Strictly speaking, one single well-argued appeal heard by a sympathetic Supreme Court could instantly cast Steamboat Willie, if not Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi, and Song of the South into the public domain. The argument? In the US, copyrights exist to promote advances in the sciences and useful arts. It says so right in the constitution. If you could objectively demonstrate that current copyright laws actively *harm* that official objective, and convince the court to buy into your argument, most of America's copyright-related laws would instantly be overturned and ruled unconstitutional.
Because he wasn't a thief.
Infringement is not theft. Infringement is infringement. There's a reason why infringement is classified as a distinct tort, instead of simply classified as theft.
JD certainly could have used the opportunity to be a narcissistic sociopath, beaten him up and bullied him into bankruptcy or complete submission, and generally ruined his life. They didn't. They took a moment to see what the book was about, realized he was writing nice things about them, and handled it exactly the right way.
The fact that it's a de-facto publicly-traded private company (one family owns 70% of the voting shares) probably explains the non-sociopathy. It seems like the most openly-sociopathic (no, make that *psychotic*) corporations are those that are owned and run by institutional investors who descend like locusts, pick the bones clean, wring every drop of equity they can out of it while running it into the ground, then fly off to destroy their next victim. The owners of JD actually care about more than the next quarter's profits. They have a personal stake in the company. It's not just part of their investment portfolio... it's part of their *identity*.
I believe that up until at least 2.0 or 2.1, your phone had to be rooted if you wanted to use Connectbot to connect to a remote host and forward local port traffic to the remote host (ie, run an Android SQL client and connect to an instance of MySQL running on the remote host that only accepted incoming connections from localhost). For all I know, it's still required (my phones have been continuously rooted since late 2009, so I'm often not really sure what non-rooted users can even do or not do anymore), but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that it's not quite mandatory anymore.
True, but the developing world was never a profit center for Microsoft, anyway. If Microsoft sold N copies of Windows in the developing world 5 years ago when there were N/100 smart phones, and today sells 1.7 x N copies of windows when there are 250 x N smart phones now, they might have had their market share in the developing world decline to a negligible percentage, but they're still selling 1.7 times as many copies as they were before.
Yes, we get the point. A desktop PC is gross overkill for facebook and twitter. Microsoft's suicidal strategy is that it's trying to bridge the gap by eliminating the one strategic advantage desktop PCs will always have over mobile devices -- raw, unapologetic power, and the ability for users to run anything they damn well feel like running, instead of being jailed in a walled garden and told what they're allowed to do. Microsoft has forgotten its own history: PCs weren't so much a more powerful alternative to mainframes as much as they were a way to do an end run around bureaucracy and arbitrary restrictions on what you could do. They were corporate middle America's way to give the mainframe folks the finger, take matters into their own hands, and show what they could do when 17 layers of IT bureaucracy were avoided. Microsoft has spent most of the past 20 years trying as hard as it can to abolish its original rationale for existing by re-empowering the Enterprise over individual users.