> On the Xoom, they made the best decision they could have made, which was to use unmodified Honeycomb.
They didn't really have a choice, since the final release of Honeycomb was only a couple of weeks before the Xoom was released. Xooms were not demo-able at CES because the OS wasn't stable yet, and that was only a month before the Xoom shipped.
I don't think MacPPP was shareware. It was written by Merit systems, IIRC, which released pretty much all of their software for free. There was a shareware PPP stack for System 7 I think, but you only needed it if you were doing something weird, otherwise you could just use FreePPP.
> You don't need these things to fix the god damm holes. If you knew anything about security you'd know this.
HBGary also sells malware detection and security software. I may know a few things about security, but I definitely know quite a bit about software development, and you can't write software without a known quantity to test it on.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the NSA and their private counterparts have databases of 0-day vulnerabilities and rootkits lying around to use for whatever "legitimate" spooking purposes arise.
Quite the opposite. I'm sure every major and minor computer security firm has a large database of virii, hacks, exploits, trojans, and other various malware. How are you supposed to defend your customers against malware if you don't have any examples?
I'm pretty sure you don't need permission to show someone's product in your film. Films are considered works of art, and I'm pretty sure are covered under the artistic license clause of fair use.
The Office is a good example - they accept paid product placement dollars, but also just put brand names in where it makes sense. They show them drinking a local Pennsylvania soda, for instance. And, in a Christmas episode, an iPod was a white elephant gift. Neither company paid for the advertising.
You are confusing dynamic range with loudness. Dynamic range is the amount of difference between the quietest and loudest sounds that can be reproduced.
Think of it in terms of color. When you move from 8 bit to 16 bit color, you don't get brighter or darker colors, you just get more shades.
No, the algorithm is roughly 6x the bit depth (dB is a logarithmic scale) so it would be closer to 96dB, but you loose some range from dithering, DAC noise floor, etc... So 90dB is the rough average.
A quick note about dynamic range, which is what the bit depth affects.
Maximum dynamic range that human hearing can discern: 140dB average Maximum practical dynamic range of CD: 90dB Maximum practical dynamic range of 24-bit audio: around 140dB Dynamic range required for full range live music playback, according to Ampex: 118dB average Maximum practical dynamic range of high quality studio analog tape: 80dB Maximum practical dynamic range of studio analog tape in the '60s: ~70dB
So, if you have a piece of music recorded, mixed, mastered and released in pure 24-bit depth, you *may* hear a difference under ideal conditions (excellent production, good equipment, *quiet* listening room, etc...) Note that there have been double-blind listening tests of SACD, and listeners were unable to hear a difference between the CD version.
All those old Beatles and Rolling Stones albums? Keep the best CD version you have, more bits aren't going to make a difference.
Most laser printers have a built-in RIP, but pretty much every consumer and prosumer inkjet printer is some sort of "win-printer" needing a software RIP, which is why the files are at least a few megs.
My 4ML is still working flawlessly under 7. Everything else works with it over the network as well - my Linux machines, my G4 running MacOS 9, the SGI.
HP still makes decent printers (fast RIP, real PostScript, easy to maintain) but you have to spend $800 to get one.
To be fair, Sony only really started touting the PS3 as a blu-ray player with that spokesman guy they have fairly recently. And, since LG executives apparently get all their information through television, they've been in the dark about this capability until now.
This is why the patent system is broken. If you can't patent the idea of changing fonts and styles in a word processing document, you shouldn't be able to patent the same concept in a spreadsheet, or video player, or anywhere else. The technology is the same, you're just implementing it somewhere else. It's not groundbreaking, nor does it require huge amounts of development time.
Because of draconian content distribution licensing schemes. Buying a license to stream over the internet is probably per-device, so computers require once license to distribute, handhelds/phones need another license fee, set-top boxes need another fee...
I used to work for a radio company and we ran into the same problems. Some content we paid for could be put over the airwaves and over the streaming internet station, some of it could only be put over the air, depending on the licensing. The company even got into trouble for having a pause button on the player, as that constituted downloading internet content which fell under a separate license than internet "streaming."
So the concern is that if a correspondence looks "professional" enough, an official might act on an unsolicited piece of analysis without consulting anyone else? Sounds like the problem is with the official, not the writer of the analysis.
Elcaset - giant higher quality analog cassettes DCC - digital cassettes backwards-compatible with analog cassettes. D-VHS - digital home movie format killed by DVD, though it carried a higher quality picture
CD was developed jointly with Phillips, and Phillips is generally more credited with pushing CDs as a standard (most of the actual standards documents were released by Phillips.)
DVD was also jointly developed by Phillips and Sony, but it was based mostly on a previous standard by Toshiba.
Sony came out with a 3" floppy standard that went nowhere. A consortium of companies took the standard and developed the 3.5" floppy standard.
Betacam was a good professional format widely used, just like DAT, though not adopted widely by the general public.
So, yeah, when Sony teams up with Phillips to develop new media they hit home runs. On their own - not so much (Beta, 3" Floppy, Consumer DAT, Minidisc, Memory Stick...)
> The signals from electronics have a much higher chance of being misinterpreted as data.
The coding used by avionics and cell phones are so radically different I don't see how that could be happening. I was involved in testing digital radios, and the only time there were problems was when a similar signal was overlapping the channel. Discriminating against relatively strong out of band cellular and other digital broadcasts wasn't difficult.
Cell phones use TDMA or CDMA - VOR uses a simple MCW scheme used as a beacon. GPS also uses CDMA, however, GPS discrimination against cell band CDMA is excellent, otherwise vehicular GPS wouldn't be that popular. Voice communication is still analog.
> It will void your warranty of your car if you install a CB or amateur radio in it.
No it won't, unless you do something stupid like tap into an ignition line for power.
> Also, I know of people who's car will turn off when they transmit using their amateur radio.
The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as an RF shield.
I've personally done car electronics testing for OEMs. Trust me, they test against everything they can think of. A single warranty recall to fix something they missed wipes out the profit margin for an entire vehicle run for a year or two.
> If a device where to send a signal on the frequencies these receivers receive, it could cause issues.
Which is why there are frequency bands, and all transmission devices have to be licensed by the FCC to only transmit on those bands. Besides which, aircraft radios should have superior out of band rejection as they are subject to higher levels of EMI/RFI than most electronics.
Think about it for a second. Airplanes can take direct lightning hits without falling out of the sky. That's an enormous, super-wide band, ultra-high amplitude blast of just about every kind of electromagnetic radiation point blank, and they fly along as if nothing happened. You seriously think a 500mW cell phone transmitter is going to cause problems?
I'd like to see tests proving that. EMF/RFI shielding isn't rocket science. The electronics in cars are hardened against pretty much everything - cell phone towers, high voltage power lines, microwave repeaters, terrestrial radio transmitters, etc... I don't see how flight avionics, which also have to be hardened against increased cosmic radiation and RFI from operating closer to the ionosphere, are so sensitive to relatively low power transmitters.
Oh. So, to correct your first post - no companies that you are a proficient enough programmer to work for use C++, therefore it doesn't matter to you, therefore it shouldn't matter to anyone.
> Games developers, a few corporate app maintainers and...
Most Mozilla project applications including Firefox.. Pretty much all of KDE and some of GNOME. WebKit. Google Chrome. Opera. A good chunk of OpenOffice. Most Adobe applications. Most Microsoft desktop applications including Internet Explorer. CUPS. The Qt toolkit and pretty much everything that uses it. MySQL. Autodesk Maya. Winamp.
I wouldn't say a *few* corporate apps are written in C++, I'd say pretty much every major desktop app that's undergone a major re-write within the last two decades is probably C++.
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> On the Xoom, they made the best decision they could have made, which was to use unmodified Honeycomb.
They didn't really have a choice, since the final release of Honeycomb was only a couple of weeks before the Xoom was released. Xooms were not demo-able at CES because the OS wasn't stable yet, and that was only a month before the Xoom shipped.
I don't think MacPPP was shareware. It was written by Merit systems, IIRC, which released pretty much all of their software for free. There was a shareware PPP stack for System 7 I think, but you only needed it if you were doing something weird, otherwise you could just use FreePPP.
> You don't need these things to fix the god damm holes. If you knew anything about security you'd know this.
HBGary also sells malware detection and security software. I may know a few things about security, but I definitely know quite a bit about software development, and you can't write software without a known quantity to test it on.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the NSA and their private counterparts have databases of 0-day vulnerabilities and rootkits lying around to use for whatever "legitimate" spooking purposes arise.
Quite the opposite. I'm sure every major and minor computer security firm has a large database of virii, hacks, exploits, trojans, and other various malware. How are you supposed to defend your customers against malware if you don't have any examples?
But you aren't buying someone else's internet, you're renting it.
I'm pretty sure you don't need permission to show someone's product in your film. Films are considered works of art, and I'm pretty sure are covered under the artistic license clause of fair use.
The Office is a good example - they accept paid product placement dollars, but also just put brand names in where it makes sense. They show them drinking a local Pennsylvania soda, for instance. And, in a Christmas episode, an iPod was a white elephant gift. Neither company paid for the advertising.
So what's stopping the US from trying? The specter of the UK possibly not extraditing him to the US? You think the US government would care?
You do know that the US has a similar extradition treaty with the UK? If the US really wanted him they could just go after him in Britain.
You are confusing dynamic range with loudness. Dynamic range is the amount of difference between the quietest and loudest sounds that can be reproduced.
Think of it in terms of color. When you move from 8 bit to 16 bit color, you don't get brighter or darker colors, you just get more shades.
No, the algorithm is roughly 6x the bit depth (dB is a logarithmic scale) so it would be closer to 96dB, but you loose some range from dithering, DAC noise floor, etc... So 90dB is the rough average.
A quick note about dynamic range, which is what the bit depth affects.
Maximum dynamic range that human hearing can discern: 140dB average
Maximum practical dynamic range of CD: 90dB
Maximum practical dynamic range of 24-bit audio: around 140dB
Dynamic range required for full range live music playback, according to Ampex: 118dB average
Maximum practical dynamic range of high quality studio analog tape: 80dB
Maximum practical dynamic range of studio analog tape in the '60s: ~70dB
So, if you have a piece of music recorded, mixed, mastered and released in pure 24-bit depth, you *may* hear a difference under ideal conditions (excellent production, good equipment, *quiet* listening room, etc...) Note that there have been double-blind listening tests of SACD, and listeners were unable to hear a difference between the CD version.
All those old Beatles and Rolling Stones albums? Keep the best CD version you have, more bits aren't going to make a difference.
Most laser printers have a built-in RIP, but pretty much every consumer and prosumer inkjet printer is some sort of "win-printer" needing a software RIP, which is why the files are at least a few megs.
My 4ML is still working flawlessly under 7. Everything else works with it over the network as well - my Linux machines, my G4 running MacOS 9, the SGI.
HP still makes decent printers (fast RIP, real PostScript, easy to maintain) but you have to spend $800 to get one.
To be fair, Sony only really started touting the PS3 as a blu-ray player with that spokesman guy they have fairly recently. And, since LG executives apparently get all their information through television, they've been in the dark about this capability until now.
This is why the patent system is broken. If you can't patent the idea of changing fonts and styles in a word processing document, you shouldn't be able to patent the same concept in a spreadsheet, or video player, or anywhere else. The technology is the same, you're just implementing it somewhere else. It's not groundbreaking, nor does it require huge amounts of development time.
Because of draconian content distribution licensing schemes. Buying a license to stream over the internet is probably per-device, so computers require once license to distribute, handhelds/phones need another license fee, set-top boxes need another fee...
I used to work for a radio company and we ran into the same problems. Some content we paid for could be put over the airwaves and over the streaming internet station, some of it could only be put over the air, depending on the licensing. The company even got into trouble for having a pause button on the player, as that constituted downloading internet content which fell under a separate license than internet "streaming."
So the concern is that if a correspondence looks "professional" enough, an official might act on an unsolicited piece of analysis without consulting anyone else? Sounds like the problem is with the official, not the writer of the analysis.
Dead and buried:
Elcaset - giant higher quality analog cassettes
DCC - digital cassettes backwards-compatible with analog cassettes.
D-VHS - digital home movie format killed by DVD, though it carried a higher quality picture
CD was developed jointly with Phillips, and Phillips is generally more credited with pushing CDs as a standard (most of the actual standards documents were released by Phillips.)
DVD was also jointly developed by Phillips and Sony, but it was based mostly on a previous standard by Toshiba.
Sony came out with a 3" floppy standard that went nowhere. A consortium of companies took the standard and developed the 3.5" floppy standard.
Betacam was a good professional format widely used, just like DAT, though not adopted widely by the general public.
So, yeah, when Sony teams up with Phillips to develop new media they hit home runs. On their own - not so much (Beta, 3" Floppy, Consumer DAT, Minidisc, Memory Stick...)
> The signals from electronics have a much higher chance of being misinterpreted as data.
The coding used by avionics and cell phones are so radically different I don't see how that could be happening. I was involved in testing digital radios, and the only time there were problems was when a similar signal was overlapping the channel. Discriminating against relatively strong out of band cellular and other digital broadcasts wasn't difficult.
Cell phones use TDMA or CDMA - VOR uses a simple MCW scheme used as a beacon. GPS also uses CDMA, however, GPS discrimination against cell band CDMA is excellent, otherwise vehicular GPS wouldn't be that popular. Voice communication is still analog.
> It will void your warranty of your car if you install a CB or amateur radio in it.
No it won't, unless you do something stupid like tap into an ignition line for power.
> Also, I know of people who's car will turn off when they transmit using their amateur radio.
The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as an RF shield.
I've personally done car electronics testing for OEMs. Trust me, they test against everything they can think of. A single warranty recall to fix something they missed wipes out the profit margin for an entire vehicle run for a year or two.
> If a device where to send a signal on the frequencies these receivers receive, it could cause issues.
Which is why there are frequency bands, and all transmission devices have to be licensed by the FCC to only transmit on those bands. Besides which, aircraft radios should have superior out of band rejection as they are subject to higher levels of EMI/RFI than most electronics.
Think about it for a second. Airplanes can take direct lightning hits without falling out of the sky. That's an enormous, super-wide band, ultra-high amplitude blast of just about every kind of electromagnetic radiation point blank, and they fly along as if nothing happened. You seriously think a 500mW cell phone transmitter is going to cause problems?
I'd like to see tests proving that. EMF/RFI shielding isn't rocket science. The electronics in cars are hardened against pretty much everything - cell phone towers, high voltage power lines, microwave repeaters, terrestrial radio transmitters, etc... I don't see how flight avionics, which also have to be hardened against increased cosmic radiation and RFI from operating closer to the ionosphere, are so sensitive to relatively low power transmitters.
Oh. So, to correct your first post - no companies that you are a proficient enough programmer to work for use C++, therefore it doesn't matter to you, therefore it shouldn't matter to anyone.
Gotcha.
You're right.
So, Microsoft, Adobe and Google products don't count?
> Games developers, a few corporate app maintainers and...
Most Mozilla project applications including Firefox.. Pretty much all of KDE and some of GNOME. WebKit. Google Chrome. Opera. A good chunk of OpenOffice. Most Adobe applications. Most Microsoft desktop applications including Internet Explorer. CUPS. The Qt toolkit and pretty much everything that uses it. MySQL. Autodesk Maya. Winamp.
I wouldn't say a *few* corporate apps are written in C++, I'd say pretty much every major desktop app that's undergone a major re-write within the last two decades is probably C++.