I love DD-WRT and have used it for years, but I get the impression it's a fragile project. The bulk of the work seems to rest on the shoulders of one or two people who only have so much time. I have always preferred Netgear's hardware with DD-WRT on top of it, but Netgear's latest product line (which has a TON of different router models... way too many, IMO) has only partial support from the DD-WRT project. Netgear's fanciest two routers, the R7500 and R8000, aren't yet supported. All we can do is sit and beg Brainslayer or Kong to spend time on them, but they've got a lot of irons in the fire.
I really wish Netgear would just give up on Genie and pay DD-WRT to support development and license it as their official firmware. Rebrand it or something if you want, but give us the power of a real firmware. I've used Genie lately on the R6100 and found quite frustrating for anything fancier than a typical home wifi router use case. Security bugs like this only prove that they're failing to get it right on their own.
It makes sense that Cisco doesn't want their Linksys-branded routers to be too powerful, since it might hurt sales of fancier Cisco stuff, but what's Netgear's excuse?
To solve this latency problem, most well-designed websites use a single large GIF or PNG for all their tiny CSS images, then slice the image to indicate each independent icon, border, etc. This not only reduces the total image overhead but also greatly reduces the total number of 304s to receive.
A similar rule applies to amateur rally races in Finland, covered on the BBC show Top Gear. In folk racing, every car is given a nominal and equal value, such as €1000. At the end of a race, if anyone asks to buy your car then you have you sell it to them, which keeps anyone from putting too much into a car.
Android Market apps are mostly super cheap. Who can't afford $1 on a game they'll play for a few days non-stop? Or a few bucks on a ROM management app? Prices for most paid apps are so low that I imagine that the largest barrier to entry is not price, but the effort required to set up one or more credit cards. My hypothesis, for that reason, is that a large portion of the piracy comes from the age 15-20 crowd who have fancy phones and lots of free time to figure out piracy options, but no credit card(s).
Google can greatly reduce this kind of piracy by working out pricing deals with the carriers to allow charges to appear on phone bills. How else would the ringtone industry thrive as it has? Verizon certainly doesn't offer a direct-bill Android Market option. Maybe this is already the case on other carriers? How does piracy compare in those cases?
Another annoyance of the Market is currency conversion. I've bought apps for sale in both Yen and Euros, and for those purchases I had to set up a Visa card since my AMEX didn't support foreign purchases (on the Market, at least). Most users don't want to deal with that kind of crap... again, piracy is easier. Can't Google Checkout handle currency conversion on the developer's end without hassling end-users?
This is true until they release a first-party game with the update included as a requirement. For example, Super Mario Galaxy 2 includes the 4.2 system update and requires you to update your system before you can play the game... unless you start the game with a homebrew tool that blocks the update. Funny how the very feature they're trying to remove is capable of blocking the removal.
Homebrew users know to avoid system updates at all costs, so the only people affected by them are people who have not yet hacked their Wii. Once updated, though, those people will have a harder time installing homebrew should they choose to try it.
I'll keep the suggestions flowing: I love last.fm for its ability to help me find (and listen to) new music. It even offers a dedicated client that doesn't require an open browser window all day.
MIT's strategy is very interesting. Several groups (like our team) have been forming their teams for weeks, but MIT appeared on the scene just today, and it's fascinating that they got a front-page Slashdot plug. I give them lots of credit for flooding the scene with mentions in such a short time. Whereas some teams give their winnings to charity (like ours), others entice balloon spotters with cash portions of the earnings, and MIT has decided to do a little of both.
DARPA is the sole decider of how difficult this competition will be. Will they place the balloons in dense urban areas, or will the launch them in small rural communities?
Best of luck to all the teams tomorrow, MIT included. I hope that the contest winner will write a paper describing their strategy, both in network-building and in launch-day data collection.
This story is all well and interesting, but I imagine it's impossible to prove that you're the first business to make money exclusively over the internet. You might be "one of the first", but to go all the way to the birth of my business represents the birth of dot-com is a bit vain, no?
This comment appears regularly on/. articles that use the term "brick." May I suggest that the term "brick" is slang and has no official definition? If I plug a [poorly patched] HD into a computer and get no sign of life, I'd consider that a "brick" until it's been flashed back into proper function.
"If you can reflash it" is also subjective: does that mean via a normal IDE/SATA interface, or does it extend to a direct JTAG connection, or do you have to desolder the ROM to flash it? There's a broad spectrum of functionality, but it seems most useful to use the term "brick" to refer to any device that seems to have no useful function under normal circumstances. My point is that it's open to interpretation, so don't be so picky.
For LCD HDTVs, most of the input lag comes from all the processing hardware, not the LCD panel itself. Many TVs now come with a "game mode" that disables certain processing features to decrease lag time at the expense of noise reduction, or upscaling quality, or whatever.
When I play Guitar Hero on my Sony LCD TV, I get about 60ms lag with the TV in its normal operating mode (as measured by GH's lag compensation feature). When I enable game mode on my TV, the lag effectively drops to zero. With game mode enable, many of the picture optimization features are not available, but that doesn't generally bother me since I usually disable them anyway.
So that's obviously the case, but the point of studying the topic is: "why?". It's also important to determine if this is by their own choice or if women are subtly coerced into their disinterest.
I helped out with FIRST LEGO League at Georgia Tech a few years back. FIRST LEGO is a robotics competition for middle-school students using LEGO automation parts to perform various tasks. There were tons of girls participating at all levels, and it was pretty noticeable how different the demographics were between the middle school competitors and the typical college-age engineering students at Gatech. Thus, it's worth asking whether girls seem to lose interest in engineering as they get older, and if so, why?
If it's purely biological (the parts of the brain that determine interests are gender-specific), then so be it. If, however, it's due to upbringing and society's pressures, then it's a topic worth discussing. Indeed, it is probably desirable to change it. Why limit the pool of intellect in a field to men? You're potentially losing 50% of the problem solving skills, assuming men and women are equally capable.
Can I toss in a complaint about the 1-button mouse embedded in the $2800 laptop? For that kind of green I expect at least two buttons. I would consider buying a Mac to run Windows XP (since Apple's hardware support seems pleasant) except that I can't right-click without an external mouse or an awkward key combination. While this sounds like a terrible nit-pick, I wonder how many geeks are turned off Mac laptops by this issue.
Sony Vegas is a serious upcoming competitor to FCP, and I have found it delightful to use after feeling blah about Premiere in Windows. I was able to produce a better product in less time (for a simple video montage) using the Vegas demo than when I was using FCP for a different project in school.
First, of all, if you slam on the brakes, the balloon flies to the front of the car. The balloon only flies to the back if you slam on the gas.
Next time you've got a balloon, put it in the car and give this experiment a try. When you have a helium-filled balloon in the car, it reacts opposite to the way most other things in the car react. When you slam on the brakes, a ball on the floorboard will roll forward, but the balloon will float backward.
Second, the reason for the balloons behavior doesn't have anything to do with its "relative vacuum", but is because of Newton's first law - an object at rest tends to remain at rest, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion. In this case, the balloon tends to remain in motion when you slam on the brakes, leading it to hit the front of the car, at which point the car's windshield exerts a force to stop the balloon.
Sure, when you slam on the brakes the balloon wants to go forward, but so does the rest of the air in the car's interior. Since the air is more dense than the helium-filled balloon, it wins out and pushes the balloon backward.
Finally, balloons are not a "relative vacuum". In fact, they are quite the opposite - the interior of the balloon is at a higher pressure than the exterior, not lower. The reason that the balloon rises is because the stuff inside the balloon is lighter than the stuff outside the balloon, not because there's proportionally less stuff in the balloon.
You got me there to an extent, but with a loosely-inflated mylar balloon, the pressure can be equal between the interior and exterior of the balloon... in either case you're right that "relative vacuum" was not really valid. My original point was that the helium means there's less mass in the same amount of volume, which was the point of my original "hole" analogy.
Part of the problem is that the accelerometers in the Wiimote are set up to measure the movement of the remote, not its rotation. It's difficult, if not impossible, for the Wiimote to accurately detect fast rotation around its center of gravity, and this is one of the movements that would be very useful in some of your example scenarios.
Games like Mario Kart Wii measure "rotation" by the movement of gravity, but the user must hold the controller generally still or the overall acceleration will be affected by that movement rather than by gravity alone. When pitching, there are much stronger sources of acceleration (your arm), so accurately measuring the rotation as well (for, say, a curve ball) is impossible.
Consider electron-hole pairs in a silicon lattice. They act very much like electron-positron pairs. However, electrons fall down, and holes fall up. To me, it would seem odd if anti-matter fell down.
Holes are a virtual particle with no mass, whereas anti-matter has mass. Electrons actually exist, but holes are simply a place where an electron can fit. Take the example of a helium balloon in a car: if you slam on the breaks, it flies to the back of the car because all the air is rushing forward, and the balloon's relative vacuum gets pushed backward. A hole behaves similarly. Antimatter, on the other hand, has mass just like its matter counterpart and therefore isn't directly comparable to a hole.
Slashdot Mirror
I love DD-WRT and have used it for years, but I get the impression it's a fragile project. The bulk of the work seems to rest on the shoulders of one or two people who only have so much time. I have always preferred Netgear's hardware with DD-WRT on top of it, but Netgear's latest product line (which has a TON of different router models ... way too many, IMO) has only partial support from the DD-WRT project. Netgear's fanciest two routers, the R7500 and R8000, aren't yet supported. All we can do is sit and beg Brainslayer or Kong to spend time on them, but they've got a lot of irons in the fire.
I really wish Netgear would just give up on Genie and pay DD-WRT to support development and license it as their official firmware. Rebrand it or something if you want, but give us the power of a real firmware. I've used Genie lately on the R6100 and found quite frustrating for anything fancier than a typical home wifi router use case. Security bugs like this only prove that they're failing to get it right on their own.
It makes sense that Cisco doesn't want their Linksys-branded routers to be too powerful, since it might hurt sales of fancier Cisco stuff, but what's Netgear's excuse?
To solve this latency problem, most well-designed websites use a single large GIF or PNG for all their tiny CSS images, then slice the image to indicate each independent icon, border, etc. This not only reduces the total image overhead but also greatly reduces the total number of 304s to receive.
Example: one of Facebook's icon resource files
A similar rule applies to amateur rally races in Finland, covered on the BBC show Top Gear. In folk racing, every car is given a nominal and equal value, such as €1000. At the end of a race, if anyone asks to buy your car then you have you sell it to them, which keeps anyone from putting too much into a car.
Android Market apps are mostly super cheap. Who can't afford $1 on a game they'll play for a few days non-stop? Or a few bucks on a ROM management app? Prices for most paid apps are so low that I imagine that the largest barrier to entry is not price, but the effort required to set up one or more credit cards. My hypothesis, for that reason, is that a large portion of the piracy comes from the age 15-20 crowd who have fancy phones and lots of free time to figure out piracy options, but no credit card(s).
Google can greatly reduce this kind of piracy by working out pricing deals with the carriers to allow charges to appear on phone bills. How else would the ringtone industry thrive as it has? Verizon certainly doesn't offer a direct-bill Android Market option. Maybe this is already the case on other carriers? How does piracy compare in those cases?
Another annoyance of the Market is currency conversion. I've bought apps for sale in both Yen and Euros, and for those purchases I had to set up a Visa card since my AMEX didn't support foreign purchases (on the Market, at least). Most users don't want to deal with that kind of crap ... again, piracy is easier. Can't Google Checkout handle currency conversion on the developer's end without hassling end-users?
This is true until they release a first-party game with the update included as a requirement. For example, Super Mario Galaxy 2 includes the 4.2 system update and requires you to update your system before you can play the game ... unless you start the game with a homebrew tool that blocks the update. Funny how the very feature they're trying to remove is capable of blocking the removal.
Homebrew users know to avoid system updates at all costs, so the only people affected by them are people who have not yet hacked their Wii. Once updated, though, those people will have a harder time installing homebrew should they choose to try it.
I'll keep the suggestions flowing: I love last.fm for its ability to help me find (and listen to) new music. It even offers a dedicated client that doesn't require an open browser window all day.
MIT's strategy is very interesting. Several groups (like our team) have been forming their teams for weeks, but MIT appeared on the scene just today, and it's fascinating that they got a front-page Slashdot plug. I give them lots of credit for flooding the scene with mentions in such a short time. Whereas some teams give their winnings to charity (like ours), others entice balloon spotters with cash portions of the earnings, and MIT has decided to do a little of both.
DARPA is the sole decider of how difficult this competition will be. Will they place the balloons in dense urban areas, or will the launch them in small rural communities?
Best of luck to all the teams tomorrow, MIT included. I hope that the contest winner will write a paper describing their strategy, both in network-building and in launch-day data collection.
This story is all well and interesting, but I imagine it's impossible to prove that you're the first business to make money exclusively over the internet. You might be "one of the first", but to go all the way to the birth of my business represents the birth of dot-com is a bit vain, no?
Just make sure it's not that peppermint-flavored dog poop.
This comment appears regularly on /. articles that use the term "brick." May I suggest that the term "brick" is slang and has no official definition? If I plug a [poorly patched] HD into a computer and get no sign of life, I'd consider that a "brick" until it's been flashed back into proper function.
"If you can reflash it" is also subjective: does that mean via a normal IDE/SATA interface, or does it extend to a direct JTAG connection, or do you have to desolder the ROM to flash it? There's a broad spectrum of functionality, but it seems most useful to use the term "brick" to refer to any device that seems to have no useful function under normal circumstances. My point is that it's open to interpretation, so don't be so picky.
For LCD HDTVs, most of the input lag comes from all the processing hardware, not the LCD panel itself. Many TVs now come with a "game mode" that disables certain processing features to decrease lag time at the expense of noise reduction, or upscaling quality, or whatever.
When I play Guitar Hero on my Sony LCD TV, I get about 60ms lag with the TV in its normal operating mode (as measured by GH's lag compensation feature). When I enable game mode on my TV, the lag effectively drops to zero. With game mode enable, many of the picture optimization features are not available, but that doesn't generally bother me since I usually disable them anyway.
So that's obviously the case, but the point of studying the topic is: "why?". It's also important to determine if this is by their own choice or if women are subtly coerced into their disinterest.
I helped out with FIRST LEGO League at Georgia Tech a few years back. FIRST LEGO is a robotics competition for middle-school students using LEGO automation parts to perform various tasks. There were tons of girls participating at all levels, and it was pretty noticeable how different the demographics were between the middle school competitors and the typical college-age engineering students at Gatech. Thus, it's worth asking whether girls seem to lose interest in engineering as they get older, and if so, why?
If it's purely biological (the parts of the brain that determine interests are gender-specific), then so be it. If, however, it's due to upbringing and society's pressures, then it's a topic worth discussing. Indeed, it is probably desirable to change it. Why limit the pool of intellect in a field to men? You're potentially losing 50% of the problem solving skills, assuming men and women are equally capable.
It's a lot easier to replace a window than it is a wall. Maybe they're just being polite!
Fixed that for ya.
Since they're already the products of combustion, it's pretty likely the ashes survived. Unfortunately, they'd probably be pretty tough to find.
Yeah, 'cause real men get pollution-related lung cancer!
Can I toss in a complaint about the 1-button mouse embedded in the $2800 laptop? For that kind of green I expect at least two buttons. I would consider buying a Mac to run Windows XP (since Apple's hardware support seems pleasant) except that I can't right-click without an external mouse or an awkward key combination. While this sounds like a terrible nit-pick, I wonder how many geeks are turned off Mac laptops by this issue.
Sony Vegas is a serious upcoming competitor to FCP, and I have found it delightful to use after feeling blah about Premiere in Windows. I was able to produce a better product in less time (for a simple video montage) using the Vegas demo than when I was using FCP for a different project in school.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a 64-bit OS, quad-core processor, and a $200 video card aren't exactly what I'd call "pedestrian".
No ... I am your sister.
Next time you've got a balloon, put it in the car and give this experiment a try. When you have a helium-filled balloon in the car, it reacts opposite to the way most other things in the car react. When you slam on the brakes, a ball on the floorboard will roll forward, but the balloon will float backward.
Sure, when you slam on the brakes the balloon wants to go forward, but so does the rest of the air in the car's interior. Since the air is more dense than the helium-filled balloon, it wins out and pushes the balloon backward.
You got me there to an extent, but with a loosely-inflated mylar balloon, the pressure can be equal between the interior and exterior of the balloon ... in either case you're right that "relative vacuum" was not really valid. My original point was that the helium means there's less mass in the same amount of volume, which was the point of my original "hole" analogy.
Part of the problem is that the accelerometers in the Wiimote are set up to measure the movement of the remote, not its rotation. It's difficult, if not impossible, for the Wiimote to accurately detect fast rotation around its center of gravity, and this is one of the movements that would be very useful in some of your example scenarios.
Games like Mario Kart Wii measure "rotation" by the movement of gravity, but the user must hold the controller generally still or the overall acceleration will be affected by that movement rather than by gravity alone. When pitching, there are much stronger sources of acceleration (your arm), so accurately measuring the rotation as well (for, say, a curve ball) is impossible.
I just reread my comment, and my "breaks" typo is driving me mad. s/breaks/brakes
Holes are a virtual particle with no mass, whereas anti-matter has mass. Electrons actually exist, but holes are simply a place where an electron can fit. Take the example of a helium balloon in a car: if you slam on the breaks, it flies to the back of the car because all the air is rushing forward, and the balloon's relative vacuum gets pushed backward. A hole behaves similarly. Antimatter, on the other hand, has mass just like its matter counterpart and therefore isn't directly comparable to a hole.
"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti ... $100 + EFF"
Hm ... still needs work.