Nothing to do with Apple - Stanza was bought out by Amazon when the Kindle app came along - thats why development was stopped, they didn't want competition for their own app. It still beats other e-book readers in quite a lot of ways, I just wish they'd implemented syncing across multiple devices before development shut down.
Not only your legal defence fees, according to the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18594105 ) it will cost £20 just to submit an appeal if you receive one of these letters.
Please, mod this up! This is probably exactly why they are doing this! Before, you could scrape all your contact's data (I used a throw-away yahoo mail account to import all that data when I deleted my facebook account, then re-imported it into my gmail contacts from yahoo mail) and it would be useful. This is probably to turn that scraped data into a pile of garbage. It would be mighty interesting to see if somebody can see what data comes through now - I suspect all the emails the users had set as their default will now be replaced with "@facebook" emails in that scraped data..
You can see their logic - with tight integration into iOS 6, for example, if users pull in "real" contact info they'll imessage or email friends instead of chatting through facebook. This is just a way to keep the average ignorant user locked into the facebook eco system.
From this Chicago Tribune article, it sounds like there were 4 major manufacturers and now there will be 3. Celestica apparently made the Blackberry Bold & Curve models, and the article seems to indicate that those models will be moved over to one of the other manufacturers.
damn wish i had mod points. and a shift key for that matter... anyway, surely there was a way for the operating system to poll the system using these 'magic' system commands to check if a disk had been inserted. so poll the system, see what it says - either a 1 or a 0, then spin up the drive and see what it actually says. heck do it as part of the system install. take a snapshot of the floppy drive device name or something at the same time. if the device name changes re-run this technique, cause if you swap the floppy with another drive which reports the same device name it'll still report 0 or 1 for the same type of disk insertion scenario so you fine, and if the floppy device name is diff, then re-run this technique. anyway, as part of the system install you could have polled if the disk was there, taken the answer, then actually spun up the drive and checked and bingo, your training is done1 damn what i could do with a shift key right now....
With the advent of automatic facial recognition technology, you need to get yourself some black bars, and you need to wear them anytime you're out in public. Then any photos of you will come out pre-censored, no more worries about automatic facial recognition!
This has been implemented near Cape Town in South Africa. During the evenings, hen demand for electricity is low, they pump water from a resevoir on the cape flats (i.e. nearly at sea level)(google maps link) up to the top of a nearby mountain (link to it on google maps. Then during the day, when the electricity is needed, they let the water flow back down and power a turbine generating surplus for the grid. I think this was implemented since pretty much all of cape town's electricity is supplied by Koeberg nuclear power station (when the turbines aren't breaking down), and from what i can gather, the electrical output from a nuclear plant is pretty constant and would otherwise be wasted if there was not some way to temporarily store it during quiet times for use in peak times.
Actually, I was once speaking to a farmer who owns the farm that the upper resevoir is located next to, and he pointed out a large many-story high concrete pillar (you can see it in the google maps link to the upper resevoir i inserted earlier in this post, to the lower right hand corner of the dam). He reckons, and i have no reason to doubt him, that its there to absorb the backward wave of water that is created when the downward flow is shut off each night. The way he explained it was its almost like a super large tidal bore flows back up the pipeline that was drilled through the mountain to the lower reservoir. Supposedly it would spout a column of water about 50 meters into the air otherwise. Anyway,thats totally irrelevant to the article, just thought it would make the links a bit more interesting.
I've actually done that myself. Fair enough it wasn't a shirt it was a pair of chino's (trousers). I was at university and was getting ready for a night out and saw how really bad they were looking, and figured a quick run over with the iron would do the trick. Obviously wasn't one of my brightest moments, but at least the iron hadn't heated up to full temp yet. I remember thinking, well, its probably going to be quite hot but i'll iron really quick so it shouldn't actually burn... The worst thing is its not an instantaneous pain - it took a couple seconds to register that this thing on my leg was f%#king hot and was hurting! I stopped and took them off before attempting to iron them again. Anyway, i totally realise it was 100% my fault and it was a valuable lesson learnt - hot things should not be applied direct to the body! I even saw the funny side of it, which is why i don't mind posting about it.
So remember kids, don't try iron your clothes while wearing them! Not a good idea!
and knowing my hardware isn't up to snuff and much of my software needs replacing, I bought a Mac. I mean, if I have to replace all that stuff anyway, why not get something truly "new" by comparison?
I must say that me and quite a few of my friends are in exactly this boat. We're all hitting our mid 20's, about 3 years out of university. Most of us have/had pc's, but are thinking of or have already moved across to macs. Why?
We're not so much into games any more, and if we are, we'd rather play on something like a playstation or psp - mainly because its a level playing field (hardware wise) and we don't need the latest and greatest kit to get the best out of the game. And its got an exptected lifetime of several years. Heck, my favourite game of all time is Wip3out. Its the only game I had on my PS1, and its the only game I still regularly play on my PS2.
There's a certain set of software we use regularly now - internet, email, photo's, music (usually ipod), sometimes word, ocassionally spreadsheet. The mac's seem to come with pretty much most of that stuff preloaded - we don't have to go out and find it and pay loads more for it.
Then there's the security side - at the moment the macs come across as a lot more safe to use on the internet.
And finally there's the fact that they look stylish.
I know that my current PC is starting to give up the ghost, and I expect the motherboard to fail within the next 6 months. When that happens, I think i'll be buying myself a couple network hard drive enclosures, stripping the drives out and moving away from the MS world.
I recently got myself a nokia N91, and have been looking for and loading a couple of useful programs I've come across. I'd seen some 3rd party app that interfaces with google maps to provide a cellphone version of it.
However, this offering from google really rocks. It's super quick (i'm testing it off my home wifi connection right now) and even though I can't get traffic congestion for my area (since I live in London), it's really useful. It took me literally a couple of seconds to add my main locations (work, home) as favourites. The functionality of this application is great - getting turn-by-turn directions is really simple, and it's very easy to step through the directions. To move to the next waypoint all you need to do is press 3. And you can switch between sat view and map view just as easily. Plus you can go to a location and then do a business search. Like if you're coming home from going out and really really need to find the closest kebab shop...
Anyway, if you've got a phone that this supports (and preferably have wifi connectivity) give this a try. Especially if you're in the states and can use the traffic congestion as well.
Actually, would somebody in the know please explain if this could be used to 'paint your own faraday cage' and stop a signal getting in? I'm guessing you'd need to know quite accurately the mesh size to block out a specific wave length, but you could make a stencil and then easily apply it to the walls of your room, then paint over with normal paint to make it invisible.
I know you'd need to cover every single piece of the room to stop signals leaking through the gaps, but in something like a cinema this could probably be easily done.
I know more ipod owners without computers than with computers. I live in a 7 person house share, and there are 6 ipods that use my computer. The one girl loved the look of them so much she just bought a 30gig pod and put (get this) 7 cd's onto it. Thats all she wanted. I sneakily put the ricky gervais podcasts onto their as well, but sheesh, you'd be amazed at the none-techi people out there using ipods. Their biggest gripe about it is getting content onto it, as they're not allowed to install itunes on their only regularly available computer (their work computers).
I reckon instead of Blockbusters, they should be doing this in virgin / hmv / [your own brand of music store] so that if you buy a cd from them, you can pop your ipod into a dock at the cash register and it'll upload the tracks while you're busy typing in your pin number etc etc. I mean people usually only buy one or two cd's, and it doesn't take long at all to upload that much content. I reckon there'd be huge demand for something like that.
Erm, how about voyager or pioneer. Personally I would say 25-30 years is a long duration space flight. I mean, if I was sitting on one of those space craft, 25-30 years would have taken up a fair deal of my life to date (100% - 120% of my life), Yet they're still working. And they were built before this sort of technology was around. Sorry, when you said "we haven't done a lot of long duration spaceflight yet" and got it so wrong, I had to say something.
Man this is why I read slashdot. I've been reading it for a while now, and to have somebody say: Agreed, I'm a "rocket scientist", (kind of, work with commercial satellites). It makes this site so amazing. I reckon that when slashdot started they'd never have even imagined having rocket scientists reply to rocket-science related articles.
But mind you, it does raise a good point about two things - the micro failure fix-speed is probably too slow for anything critical, and that anything extremely sensitive will not be grounded enough and so is going to suffer the most. So basically it means nothing will be secured enough to guarantee success. But would I do it - hell yeah, just waiting till I win the lotto so I can afford to because I think I missed NASA's astronaut school by a decade or so...
Yes it will. It will iterate through all your zip files. And if you password protect, gmail wont process it. So how do you send an exe or zip? Just give it some other arb extension (like bmp or dat or xxx or anything) and then attach it. On the other end give it back its proper extension, and you're done.
that a digital tax will be added to all machines that can play digitized music/games/etc. in order to make up for the lost revenue
And how the hell do you quantify this lost revenue?? Company A: "hmmm, we signed up this crap music act, processed the shit out of their performance and spent a gazillion dollars marketing it trying to make out gullible target market, i mean valuable consumers, go out and buy it. But nobody is buying it because they're all pirating it. So please can you give us a gazillion dollars to make up for the money that we surely would have made if piracy hadn't occured." And that sort of system wont be abused, right??
Let people get it for free off the net, and make the bands get there money back from loyal fans via concerts and live gigs, and memberships to their fan clubs or whatever. The good musicians have nothing to fear from a system like this. And the new start ups would owe record companies so much for "starting them up" that they have nothing to lose either.
No no no.
Companies should only be allowed to use passive, non intrusive DRM. Same as advertising. If active advertising (read spamming your inbox, phone soliciting, junk mail in your post box) was banned and only passive advertising that didn't waste your time was allowed, the world would be a much better place. Same as with DRM. If i put a CD into a computer and it alters *MY* computer, thats active DRM and should be illegal.
Its how I view religion. I dont mind whatever you follow. Really. You're more than welcome to tell me you follow deity XYZ (and all his noodly appendages) But dont come trying to convert me over. That just pisses me off. Same as active DRM and spam.
Back to the topic, DRM is entering very dangerous grounds. Its a way of locking you into a specific format, a specific media. Its a way of forcing consumers away from the "buying a piece of music" to "buying the rights to have a piece of music in a certain format on a certain media". Have the CD but want it on your Ipod? They really want you to go out and pay to download it again in a format loaded with DRM for your ipod. DRM is just a cleverly disguised method of stripping you of your valid rights as a consumer, and the sooner it disappears the better.
Re:Houston, we have a busted/confirmed myth
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Hell, these guys seems to have even found an urban version of cow tipping...
something you city slickers could try out and let us know about. And heck, its in colour *and* on the internet, so dag nabbit it must be true.
Actually, the sony media player does send back personal information - it checks for the latest lyrics and album art for any CD you play through it. So at the least they can collect CD being played, time of day and IP address of computer playing it. That to me is spyware..
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing to do with Apple - Stanza was bought out by Amazon when the Kindle app came along - thats why development was stopped, they didn't want competition for their own app. It still beats other e-book readers in quite a lot of ways, I just wish they'd implemented syncing across multiple devices before development shut down.
Not only your legal defence fees, according to the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18594105 ) it will cost £20 just to submit an appeal if you receive one of these letters.
Please, mod this up! This is probably exactly why they are doing this! Before, you could scrape all your contact's data (I used a throw-away yahoo mail account to import all that data when I deleted my facebook account, then re-imported it into my gmail contacts from yahoo mail) and it would be useful. This is probably to turn that scraped data into a pile of garbage. It would be mighty interesting to see if somebody can see what data comes through now - I suspect all the emails the users had set as their default will now be replaced with "@facebook" emails in that scraped data.. You can see their logic - with tight integration into iOS 6, for example, if users pull in "real" contact info they'll imessage or email friends instead of chatting through facebook. This is just a way to keep the average ignorant user locked into the facebook eco system.
From this Chicago Tribune article, it sounds like there were 4 major manufacturers and now there will be 3. Celestica apparently made the Blackberry Bold & Curve models, and the article seems to indicate that those models will be moved over to one of the other manufacturers.
damn wish i had mod points. and a shift key for that matter... anyway, surely there was a way for the operating system to poll the system using these 'magic' system commands to check if a disk had been inserted. so poll the system, see what it says - either a 1 or a 0, then spin up the drive and see what it actually says. heck do it as part of the system install. take a snapshot of the floppy drive device name or something at the same time. if the device name changes re-run this technique, cause if you swap the floppy with another drive which reports the same device name it'll still report 0 or 1 for the same type of disk insertion scenario so you fine, and if the floppy device name is diff, then re-run this technique. anyway, as part of the system install you could have polled if the disk was there, taken the answer, then actually spun up the drive and checked and bingo, your training is done1 damn what i could do with a shift key right now....
With the advent of automatic facial recognition technology, you need to get yourself some black bars, and you need to wear them anytime you're out in public. Then any photos of you will come out pre-censored, no more worries about automatic facial recognition!
This has been implemented near Cape Town in South Africa. During the evenings, hen demand for electricity is low, they pump water from a resevoir on the cape flats (i.e. nearly at sea level)(google maps link) up to the top of a nearby mountain (link to it on google maps. Then during the day, when the electricity is needed, they let the water flow back down and power a turbine generating surplus for the grid. I think this was implemented since pretty much all of cape town's electricity is supplied by Koeberg nuclear power station (when the turbines aren't breaking down), and from what i can gather, the electrical output from a nuclear plant is pretty constant and would otherwise be wasted if there was not some way to temporarily store it during quiet times for use in peak times.
Actually, I was once speaking to a farmer who owns the farm that the upper resevoir is located next to, and he pointed out a large many-story high concrete pillar (you can see it in the google maps link to the upper resevoir i inserted earlier in this post, to the lower right hand corner of the dam). He reckons, and i have no reason to doubt him, that its there to absorb the backward wave of water that is created when the downward flow is shut off each night. The way he explained it was its almost like a super large tidal bore flows back up the pipeline that was drilled through the mountain to the lower reservoir. Supposedly it would spout a column of water about 50 meters into the air otherwise. Anyway,thats totally irrelevant to the article, just thought it would make the links a bit more interesting.
I've actually done that myself. Fair enough it wasn't a shirt it was a pair of chino's (trousers). I was at university and was getting ready for a night out and saw how really bad they were looking, and figured a quick run over with the iron would do the trick. Obviously wasn't one of my brightest moments, but at least the iron hadn't heated up to full temp yet. I remember thinking, well, its probably going to be quite hot but i'll iron really quick so it shouldn't actually burn... The worst thing is its not an instantaneous pain - it took a couple seconds to register that this thing on my leg was f%#king hot and was hurting! I stopped and took them off before attempting to iron them again. Anyway, i totally realise it was 100% my fault and it was a valuable lesson learnt - hot things should not be applied direct to the body! I even saw the funny side of it, which is why i don't mind posting about it.
So remember kids, don't try iron your clothes while wearing them! Not a good idea!
I must say that me and quite a few of my friends are in exactly this boat. We're all hitting our mid 20's, about 3 years out of university. Most of us have/had pc's, but are thinking of or have already moved across to macs. Why?
We're not so much into games any more, and if we are, we'd rather play on something like a playstation or psp - mainly because its a level playing field (hardware wise) and we don't need the latest and greatest kit to get the best out of the game. And its got an exptected lifetime of several years. Heck, my favourite game of all time is Wip3out. Its the only game I had on my PS1, and its the only game I still regularly play on my PS2.
There's a certain set of software we use regularly now - internet, email, photo's, music (usually ipod), sometimes word, ocassionally spreadsheet. The mac's seem to come with pretty much most of that stuff preloaded - we don't have to go out and find it and pay loads more for it.
Then there's the security side - at the moment the macs come across as a lot more safe to use on the internet.
And finally there's the fact that they look stylish.
I know that my current PC is starting to give up the ghost, and I expect the motherboard to fail within the next 6 months. When that happens, I think i'll be buying myself a couple network hard drive enclosures, stripping the drives out and moving away from the MS world.
I recently got myself a nokia N91, and have been looking for and loading a couple of useful programs I've come across. I'd seen some 3rd party app that interfaces with google maps to provide a cellphone version of it.
However, this offering from google really rocks. It's super quick (i'm testing it off my home wifi connection right now) and even though I can't get traffic congestion for my area (since I live in London), it's really useful. It took me literally a couple of seconds to add my main locations (work, home) as favourites. The functionality of this application is great - getting turn-by-turn directions is really simple, and it's very easy to step through the directions. To move to the next waypoint all you need to do is press 3. And you can switch between sat view and map view just as easily. Plus you can go to a location and then do a business search. Like if you're coming home from going out and really really need to find the closest kebab shop...
Anyway, if you've got a phone that this supports (and preferably have wifi connectivity) give this a try. Especially if you're in the states and can use the traffic congestion as well.
Actually, would somebody in the know please explain if this could be used to 'paint your own faraday cage' and stop a signal getting in? I'm guessing you'd need to know quite accurately the mesh size to block out a specific wave length, but you could make a stencil and then easily apply it to the walls of your room, then paint over with normal paint to make it invisible.
I know you'd need to cover every single piece of the room to stop signals leaking through the gaps, but in something like a cinema this could probably be easily done.
I know more ipod owners without computers than with computers. I live in a 7 person house share, and there are 6 ipods that use my computer. The one girl loved the look of them so much she just bought a 30gig pod and put (get this) 7 cd's onto it. Thats all she wanted. I sneakily put the ricky gervais podcasts onto their as well, but sheesh, you'd be amazed at the none-techi people out there using ipods. Their biggest gripe about it is getting content onto it, as they're not allowed to install itunes on their only regularly available computer (their work computers). I reckon instead of Blockbusters, they should be doing this in virgin / hmv / [your own brand of music store] so that if you buy a cd from them, you can pop your ipod into a dock at the cash register and it'll upload the tracks while you're busy typing in your pin number etc etc. I mean people usually only buy one or two cd's, and it doesn't take long at all to upload that much content. I reckon there'd be huge demand for something like that.
Erm, how about voyager or pioneer. Personally I would say 25-30 years is a long duration space flight. I mean, if I was sitting on one of those space craft, 25-30 years would have taken up a fair deal of my life to date (100% - 120% of my life), Yet they're still working. And they were built before this sort of technology was around. Sorry, when you said "we haven't done a lot of long duration spaceflight yet" and got it so wrong, I had to say something.
OFF TOPIC (slightly)
Man this is why I read slashdot. I've been reading it for a while now, and to have somebody say: Agreed, I'm a "rocket scientist", (kind of, work with commercial satellites). It makes this site so amazing. I reckon that when slashdot started they'd never have even imagined having rocket scientists reply to rocket-science related articles.
But mind you, it does raise a good point about two things - the micro failure fix-speed is probably too slow for anything critical, and that anything extremely sensitive will not be grounded enough and so is going to suffer the most. So basically it means nothing will be secured enough to guarantee success. But would I do it - hell yeah, just waiting till I win the lotto so I can afford to because I think I missed NASA's astronaut school by a decade or so...
Yes it will. It will iterate through all your zip files. And if you password protect, gmail wont process it. So how do you send an exe or zip? Just give it some other arb extension (like bmp or dat or xxx or anything) and then attach it. On the other end give it back its proper extension, and you're done.
that a digital tax will be added to all machines that can play digitized music/games/etc. in order to make up for the lost revenue
And how the hell do you quantify this lost revenue?? Company A: "hmmm, we signed up this crap music act, processed the shit out of their performance and spent a gazillion dollars marketing it trying to make out gullible target market, i mean valuable consumers, go out and buy it. But nobody is buying it because they're all pirating it. So please can you give us a gazillion dollars to make up for the money that we surely would have made if piracy hadn't occured." And that sort of system wont be abused, right?? Let people get it for free off the net, and make the bands get there money back from loyal fans via concerts and live gigs, and memberships to their fan clubs or whatever. The good musicians have nothing to fear from a system like this. And the new start ups would owe record companies so much for "starting them up" that they have nothing to lose either.
No no no. Companies should only be allowed to use passive, non intrusive DRM. Same as advertising. If active advertising (read spamming your inbox, phone soliciting, junk mail in your post box) was banned and only passive advertising that didn't waste your time was allowed, the world would be a much better place. Same as with DRM. If i put a CD into a computer and it alters *MY* computer, thats active DRM and should be illegal. Its how I view religion. I dont mind whatever you follow. Really. You're more than welcome to tell me you follow deity XYZ (and all his noodly appendages) But dont come trying to convert me over. That just pisses me off. Same as active DRM and spam. Back to the topic, DRM is entering very dangerous grounds. Its a way of locking you into a specific format, a specific media. Its a way of forcing consumers away from the "buying a piece of music" to "buying the rights to have a piece of music in a certain format on a certain media". Have the CD but want it on your Ipod? They really want you to go out and pay to download it again in a format loaded with DRM for your ipod. DRM is just a cleverly disguised method of stripping you of your valid rights as a consumer, and the sooner it disappears the better.
Hell, these guys seems to have even found an urban version of cow tipping... something you city slickers could try out and let us know about. And heck, its in colour *and* on the internet, so dag nabbit it must be true.
Actually, the sony media player does send back personal information - it checks for the latest lyrics and album art for any CD you play through it. So at the least they can collect CD being played, time of day and IP address of computer playing it. That to me is spyware..