I was at BB and had bought an item with my debit card and did not give the clerk any info other than my card. A week later I needed to return the item, but had lost the receipt. I went into BB and by using just my phone number, the clerk was able to find the transaction and reprint the receipt for the purchase. I have bought ESP/EPP plans in the past with that card so that's how they got my phone number, but it just shows that they are actively collecting every purchase you make even if you don't give them any personal info other than your CC number.
The pico cells they would put on the planes have only a fraction of the power output of a normal base station, so I would be highly surprised if your phone received any signal from the plane, let alone enough for the phone to consider handing off to the plane. Two planes crossing paths might be problematic, but the base station in your plane would have a stronger signal compared to the other plane, so your phone should stay associated to the closer station.
Aspartame is evil. When ingested, it breaks down into several components, one of which is methanol, which further breaks down into formaldehyde and formic acid, a component of bee and ant sting venom. So after poisoning yourself, you'll be nicely preserved.
Basically, what I want to know is if I get a PS3 for my HDTV capable of 1080i/720p/480p, will it convert 1080p to either 1080i or 720p, or will I be stuck with 480p?
Because your tv does not support 1080p, the PS3 would feed it a 720p picture, and rely on the tv to upscale it to 1080i. If the tv can not do the upscaling to 1080i, then it would display the 720p picture. The 480p problem comes from tvs that can do 1080i, but not 720p.
As a ReplayTV owner, I typically do 2-3 minute jumps over commercial blocks. The only commercials I see are the first couple of seconds of the first commercial and the last second or two of the last commercial. Everything else in between gets skipped over instantly. All this is going to do is annoy the hell out of people who watch tv in real-time.
I was at OSCON last month with my MacBook Pro and had several instances of kernel panics in the airport driver. This machine has never paniced before the conference and has not paniced since. During one session alone, the presenters mac paniced 3 times and my MBP paniced twice. If there is no remote control exploit, there certainly is some kind of DoS vector. I talked to over a dozen other people using Apple laptops and they also had issues with sporadic kernel panics in the airport driver. All the people I talked to and myself were using the built-in airport card, so no, this wasn't a third-party wireless card or driver. At the time of the panics, the airport browser was showing networks being advertised with garbage for the SSID. Take this for what you will, but there *ARE* issues with Apple's airport drivers.
Then so be it. Commercial flight is not the only option for travel. There are other ways to get around the country. Try a nice scenic trip by motorcycle. If motorcycles are not your cup of tea, there is always the 4 wheeled variety of vehicles. If 4 wheels isn't enough, try a bus or a train. Another option would be to get a pilot's license and fly yourself. Granted none of those options are as fast as a jet, but the majority of people are in too much of a hurry these days anyhow.
I think that you can put your toothpaste in your checked luggage.
While I can agree for the most part with your other points, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever check my laptop, ipod or cellphone like the UK is now requiring for flights to the US.
Of course registers don't use memory. I never said they did. But in 64-bit mode, the CPU makes more general purpose registers available to the program. The trade off is pointers, that *are* stored in memory, are going to take up twice as much space.
Lets not forget that memory pointers get upgraded to 64-bits. Depending on how heavily pointers are used in a program, that could make a measurable change in its memory footprint. But, IMHO, I'll take that increase in memory for all those extra registers.
It's not fair that taxes are applied to a CD, but not applied to an iTunes download. Solution:
Repeal the tax on the CD and cut government spending.
A similar technique will solve all other cases of taxation that aren't fair.
No, if you want fair, you either tax nothing, or you tax everything the same across the board.
One such plan in the works is the Fair Tax. It is a plan to consolidate the federal income tax, Social Security tax and several other taxes into one federal sales tax. It also lobbies to have the 16th Amendment repealed so the government can't institute another income tax without another Constitutional Amendment. There is currently a bill in the House and Senate about this, HR25 and S1493.
All services and new goods would be taxed equally. Used goods would not be taxed to prevent double taxation. Every person in the country with a SSN would get a monthly prebate check to account for the sales tax on things up to the poverty level. Its a prebate check because its given in advance so low income households don't suffer. With that plan, everyone would pay their fair share. If you don't want to pay taxes, don't buy things you don't need.
People would finally be able to take home everything they rightfully make. The only exception would be people living in states that have a state income tax.
Spend the hour or so to read the FAQ on the Fair Tax site. It answers alot of questions people how about the plan and what it does. After that, write to your representitives with your opinions.
I still switched to Verizon from Sprint since it gets better reception for me (GSM is horrible over here).
Sprint and Verizon are both CDMA carriers. No GSM for either of them. You most likely get better reception with Verizon because of them having more, or better placed towers in your area.
I made the switch from Sprint to T-Mobile a bit over a year ago, and found the change from CDMA to GSM to be very nice. I can clearly hold calls all the way down to 1 or 2 bars of signal, out of 7 bars. With CDMA, calls would become unbearable after about a 1/3 - 1/2 drop in signal strength.
I also love GSM for the SIM cards. All of the important details of your account is stored on your SIM card and you can move it from phone to phone. Pop it into pretty much any GSM phone that isn't locked to a carrier and if it supports the proper frequencies, most likely it'll work. CDMA networks can't do that. The network has to know the phone's serial number to do authorization. Sprint refuses to add 3rd party phones to their system, so you are stuck with phones that Sprint feels you should have.
Part of the agreement when you buy a PPV movie is that you have a limited window in which to watch it.
What agreement? Where? I've never had to agree to anything when I've bought PPV or VOD. I've never read anything from my cable company that says I can't record PPV or VOD, so to me, there is no difference between recording those and recording any other channel I get.
I know the answer to this... The unwritten agreement that everyone is supposed to know about and believe in. The same one that says we really should be watching the commercials on network TV. I record my PPV purchases with my ReplayTV and skip commercials. I also copy shows from my RTV and burn DVDs of them. I don't lose any sleep over it.
Perhaps a "Driver Adapter" could be built that would allow drivers written for it to run on any OS? The basic concept is that the adapter itself would be a driver for the OS, then the "Cross Platform Drivers" would deal directly with the adapter.
Check out the UDI Project. Its a project by some of the big name computer and software companies to create a Uniform Driver Interface. They released a reference implementation under the BSD license and a Linux implementation has been made. The problem though is getting hardware companies to code a UDI driver.
The other sad point is that they aren't stopping 3rd parties from charging over and above the normal Live fee for their games. Example: Sega has announced they will charge for PSO on Live...so this could get really pricy!
Most(all?) of the games available right now are peer to peer and only use XBL servers for coordination of games. For these types of games, it would be unreasonable for the game makes to tack on an extra charge. But for games like PSO, where Sega maintains their own servers to play on, its not unreasonable for them to charge extra.
And what's stopping people from just buying a new Starters Pack for $49.99/year, including a new headset?
It won't ever be more than $49.99/year, otherwise people would just buy a new starter's pack and sign up again...
Because then you have to chose another Gamertag, and start all over with respect to stats. For some, if they have good standing, or a particularly good reputation, they might not want to lose that.
It's also stupid that XBox live doesn't support Visa or MasterCard DEBIT cards.
If the debit card has a Visa/Mastercard logo, and has a 16 digit number starting with 4 or 5, then it will work, assuming the bank will let you do online transactions. I believe that people are trying to use non-Visa/Mastercard ATM cards that they can use at the supermarket to pay for groceries. Those use the EFT POS network and not the credit card network.
OK, so Wal-mart, K-mart, and Quicky-marts can sell Eminem albums (and lots of 'em), but they won't dare sell videogames with 16-bit color depth-versions of naked women?
From what I've read in OXM, its supposed to be DVD quality video, that they shot themselves.
Now, I might understand having a centralized server for an RPG, but these games (most are sports games) would be helped dramatically by a localized server. The other thing is, making the server freely available forces pay services to offer higher quality, lower ping times, etc.
I just want to point out that Microsoft only runs the coordination servers. The actual games run on the user's Xbox. Whoever creates the game becomes the "server" and everyone else is the "client". Game data doesn't get relayed through Microsoft's network.
I read a page somewhere that had rough guidelines on latency... ~250ms round trip time between two Xboxes, and ~750ms round trip time between an Xbox and Microsoft's servers.
However, the makers of the most popular consumer operating system in the world (and that's not an endorsement) do not have the low-power mode enabled by default; therefore, only true nerds and relatives/friends/s.o.'s of said nerds have their low-power monitor setting enabled!
The last time I reinstalled Windows 98 SE, I forgot about the power saving settings and after an hour of being idle, it had actually put the whole computer into standby mode. So, the computer was in the equivalent of a laptop's suspend to ram state. It also powers hard drives down, and it also put the monitor into low power mode. In this state, the motherboard is drawing enough power to keep the system ram alive and for the bios to monitor the keyboard so it can wake the system back up when it needs to. All of this was with the default *desktop* power settings. I also remember this happening when I was running plain WIndows 98.
Usually on the prebuilts, Dell, Gateway, etc, they reconfigure everything, so I can't testify to how those work.
In a floppy-based system like that (firewall), the floppy would be used to boot the host, that is all. The goal is to have *NO* disks, or any other moving parts.
That is easy. Use Flash RAM. CompactFlash cards, with the proper interface can emulate an IDE hard drive. Now you can have a very small "disk" with a decent capacity. No moving parts and very little heat. Just don't write to it alot.:)
Even better, boot from the flash, and then run out of a ram drive.
Do you know whether Transmeta has or doesn't have HLT? While I didn't think of it in the two minutes I was writing that post, it sounds like something Transmeta's "next generation" powersaving they claim to have would probably contain... and I'd guess that PowerNow would have it, too... but I could certainly be wrong.
I would be surprised if it didn't contain HLT. HLT is part of the x86 instruction set, and all the other major CPU manufacturers have it. Besides, Linux uses it, so it must be in there.:)
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I was at BB and had bought an item with my debit card and did not give the clerk any info other than my card. A week later I needed to return the item, but had lost the receipt. I went into BB and by using just my phone number, the clerk was able to find the transaction and reprint the receipt for the purchase. I have bought ESP/EPP plans in the past with that card so that's how they got my phone number, but it just shows that they are actively collecting every purchase you make even if you don't give them any personal info other than your CC number.
The pico cells they would put on the planes have only a fraction of the power output of a normal base station, so I would be highly surprised if your phone received any signal from the plane, let alone enough for the phone to consider handing off to the plane. Two planes crossing paths might be problematic, but the base station in your plane would have a stronger signal compared to the other plane, so your phone should stay associated to the closer station.
Sounds more like aspartame
Aspartame is evil. When ingested, it breaks down into several components, one of which is methanol, which further breaks down into formaldehyde and formic acid, a component of bee and ant sting venom. So after poisoning yourself, you'll be nicely preserved.
Basically, what I want to know is if I get a PS3 for my HDTV capable of 1080i/720p/480p, will it convert 1080p to either 1080i or 720p, or will I be stuck with 480p?
Because your tv does not support 1080p, the PS3 would feed it a 720p picture, and rely on the tv to upscale it to 1080i. If the tv can not do the upscaling to 1080i, then it would display the 720p picture. The 480p problem comes from tvs that can do 1080i, but not 720p.
As a ReplayTV owner, I typically do 2-3 minute jumps over commercial blocks. The only commercials I see are the first couple of seconds of the first commercial and the last second or two of the last commercial. Everything else in between gets skipped over instantly. All this is going to do is annoy the hell out of people who watch tv in real-time.
I was at OSCON last month with my MacBook Pro and had several instances of kernel panics in the airport driver. This machine has never paniced before the conference and has not paniced since. During one session alone, the presenters mac paniced 3 times and my MBP paniced twice. If there is no remote control exploit, there certainly is some kind of DoS vector. I talked to over a dozen other people using Apple laptops and they also had issues with sporadic kernel panics in the airport driver. All the people I talked to and myself were using the built-in airport card, so no, this wasn't a third-party wireless card or driver. At the time of the panics, the airport browser was showing networks being advertised with garbage for the SSID. Take this for what you will, but there *ARE* issues with Apple's airport drivers.
Then you won't get to fly on a commercial flight
Then so be it. Commercial flight is not the only option for travel. There are other ways to get around the country. Try a nice scenic trip by motorcycle. If motorcycles are not your cup of tea, there is always the 4 wheeled variety of vehicles. If 4 wheels isn't enough, try a bus or a train. Another option would be to get a pilot's license and fly yourself. Granted none of those options are as fast as a jet, but the majority of people are in too much of a hurry these days anyhow.
I think that you can put your toothpaste in your checked luggage.
While I can agree for the most part with your other points, it will be a cold day in hell before I ever check my laptop, ipod or cellphone like the UK is now requiring for flights to the US.
Registers don't use memory.
Of course registers don't use memory. I never said they did. But in 64-bit mode, the CPU makes more general purpose registers available to the program. The trade off is pointers, that *are* stored in memory, are going to take up twice as much space.
Lets not forget that memory pointers get upgraded to 64-bits. Depending on how heavily pointers are used in a program, that could make a measurable change in its memory footprint. But, IMHO, I'll take that increase in memory for all those extra registers.
It's not fair that taxes are applied to a CD, but not applied to an iTunes download. Solution:
Repeal the tax on the CD and cut government spending.
A similar technique will solve all other cases of taxation that aren't fair.
No, if you want fair, you either tax nothing, or you tax everything the same across the board.
One such plan in the works is the Fair Tax. It is a plan to consolidate the federal income tax, Social Security tax and several other taxes into one federal sales tax. It also lobbies to have the 16th Amendment repealed so the government can't institute another income tax without another Constitutional Amendment. There is currently a bill in the House and Senate about this, HR25 and S1493.
All services and new goods would be taxed equally. Used goods would not be taxed to prevent double taxation. Every person in the country with a SSN would get a monthly prebate check to account for the sales tax on things up to the poverty level. Its a prebate check because its given in advance so low income households don't suffer. With that plan, everyone would pay their fair share. If you don't want to pay taxes, don't buy things you don't need.
People would finally be able to take home everything they rightfully make. The only exception would be people living in states that have a state income tax.
Spend the hour or so to read the FAQ on the Fair Tax site. It answers alot of questions people how about the plan and what it does. After that, write to your representitives with your opinions.
I still switched to Verizon from Sprint since it gets better reception for me (GSM is horrible over here).
Sprint and Verizon are both CDMA carriers. No GSM for either of them. You most likely get better reception with Verizon because of them having more, or better placed towers in your area.
I made the switch from Sprint to T-Mobile a bit over a year ago, and found the change from CDMA to GSM to be very nice. I can clearly hold calls all the way down to 1 or 2 bars of signal, out of 7 bars. With CDMA, calls would become unbearable after about a 1/3 - 1/2 drop in signal strength.
I also love GSM for the SIM cards. All of the important details of your account is stored on your SIM card and you can move it from phone to phone. Pop it into pretty much any GSM phone that isn't locked to a carrier and if it supports the proper frequencies, most likely it'll work. CDMA networks can't do that. The network has to know the phone's serial number to do authorization. Sprint refuses to add 3rd party phones to their system, so you are stuck with phones that Sprint feels you should have.
Part of the agreement when you buy a PPV movie is that you have a limited window in which to watch it.
What agreement? Where? I've never had to agree to anything when I've bought PPV or VOD. I've never read anything from my cable company that says I can't record PPV or VOD, so to me, there is no difference between recording those and recording any other channel I get.
I know the answer to this... The unwritten agreement that everyone is supposed to know about and believe in. The same one that says we really should be watching the commercials on network TV. I record my PPV purchases with my ReplayTV and skip commercials. I also copy shows from my RTV and burn DVDs of them. I don't lose any sleep over it.
Perhaps a "Driver Adapter" could be built that would allow drivers written for it to run on any OS? The basic concept is that the adapter itself would be a driver for the OS, then the "Cross Platform Drivers" would deal directly with the adapter.
Check out the UDI Project. Its a project by some of the big name computer and software companies to create a Uniform Driver Interface. They released a reference implementation under the BSD license and a Linux implementation has been made. The problem though is getting hardware companies to code a UDI driver.
Here is a company making a legal Linux DVD player. Its not available to the public, but its possible it could've been licensed in this case.
The other sad point is that they aren't stopping 3rd parties from charging over and above the normal Live fee for their games. Example: Sega has announced they will charge for PSO on Live...so this could get really pricy!
Most(all?) of the games available right now are peer to peer and only use XBL servers for coordination of games. For these types of games, it would be unreasonable for the game makes to tack on an extra charge. But for games like PSO, where Sega maintains their own servers to play on, its not unreasonable for them to charge extra.
And what's stopping people from just buying a new Starters Pack for $49.99/year, including a new headset?
It won't ever be more than $49.99/year, otherwise people would just buy a new starter's pack and sign up again...
Because then you have to chose another Gamertag, and start all over with respect to stats. For some, if they have good standing, or a particularly good reputation, they might not want to lose that.
It's also stupid that XBox live doesn't support Visa or MasterCard DEBIT cards.
If the debit card has a Visa/Mastercard logo, and has a 16 digit number starting with 4 or 5, then it will work, assuming the bank will let you do online transactions. I believe that people are trying to use non-Visa/Mastercard ATM cards that they can use at the supermarket to pay for groceries. Those use the EFT POS network and not the credit card network.
OK, so Wal-mart, K-mart, and Quicky-marts can sell Eminem albums (and lots of 'em), but they won't dare sell videogames with 16-bit color depth-versions of naked women?
From what I've read in OXM, its supposed to be DVD quality video, that they shot themselves.
On a related note, does anyone know if this game will use the extremely rare "AO" (Adults Only) ESRB rating?
According to an interview done with Acclaim in OXM, they are trying to push the M rating as far as they can.
Now, I might understand having a centralized server for an RPG, but these games (most are sports games) would be helped dramatically by a localized server. The other thing is, making the server freely available forces pay services to offer higher quality, lower ping times, etc.
I just want to point out that Microsoft only runs the coordination servers. The actual games run on the user's Xbox. Whoever creates the game becomes the "server" and everyone else is the "client". Game data doesn't get relayed through Microsoft's network.
I read a page somewhere that had rough guidelines on latency... ~250ms round trip time between two Xboxes, and ~750ms round trip time between an Xbox and Microsoft's servers.
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
Because some people wanted it? If I remember correctly, didn't FBSD get the base USB code from NetBSD?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
For the purposes PicoBSD serves, it needs server-like features. The most common uses I have seen are as routers, bridges, and dial-up servers.
However, the makers of the most popular consumer operating system in the world (and that's not an endorsement) do not have the low-power mode enabled by default; therefore, only true nerds and relatives/friends/s.o.'s of said nerds have their low-power monitor setting enabled!
The last time I reinstalled Windows 98 SE, I forgot about the power saving settings and after an hour of being idle, it had actually put the whole computer into standby mode. So, the computer was in the equivalent of a laptop's suspend to ram state. It also powers hard drives down, and it also put the monitor into low power mode. In this state, the motherboard is drawing enough power to keep the system ram alive and for the bios to monitor the keyboard so it can wake the system back up when it needs to. All of this was with the default *desktop* power settings. I also remember this happening when I was running plain WIndows 98.
Usually on the prebuilts, Dell, Gateway, etc, they reconfigure everything, so I can't testify to how those work.
In a floppy-based system like that (firewall), the floppy would be used to boot the host, that is all. The goal is to have *NO* disks, or any other moving parts.
:)
That is easy. Use Flash RAM. CompactFlash cards, with the proper interface can emulate an IDE hard drive. Now you can have a very small "disk" with a decent capacity. No moving parts and very little heat. Just don't write to it alot.
Even better, boot from the flash, and then run out of a ram drive.
Do you know whether Transmeta has or doesn't have HLT? While I didn't think of it in the two minutes I was writing that post, it sounds like something Transmeta's "next generation" powersaving they claim to have would probably contain... and I'd guess that PowerNow would have it, too... but I could certainly be wrong.
:)
I would be surprised if it didn't contain HLT. HLT is part of the x86 instruction set, and all the other major CPU manufacturers have it. Besides, Linux uses it, so it must be in there.