The vast majority of people buy new phones every 2 years from the carrier. Hardly surprising when they are paying for them (or a substantial portion of them) whether they want them or not.
I remember it used to be like this in the uk, then one of the providers (I think it was 02) started offering a sim only tarrif that gave you more service for your money than the regular tarrifs and soon enough loads of others followed suit.
Not sure what it is like in the US but over here in the UK you can certainly get data only plans intended for use with mobile broadband dongles (but I can't see any reason you couldn't shove the sim in a phone)
It's not that the containers cause fires (though I would guess the welding torches fed from them do from time to time), it's that properties catch fire for a whole number of reasons and those properties sometimes contain gas cylinders (of which acetelene is the nastiest common one but even things like butane and propane can be pretty nasty). Furthermore until the fire brigade can contact the owner they often don't know if cylinders are present and if so what they contain.
Second Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do. Really good at convincing the powers that be to buy thier shitware and force it on us yes.
The thing is i'm not going to use a beta or even freshly released version of windows and even if vista's problems have been mostly overcome by better hardware and service packs now as some people claim I don't particularlly feel like learning the quirks of a version that hardly anywhere uses. Nor do I like the fact that there is no version that does not require either activation or a code in the bios.
So for the next couple of years at least i'm going to be staying on XP for any machines that need to run windows. I'm sure many here feel the same.
They abandoned drm on newly sold music. Existing music still has it unless the user pays an upgrade fee (and worse upgrading is all or nothing) and afaict they still have it on music that is given away as part of various promotions and on all thier video content..
Firstly in the old days we were dealing with a few bored or occasionally vengefull people. Now we are dealing with massive organised crime. They can easilly afford to buy every antivirus product on the market and spend all the time they need to tweak a virus until it no longer gets detected or research new ways to make life harder for the antivirus vendors.
Secondly there is a constant arms race, the viruses are trying to find new ways to hide and the scanner vendors are trying to find ways to fight back against that hiding. The end result is that both sides
There must be something wrong with the under sea cable industry (or at least theor press department) because whenever I read about them I have visions of outages and sabotage Because it's not something most of us deal with directly (that gets left up to our ISPs/telcos) the only time we tend to hear anything about it is either when there is a major new cable (or more commonly group of cables) or a cable gets damaged and it screws with our internet routing in a big way (remember loads of ISPs will have virtual circuits on any given cable so the damage isn't confined to one ISP).
Given that theese cables are extremely long and the undersea environment isn't exactly friendly it is almost inevitable that they will be damaged and repaired over thier lifetime and when they are damaged it takes days to fix them, over those few days internet will be much slower than normal for anyone whose ISP was relying on the cable in question as the ISP reroutes by less favorable routes.
So it's hardly surprising that most of the news we hear about theese cables is when they break. Still they are far lower latency than satcoms and far easier politically (especially in regions full of unstable countries) than overland cables than the alternative so we live with the occasional downtime.
Well, now we don't have to deal with that difference. LCD HDTVs are made on the same technology as your LCD computer screen, and their interconnects use the same signaling. With an HDTV, you can have all the same resolution you get on a computer, and new consoles are made to take advantage of it. Though they still suck as monitors because they always seem to blur the image noticably, even with filtering settings set to minimum and a signal in thier native resolution.
note: afaict the configuration tool for the mac pro will let you select impossible combinations, that is it will let you select more cards than there are slots for.
I dunno what would happen if you tried to order such a machine. I guess apple would contact you and tell you that you had ordered an impossible combination and either ask how you wanted to proceed or just reject the order and tell you to try again.
any electronics running as low as 1.5V is going to need to be supplied from a local regulator (either linear or switcher depending on whether the manufacturer cares more about cost or efficiancy) anyway because that is the only way to keep the voltage stable enough.
Notice that this is how PCs are done nowadays, 12V supply from the PSU to local switchers that provide the high current low voltage power needed by the CPU(s) and GPU(s)
the argument could be made that the document was leaked through a different source, run through the algorithm, and coincidentally matched the "signature" of the leaker's copy. Remember they just have to show "probable cause" to a court to get a search warrant. Once they have that search warrent they can start searching for more direct evidence that you leaked it.
It's completely bogus. If they want to keep data private, then use real cryptography, and validated software/hardware combinations that make the cost of extracting the data in a usable format more expensive than the data it's protecting. The military does it, as to certain businesses, and intelligence agencies around the world. The technology is there, it works, and it's real security. and it's frightfully expensive, because you have to give everyone who needs access to the data your special locked down terminal. Worse you need to set up a secured environment for that terminal otherwise they could just put thier laptop down next to it and retype the information manually.
use a weak pointer for that (or even a plain old C pointer). The trouble with plain pointers is they can go stale. If a stale pointer gets inadvertantly written through very bad things that are very hard to debug can happen.
The philosophy of garbage collection is that stuff gets cleaned up when the GC gets arround to it or ram is running out. This is tolerable (though IMO not ideal) for ram but not for most other resources.
The philosophy of C++ destructors and reference counting is that stuff gets cleaned up as soon as it is no longer used. This means it can be used to manage any type of resource.
The result is in GC environments for a lot of objects you end up doing a cleanup step manually. Worse if an object needs a cleanup call it's owner and it's owners owner and so on will also need manual cleanup.
The result is a mess where you have to constantly remember whether any particular object needs manual cleanup or not and a huge ammount of refactoring work if an object that didn't previously need manual cleanup now does so.
Indeed, I remember a girl (I think she was from somewhere in africa) in my first year tutorial group at university (i'm in the UK). If you listened to her speak you would not be able to tell she wasn't british.
However she had very little grasp of english sayings and the like meaning every time someone used one it would trip her up. This made conversing with her really disconcerting.
Afaict undersea cables aren't pure fiber. There is a fiber core which carries the actual data but there are also layers of conductors (not sure if they use copper or some other metal) to carry high voltage power to the repeaters and in shallower waters a layer of metal armoring to reduce the risk of damage.
Like the guy who wrote Hello, World. Completely safe. It is because of both it's triviality and the fact it doesn't deal with untrusted data (or any data).
Real systems are a lot more complex and they often have to deal untrusted data. Noone is perfect and it is almost a certainty that a coder will overlook something or make an incorrect assumption sooner or later. Of course some coders will do it more often than others. If they are lucky they spot it during testing and/or it is not exploitable. If they are unluky they have just introduced a security hole.
You can reduce the bug rate in code by hiring better programmers or by doing a lot more testing and inspection of code, but you quickly get into very high costs and diminishing returns and some bugs still slip through (see: NASA).
C (and some C++ subsets*) has very little checking built into the language. As a result of this it is easy to end up with bugs that allow overwriting memory the code was never meant to even touch and thus allowing injection of code.
*C++ is a huge language (it's not quite a strict superset of C but it's pretty close) with an even bigger standard library. Some constructs in it are much safer than others and so it's vulnerability depends on what subset you work with.
all they have to do is stop investing in our economy and call in all our notes. In a total war situation money only really matters for trading with neutrals, resources in the country can be taken by the government for use in the war effort regardless of if thier ownership is domestic or foriegn. Peoples consumption on non-war activities can be severely curtailed through rationing. While north americas natural and manufacturing resources aren't what they once were they are still pretty substantial afaict.
Do I want people looking at my site to be able to contact me directly. Yes at an email address that I check when i've got time, not at my low traffic important email address and not by phone or in person.
1) Your website has been hacked and is showing a fake IRS "register your details to receive your tax rebate" form. Do you want someone to be able to tell you this Yes
2) Your domain expires soon, competing registrars want to advertise to you to move your domain to them. Hell no, i'm happy enough with the registrars I use at the moment and i'm not going to trust someone who contacts me in that manner anyway.
Here in the UK, private individuals can specifically opt-out of including their personal information in the WHOIS record and that's available through nominet, no matter who your registrar is. I think that only applies to uk domains though, since the sites i'm involved with aren't really country specific and i've had the names for ages anyway i'm kinda stuck with.com/.org/.net .
ICANN can't just unilaterally block a major registrar, because then that registrar's customer's will be adrift, and of course the registrar will tell all of them that it's all ICANN's fault their domains don't work anymore. wouldn't suspending new registrations from a registrar but leaving existing ones alone cause them a great deal of pain without pissing off domain owners too much?
It is bigger than for something that simple. Sure, Mass Effect uses more RAM... However it does a hell of a lot more.
Again the real question is WHY. Storage is cheap. 9GB DVDs are less than a dollar a piece produced in quantity. Harddrives cost $0.10/GB and are dropping fast. Storage is just not a big deal. As such, it doesn't make sense to worry overly much about using it. I'm not saying waste space, but don't worry about trying to squeeze everything down to a minuscule size. Why would you want to waste CPU power on generating content when that CPU power could be used for better physics or AI or whatever?
Like I said, this is neat for a tech demo, but there is no reason to try and pack games down in to tiny sizes. I like all the enriched media that large games bring, and I easily have the HD space to store it.
Like I said, this is neat for a tech demo, but there is no reason to try and pack games down in to tiny sizes. Not quite this tiny I agree but that doesn't mean procedural generation is a bad thing.
The great thing about procedural generation is done right (e.g. on the fly not at loadup time) it should allow you to have massive worlds. Consider a game like GTA but with realisitic sized cities and realistic distances between them. Most of that world could be procedurally generated with just the occasional area overridden to provide locations for the story.
A compression algorithm can be considered as a mapping function that maps the set of all possible input byte sequences to some set of output byte sequences in a one to one manner. The decompression algorithm is then a reverse mapping.
The number of sequences of bytes that are a given length or shorter is fixed. It follows that if the mapping maps some input sequences to shorter output sequences it must also map some input sequences to longer output sequences.
Like Linux kernel is, what, 56 meg or so but obviously isn't remotely that large when compiled. The kernel itself is pretty small but that is simply because the majority of the kernel source code is typically built as modules.
Taking the kernel in debian squeeze as an example the kernel binary package (686 variant) is about 20 megabytes compressed and about 60 installed. The kernel source is about 70 megabytes (of which about 60 are upstream and the remainder debian specific stuff)) compressed and about 350 megabytes extracted.
So your general point stands but your actual figures are somewhat off.
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The vast majority of people buy new phones every 2 years from the carrier.
Hardly surprising when they are paying for them (or a substantial portion of them) whether they want them or not.
I remember it used to be like this in the uk, then one of the providers (I think it was 02) started offering a sim only tarrif that gave you more service for your money than the regular tarrifs and soon enough loads of others followed suit.
"Sycraft-fu eats cats and wears the fur as a decorative suit" is not believable
I dunno, people eat and wear all sorts of whaky stuff.
Not sure what it is like in the US but over here in the UK you can certainly get data only plans intended for use with mobile broadband dongles (but I can't see any reason you couldn't shove the sim in a phone)
It's not that the containers cause fires (though I would guess the welding torches fed from them do from time to time), it's that properties catch fire for a whole number of reasons and those properties sometimes contain gas cylinders (of which acetelene is the nastiest common one but even things like butane and propane can be pretty nasty). Furthermore until the fire brigade can contact the owner they often don't know if cylinders are present and if so what they contain.
Second Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
Really good at convincing the powers that be to buy thier shitware and force it on us yes.
The thing is i'm not going to use a beta or even freshly released version of windows and even if vista's problems have been mostly overcome by better hardware and service packs now as some people claim I don't particularlly feel like learning the quirks of a version that hardly anywhere uses. Nor do I like the fact that there is no version that does not require either activation or a code in the bios.
So for the next couple of years at least i'm going to be staying on XP for any machines that need to run windows. I'm sure many here feel the same.
They abandoned drm on newly sold music. Existing music still has it unless the user pays an upgrade fee (and worse upgrading is all or nothing) and afaict they still have it on music that is given away as part of various promotions and on all thier video content..
There are two issues.
Firstly in the old days we were dealing with a few bored or occasionally vengefull people. Now we are dealing with massive organised crime. They can easilly afford to buy every antivirus product on the market and spend all the time they need to tweak a virus until it no longer gets detected or research new ways to make life harder for the antivirus vendors.
Secondly there is a constant arms race, the viruses are trying to find new ways to hide and the scanner vendors are trying to find ways to fight back against that hiding. The end result is that both sides
There must be something wrong with the under sea cable industry (or at least theor press department) because whenever I read about them I have visions of outages and sabotage
Because it's not something most of us deal with directly (that gets left up to our ISPs/telcos) the only time we tend to hear anything about it is either when there is a major new cable (or more commonly group of cables) or a cable gets damaged and it screws with our internet routing in a big way (remember loads of ISPs will have virtual circuits on any given cable so the damage isn't confined to one ISP).
Given that theese cables are extremely long and the undersea environment isn't exactly friendly it is almost inevitable that they will be damaged and repaired over thier lifetime and when they are damaged it takes days to fix them, over those few days internet will be much slower than normal for anyone whose ISP was relying on the cable in question as the ISP reroutes by less favorable routes.
So it's hardly surprising that most of the news we hear about theese cables is when they break. Still they are far lower latency than satcoms and far easier politically (especially in regions full of unstable countries) than overland cables than the alternative so we live with the occasional downtime.
Well, now we don't have to deal with that difference. LCD HDTVs are made on the same technology as your LCD computer screen, and their interconnects use the same signaling. With an HDTV, you can have all the same resolution you get on a computer, and new consoles are made to take advantage of it.
Though they still suck as monitors because they always seem to blur the image noticably, even with filtering settings set to minimum and a signal in thier native resolution.
note: afaict the configuration tool for the mac pro will let you select impossible combinations, that is it will let you select more cards than there are slots for.
I dunno what would happen if you tried to order such a machine. I guess apple would contact you and tell you that you had ordered an impossible combination and either ask how you wanted to proceed or just reject the order and tell you to try again.
any electronics running as low as 1.5V is going to need to be supplied from a local regulator (either linear or switcher depending on whether the manufacturer cares more about cost or efficiancy) anyway because that is the only way to keep the voltage stable enough.
Notice that this is how PCs are done nowadays, 12V supply from the PSU to local switchers that provide the high current low voltage power needed by the CPU(s) and GPU(s)
the argument could be made that the document was leaked through a different source, run through the algorithm, and coincidentally matched the "signature" of the leaker's copy.
Remember they just have to show "probable cause" to a court to get a search warrant. Once they have that search warrent they can start searching for more direct evidence that you leaked it.
It's completely bogus. If they want to keep data private, then use real cryptography, and validated software/hardware combinations that make the cost of extracting the data in a usable format more expensive than the data it's protecting. The military does it, as to certain businesses, and intelligence agencies around the world. The technology is there, it works, and it's real security.
and it's frightfully expensive, because you have to give everyone who needs access to the data your special locked down terminal. Worse you need to set up a secured environment for that terminal otherwise they could just put thier laptop down next to it and retype the information manually.
use a weak pointer for that (or even a plain old C pointer).
The trouble with plain pointers is they can go stale. If a stale pointer gets inadvertantly written through very bad things that are very hard to debug can happen.
The philosophy of garbage collection is that stuff gets cleaned up when the GC gets arround to it or ram is running out. This is tolerable (though IMO not ideal) for ram but not for most other resources.
The philosophy of C++ destructors and reference counting is that stuff gets cleaned up as soon as it is no longer used. This means it can be used to manage any type of resource.
The result is in GC environments for a lot of objects you end up doing a cleanup step manually. Worse if an object needs a cleanup call it's owner and it's owners owner and so on will also need manual cleanup.
The result is a mess where you have to constantly remember whether any particular object needs manual cleanup or not and a huge ammount of refactoring work if an object that didn't previously need manual cleanup now does so.
Indeed, I remember a girl (I think she was from somewhere in africa) in my first year tutorial group at university (i'm in the UK). If you listened to her speak you would not be able to tell she wasn't british.
However she had very little grasp of english sayings and the like meaning every time someone used one it would trip her up. This made conversing with her really disconcerting.
Afaict undersea cables aren't pure fiber. There is a fiber core which carries the actual data but there are also layers of conductors (not sure if they use copper or some other metal) to carry high voltage power to the repeaters and in shallower waters a layer of metal armoring to reduce the risk of damage.
Like the guy who wrote Hello, World. Completely safe.
It is because of both it's triviality and the fact it doesn't deal with untrusted data (or any data).
Real systems are a lot more complex and they often have to deal untrusted data. Noone is perfect and it is almost a certainty that a coder will overlook something or make an incorrect assumption sooner or later. Of course some coders will do it more often than others. If they are lucky they spot it during testing and/or it is not exploitable. If they are unluky they have just introduced a security hole.
You can reduce the bug rate in code by hiring better programmers or by doing a lot more testing and inspection of code, but you quickly get into very high costs and diminishing returns and some bugs still slip through (see: NASA).
C (and some C++ subsets*) has very little checking built into the language. As a result of this it is easy to end up with bugs that allow overwriting memory the code was never meant to even touch and thus allowing injection of code.
*C++ is a huge language (it's not quite a strict superset of C but it's pretty close) with an even bigger standard library. Some constructs in it are much safer than others and so it's vulnerability depends on what subset you work with.
all they have to do is stop investing in our economy and call in all our notes.
In a total war situation money only really matters for trading with neutrals, resources in the country can be taken by the government for use in the war effort regardless of if thier ownership is domestic or foriegn. Peoples consumption on non-war activities can be severely curtailed through rationing. While north americas natural and manufacturing resources aren't what they once were they are still pretty substantial afaict.
Do I want people looking at my site to be able to contact me directly.
Yes at an email address that I check when i've got time, not at my low traffic important email address and not by phone or in person.
1) Your website has been hacked and is showing a fake IRS "register your details to receive your tax rebate" form. Do you want someone to be able to tell you this
Yes
2) Your domain expires soon, competing registrars want to advertise to you to move your domain to them.
Hell no, i'm happy enough with the registrars I use at the moment and i'm not going to trust someone who contacts me in that manner anyway.
Here in the UK, private individuals can specifically opt-out of including their personal information in the WHOIS record and that's available through nominet, no matter who your registrar is. .com/.org/.net .
I think that only applies to uk domains though, since the sites i'm involved with aren't really country specific and i've had the names for ages anyway i'm kinda stuck with
ICANN can't just unilaterally block a major registrar, because then that registrar's customer's will be adrift, and of course the registrar will tell all of them that it's all ICANN's fault their domains don't work anymore.
wouldn't suspending new registrations from a registrar but leaving existing ones alone cause them a great deal of pain without pissing off domain owners too much?
It is clearly less free than the GPL just as the GPL is less free than BSD.
Whether it is free enough to count as free is a matter of opinion.
It is bigger than for something that simple. Sure, Mass Effect uses more RAM... However it does a hell of a lot more.
Again the real question is WHY. Storage is cheap. 9GB DVDs are less than a dollar a piece produced in quantity. Harddrives cost $0.10/GB and are dropping fast. Storage is just not a big deal. As such, it doesn't make sense to worry overly much about using it. I'm not saying waste space, but don't worry about trying to squeeze everything down to a minuscule size. Why would you want to waste CPU power on generating content when that CPU power could be used for better physics or AI or whatever?
Like I said, this is neat for a tech demo, but there is no reason to try and pack games down in to tiny sizes. I like all the enriched media that large games bring, and I easily have the HD space to store it.
Like I said, this is neat for a tech demo, but there is no reason to try and pack games down in to tiny sizes.
Not quite this tiny I agree but that doesn't mean procedural generation is a bad thing.
The great thing about procedural generation is done right (e.g. on the fly not at loadup time) it should allow you to have massive worlds. Consider a game like GTA but with realisitic sized cities and realistic distances between them. Most of that world could be procedurally generated with just the occasional area overridden to provide locations for the story.
A compression algorithm can be considered as a mapping function that maps the set of all possible input byte sequences to some set of output byte sequences in a one to one manner. The decompression algorithm is then a reverse mapping.
The number of sequences of bytes that are a given length or shorter is fixed. It follows that if the mapping maps some input sequences to shorter output sequences it must also map some input sequences to longer output sequences.
Like Linux kernel is, what, 56 meg or so but obviously isn't remotely that large when compiled.
The kernel itself is pretty small but that is simply because the majority of the kernel source code is typically built as modules.
Taking the kernel in debian squeeze as an example the kernel binary package (686 variant) is about 20 megabytes compressed and about 60 installed. The kernel source is about 70 megabytes (of which about 60 are upstream and the remainder debian specific stuff)) compressed and about 350 megabytes extracted.
So your general point stands but your actual figures are somewhat off.