What truly shocked me about the PS3 was to find that attached controllers do not appear to charge unless the console is powered on.
You are joking right? Using the PS3 to actually charge your PS3 controller is IMHO stupid and wasteful of electricity unless you are actually playing a game and then there is the inconvenience of the USB charging cable. The best way of charging your PS3 controller is via the USB cable by plugging it into your PC or laptop (takes about an hour to fully charge) or even a USB mains charging station (some mobile phone USB chargers may not work if they do great). By doing this you can save on your electrical bill. My laptop consumes less than 10 W of power with the lid down and will still charge my controller(s) - yes I do have two controllers as well as two USB cables and you don't need the Sony branded ones either any standard USB to mini USB cable will work.
If you charge your controller on something other than your PS3 you will see all four leds flash and when they stop flashing the controller is fully charged, however you do have to "pair" your controller with your PS3 again which takes about 10 seconds. That is connect your PS3 controller to your PS3 via the USB cable, switch on your PS3 and then press the centre button then when the flashing stops (about 5 seconds) remove the cable and your are good for about 10 to 15 hours plus of gaming.
Of course the above tip will be wasted on people who 1) can't read or 2) don't care since they don't pay for the electricity consumed.
4 quarts or 8 pints or 16 cups. It's part of the cool new power-of-two based measurement system that makes many everyday tasks much easier than the old power-of-ten system.
Depends which country you are living in. Most countries use the Metric system where the "litre" is the standard volume measurement. When someone asks "What's a gallon" you need to know if they are talking about the US or the Imperial Gallon where 1 US gallon equals 0.833 Imp gallon. Of course "quarts" and "pints" are normally related to the Imperial (UK) measurements so the US versions are relatively smaller. As for "cups" (0.5 UK pints) the metric system can use these but they are normally 250 ml.
Lets bring in "pinch", "hogshead", firkin", "drops" and "teaspoon" and confuse the issue no end:) Is it any wonder most countries in the world have shifted to the Metric System.
Even with normal use I doubt they will last long. Or stay clean.
A few one second bursts of a spray can by a Graffiti artist? and by-by screen. A determined person could deface all 250 screens in a few hours unless cameras are installed and even if that was the case that would only deter a few.
Tell that to a senior manager who created some valuable data on a particular day then "accidentally" deleted it the next day. Usually nightly backups of user data is done inclemently and as such the overall backup capacity is fairly small. It also makes the IT department look "magical" when they can actually recover said valuable data.
For databases a full backup every week is usually adequate (depends on policy), however the archive logs should be backed up daily at the very least. I always recommend at least 1 to 2 weeks of archive logs should be kept on-line which makes for faster recovery in case the database gets corrupted (rare but it can happen). On some Enterprise Databases hourly or even immediate archive log backups are mandated.
From a backup perspective for taxation purposes "a VERY long time" is seven years. For some Government and even Industry requirements "a VERY long time" can be anything from 10 years till the human race dies out. Personally I would never assume a tape could retain recoverable data much longer than 10 years so the best way to retain data is to run full backups, incremental backups and archival backups (3 to 7 years) with data kept on the computer till it no longer is required. Of course decisions like this are dependent on what is required for the data on the computer.
One major problem in archiving data is how do you recover the data again particularly if the company that sold you a backup solution no longer exists or the the vendor no longer supports the recovery software. This is why IMHO open standards for backup solutions are the best, however many backup companies would disagree with me.
Once again, Reel-To-Reel computers are no longer anachronistic in 60's Sci-Fi shows.
Err! Yes they are anachronistic. No one in the IT industry uses reel to reel tapes any more. Tape cartridges for backup purposes are very much the norm and have been the norm from the mid to late 1990's on and are still in use today. One major item that has been added to the Enterprise backup solution is the Virtual Tape Library which really is a collection of RAID disks and inbuilt software that allows for many machines to backup to the one device and remain on disk for say 1 day to a week (recovery from a VTL is very fast) depending on its capacity and the amount of data to backup before being archived to tape. The cost for this type of backup solution this is normally in the region of $20k to $10m depending on your backup requirements.
The biggest cost to the enterprise is actually the backup media with cartridges costing from $22 up for 800GB to 1.6TB so having cartridges having 6TB capacity would be welcomed (depending on price of course). With some companies actually backing up Peta-Bytes on a daily basis the cost and capacity of the media costs can be very significant.
Yes gone are the days of the reel to reel tapes and the multiple blinking lights.
Just make your magnetic tape on a nitrocellulose base.
I was working for a Government scientific company back in the 1980's and was asked to purchase a years worth of backup tapes so I was pointed to a Government preferred company to purchase the reel to reel tapes (max capacity 100MB - not bad for the day). For a year the tapes worked flawlessly then the substrate started to flake off rendering the tapes useless. It seams either someone got a kick back or the people who make the recommendations for preferred Government purchases really stuffed up. Needless to say when we found out we had to repurchase tapes. Fortunately we were never asked to recover data from those tapes so it was not that serious, however it could have been.
If they were cheap, free of drm and free of region restrictions i would have lots of them.
The price of DVD and BD movies has dropped dramaticly over the last few years and for older movies the price between DB and DVD moves is normally a few cents. It is only new releases that you seen a huge price (20% plus) difference, As for DRM you do realise that DVD's have DRM as well and have more regions than BD. It is just that DVD's have had their DRM broken and you can buy region unlocked DVD players. I sometimes buy my PS3 software from overseas and have never had region lock issues. As for moves I have never purchased a BD or even DVD movie although I do rent on occasion. As for pirating I could do that but I could not be bothered waiting for the download since I have better things to do with my time.
The players would be considerably cheaper if they were not forced to both license and implement the drm schemes
As for the argument that BD players are too expensive you can get BD players under AU$100 (about the same for the US$) now although you can get DVD players at one third that but that is only a one-time purchase and if you have a HDTV you would be silly (or bloody minded) not to purchase one. Of course if you don't have a HDTV then purchasing a BD player is rather a waste.
I imagine the time and money spent on implementing these ridiculous schemes is massively more than what the cracking groups expend to break them
If you have a BD player you can play BD movies as well as unscaled DVD movies. What the movie makers are trying to prevent is copying of the media and selling that copy to the public. When DVD movies first came out it was quite expensive (burner and raw disk) to actually pirate a movie, however over time the price of the raw DVD disk and burner dropped and within a few years it is so easy to copy and re-burn a DVD movie. At the moment BD movies are IMHO still more expensive in capacity, media and burner, however that price is dropping dramatically.
If I want to copy a BD movie on my PC I would insert the BD disk in my PC BD player and using ripping software save that raw rip on my hard disk which would be in the order of 15GB to 35GB, then using software reprocess that into a container and then burn that onto a BD disk. This would take me quite a few hours to do and my machine is an i7. Personally I would rather stick that BD movie into my PS3 and watch that same move on my 55" 3D TV. Still if you are part of the "Green Parrot on Shoulder Brigade" I suppose you would be peeved with the DRM that BD disks have over the broken DRM on DVD's.
If blu-ray disks were $5 each I would have hundreds of them.
As it is, I have none.
A little Googling and I can find BD-R 25GB disk for AU$80/50 (that is AU$1.60 per disk). Yes you can get DVD 's (4.7GB) for as little as AU$0.22 per disk which works out cheaper however you do need over 5 DVD's to every BD-R disk so there is not that much of a price difference. One really big plus of BD over DVD is the fact the coating on the BD makes any scratching very difficult which is definitely not the case for DVD.
I have noticed that many older movies that are on BD are almost the same price as their DVD counterparts however if you have a HDTV the dollar extra is worth it especially considering the durability of BD disk compared to the DVD.
Personally I have never purchased a BD movie but then again neither have I ever purchased a DVD movie in the whole time movies have been available on both media, I think that is due to the fact that I rarely watch a movie more than once, with that in mind I don't mind renting a movie if I really want to watch one and most rental places in my area have BD or DVD rental at the same price. When backing up my computer I use a portable hard drive not BD or DVD disks since the overall capacity is too small.
Note: AU$1.00 equals US$1.05 so they are fairly close.
That is why I normally record a show and then when I do watch it I can skip the adds. Fortunately I don't watch much TV since I now find most shows on "Foxtel" are repeats and those new shows are basically a rehash of old shows. Start charging for skipping adds and I will stop my subscription.
I do remember when Foxtel came out and it was great that there were no commercials which was a massive improvement over Free to Air TV. Today while Foxtex has more channels and IMHO less choice there is little diference in the length of commercials for a given show on either Free to Air or Cable. I now spend most of my free time which a few years back would be spent watching TV either playing computer/console games or just surfing the web.
Even though many web pages have commercials I find it very easy to ingnore them and just read or view what I want. I wonder when someone comes up with a patent that determins if you the viewer of a web page has actually looked at the commercial and have some means of charging by micro payment for skipping the add. BTW this could be done if you allow monitoring of your web cam if you are stupid enough to have it activated while surfing the Web.
The difference is that the antialiasing filters are much simpler and have a gentler roll-off when sampling at 96kHz. The high-order filters necessary to ensure adequate attenuation at Nyquist and above when sampling at the lower rates have this tendency to ring.
I suggest doing a basic electronics course or even an Electrical engineering degree before posting a comment like this.
You don't. The whole point of sudo is that it gives you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user.
sudo, is used to run as root. The point is to allow the user to do a quick operation with root permissions, then go back to running as a normal user. It doesn't "give you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user."
No "sudo" is a means of adding elevated privilege to specific tools that will be used by trusted non System Admin users. It was never meant to be used as a means of allowing root access to a machine by just entering the user's own password. In many corporate environments using sudo to become root (unless specifically cleared with the Security Group) is a sure fire way of loosing your job.
The best way of using "sudo" is not to use it unless there is a compelling reason to do so (again see my corporate comments). As the System Admin on a home machine you should only use the root password to do System Admin tasks and the user password and the root password should be different.
I am quite sure many people will disagree with what I have said but I have never yet had to back-down on the above comments over the last 21 years.
Joining a wifi network also changes behavior for all users though, and so does "shutdown -r now". I doubt you want to ask an administrator to reboot your laptop:-)
Joining a wireless network is actually under user control for Fedora 15/16 which is very useful for a Laptop user who has to access different networks without needing the root password. As for shutting down the machine it is a very simple matter to power off a machine if you have access to it. In fact most (if not all) distributions of Linux allow the user to gracefully shutdown their Laptop via a GUI although running the "shutdown" command is still reserved for the System Admin.
only the person who mounted the CD should have permission to eject the CD.
I agree with this sentence, but I still need clarification: If two people are logged into a computer, and a CD is inserted, and the CD is mounted automatically, who mounted the CD?
Does it matter? If a CD is mounted and a user is accessing the device it is difficult to un-mount. In a corporate environment (ie. server) normally root mounts the CD for specific tasks and then un-mounts it when finished. For a home Linux machine (ie. laptop/PC) the "eject" command will actually eject the CD and you don't have to be root to do this. Of course this won't work if someone or their application is accessing the CD mount point.
For Linux and some Unix machines you can run "lsof" on the CD mount-point to find who is actually using the CD.
On any Linux/Unix system you need to be root to add applications or change configuration files, however there is nothing to stop you adding applications or even changing configuration files providing you as a normal user has the privilege to do so which normally means you can write into any directory owned by yourself. This concept has been available in Linux/Unix almost from inception.
The problem Linus seems to have is he finds that he would like to allow users to add printers without elevated privilege. Personally I don't have an issue with this however if you have a server (and yes a Linux/Solaris laptop/netbook/PC/tablet can be easily made into a server) then you want some control on what printers are added (or not added) to the server. Allowing all users access to change printers can be done, all that is needed is to modify the printer (normally CUPS) program to allow for system and user local printer setup. Of course the modifier would have to be careful not to compromise security.
I see this on Macs a lot. If you want to install anything, you have to type an administrator's password.
In theory, that's great. But in effect, you are giving that installer root access. So if I understand correctly, that installer could be putting any amount of spyware (or whatever) into your computer and nearly perfectly cover its tracks.
You are quite correct a Criminal System Admin could compromise a system, however on any corporate system you have to assume the designated System Admin(s) have some integrity and won't deliberately do the wrong thing. It all boils down to trust. If you don't trust your System Admin you may as well give up on having a computer.
As for giving out the root password to non System Admin users you are compromising your computing system. I am quite sure I will read how "sudo" (or other such division of privilege tool) is the best solution. My answer is "no it is not".
Personally on my machines I never use "sudo" although on corporate machines I sometimes have under my control I only use "sudo" to allow designated users access to tasks specific to their corporate requirements such as specific monitoring tasks which are normally required for professional databases such as Oracle and SAP and only after all requests are vetted by the corporate security team and appropriate change requests have been raised and approved. For people to be allowed "sudo" root access on any machines I control I want the reasons in writing which will be passed to the relevant security team where it normally is rejected.
The problem is that file storage is so dad-gum expensive these days. 15cents a gb at Amazon makes it $150 per month for a terabyte of storage. You're better off buying the 1TB drives yourself and rotating it to an employee's house every night.
Sure there are some cheaper alternatives (nimbus.io) but even at 6cents a GB with Nimbus, you're still better off buying the external drives yourself.
Buying a 1TB drive for your backup may be fine for your home computer (I do that myself) but tell that to companies who backup peta-bytes of data a day. Don't know them try your local Telco's. Even local Councils require backups of many TB per week.
BTW. Can your 1TB backup solution allow for recovery of data that is 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months even up to 7 years or more old? By law many companies are required to keep data up to 7 years old.
A professional backup and recovery solution can range from a few 10's of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars with on-going costs ranging from a few hundred dollars per month to many thousands of dollars per month. It is not cheap but all companies must ask the question of "What price do you put on your data?". Those business that don't answer the question correctly and plan accordingly with the appropriately allocated budget are doomed to failure.
Good. Maybe this will teach future political leaders that censorship is a bad idea.
Oh who am I kidding, these idiots never learn anything.
Personally I am not against censorship per say, however there are certain classifications (the so called R, X and PG rating come to mind) which if properly implemented are quite reasonable. Unfortunately you always have parent groups who are not satisfied with any type of censorship classification who IMHO don't want to take responsibility for what their children see, hear and play.
In Australia we only have a R15 rating for video games, even though lobby groups have been pushing for an R18 rating for years there are always some "Holier than Thou" who oppose this by giving all sorts of "Think of the Children" excuses. Even with the stupid R15 category it is still illegal to sell to a person under this age group and the seller can be fined and I assume that would be the case in all countries. Of course that can't stop the kid from winging to his parents to get the game for him, but that's another story.
Putting laws in place of perfectly good existing laws seems to be an international pastime amongst politicians.
My eyesight is too crappy to take advantage of that. I don't think I would personally pay extra for that resolution.
The resolution would be great for a 55 inch or bigger screen but for a 9 to 10 inch tablet (assuming the screen size of the iPad 3) it would be wasted. Even a 720p (1280 x 720) resolution for the iPad 3 IMHO is still a waste since the majority of people wont be able to resolve that pixel density on a small screen. Of course you are going to get people say they can do it, you know the people who can hear above 25kHz:)
And every major version update still fucks up all my video card configurations (not to mention a bunch of other stuff). Try explaining to your wife over the phone: "Sorry baby, you shouldn't have hit update while I was at work. It's simple, just open up the terminal on the desktop, SSH to the laptop and replace xorg.conf with xorg.conf-backup". Her responding being, "This computer is stupid. Why can't we use windows like normal people?".
Wow you let your non-technical wife run updates you are brave:)
Linux suffers from being suffocated by geeks who really don't grasp that the user doesn't want to have to think, the user wants a magic box that adds value to their lives. This is why things like Steam took off and 'app stores'.
If you want to use the Linux command line (you know like the geeks do and and computer users back in the 1970/80/90's did) you could use "apt-get" (Debian and it's derivatives based) or "yum" (Redhat and it's derivatives based), however you can also use GUI tools as well and select packages to delete, install or upgrade which are so intuitive a 5 year old can use. Unfortunately over the last 30 years it appears that the so called "dumbing down of computers" has reduced most computer users knowledge to that of a 3 year old, however all is not lost you can even automate the update process so the very idea of thinking is removed:).
When you talk about Linux or even Unix you only have to look at the 100's of millions of smart phones on the market and most people seem to be quite happy with them especially with upgrading as well as application installation and removal. Even tablets (both Linux and Unix) appear to be selling well and these are more closer to the Linux/Apple PC than most people are aware. What can be done with a smart phone or tablet can also be done and is with a Linux or Apple (Unix) based PC and under a nice GUI if you want.
There is more to being an IT manager than just presenting pretty graphs.
Any professional IT manager should be capable of understanding technical matters raised by his colleagues (the word "underlings" is not something you should use in an IT environment) and how to present that information to non technical people in words or graphs that they can understand. In fact the IT manager must have a firm grasp on IT related matters which actually includes software, hardware, networks as well as being aware what each department in the firm does and their requirements. In addition the IT manager must be current with advances and changes to IT in that he/she can make informed recommendations as to their implementation or non-implementation.
This is not to say that a professional IT manger must be some sort of super guru, in fact they actually depend heavily on colleagues who have more specialized knowledge and can take that input and present it in a form that non technical managers can understand although each department manager must have some knowledge of what their department does and it's requirements be it IT or otherwise. Having an IT manager that has limited computer knowledge is asking for that company to stagnate although in the case of small companies they normally just just follow in the footsteps of larger companies or just hire consultants and implement what is recommended.
Personally an IT manager in a suit is someone I would look down on since casual clothing is much more practical and I am speaking from working with firms that have tens of thousands on employees and many departments. In fact many department heads I know prefer casual clothes to a suit so meetings while formal are fairly relaxed although mobiles are normally switched off or left in silent mode.
C is great but really - those curly braces may seem like a sexy thing in a geeky way but they seriously decrease the legibility of the code. They may have been a poor design decision.
No the curly brackets in C and C++ are actually a very good design idea however if you don't like them you can easily replace them with "begin" and "end" or whatever words or symbols you want for a delimiter. The problem with doing that is your code is going to look strange to another programmer. Still if it's your own code and you are not going to have other people looking at it then you can do what you want.
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What truly shocked me about the PS3 was to find that attached controllers do not appear to charge unless the console is powered on.
You are joking right? Using the PS3 to actually charge your PS3 controller is IMHO stupid and wasteful of electricity unless you are actually playing a game and then there is the inconvenience of the USB charging cable. The best way of charging your PS3 controller is via the USB cable by plugging it into your PC or laptop (takes about an hour to fully charge) or even a USB mains charging station (some mobile phone USB chargers may not work if they do great). By doing this you can save on your electrical bill. My laptop consumes less than 10 W of power with the lid down and will still charge my controller(s) - yes I do have two controllers as well as two USB cables and you don't need the Sony branded ones either any standard USB to mini USB cable will work.
If you charge your controller on something other than your PS3 you will see all four leds flash and when they stop flashing the controller is fully charged, however you do have to "pair" your controller with your PS3 again which takes about 10 seconds. That is connect your PS3 controller to your PS3 via the USB cable, switch on your PS3 and then press the centre button then when the flashing stops (about 5 seconds) remove the cable and your are good for about 10 to 15 hours plus of gaming.
Of course the above tip will be wasted on people who 1) can't read or 2) don't care since they don't pay for the electricity consumed.
4 quarts or 8 pints or 16 cups. It's part of the cool new power-of-two based measurement system that makes many everyday tasks much easier than the old power-of-ten system.
Depends which country you are living in. Most countries use the Metric system where the "litre" is the standard volume measurement. When someone asks "What's a gallon" you need to know if they are talking about the US or the Imperial Gallon where 1 US gallon equals 0.833 Imp gallon. Of course "quarts" and "pints" are normally related to the Imperial (UK) measurements so the US versions are relatively smaller. As for "cups" (0.5 UK pints) the metric system can use these but they are normally 250 ml.
:) Is it any wonder most countries in the world have shifted to the Metric System.
Lets bring in "pinch", "hogshead", firkin", "drops" and "teaspoon" and confuse the issue no end
Even with normal use I doubt they will last long. Or stay clean.
A few one second bursts of a spray can by a Graffiti artist? and by-by screen. A determined person could deface all 250 screens in a few hours unless cameras are installed and even if that was the case that would only deter a few.
What's the point of nightly backups?
Tell that to a senior manager who created some valuable data on a particular day then "accidentally" deleted it the next day. Usually nightly backups of user data is done inclemently and as such the overall backup capacity is fairly small. It also makes the IT department look "magical" when they can actually recover said valuable data.
For databases a full backup every week is usually adequate (depends on policy), however the archive logs should be backed up daily at the very least. I always recommend at least 1 to 2 weeks of archive logs should be kept on-line which makes for faster recovery in case the database gets corrupted (rare but it can happen). On some Enterprise Databases hourly or even immediate archive log backups are mandated.
From a backup perspective for taxation purposes "a VERY long time" is seven years. For some Government and even Industry requirements "a VERY long time" can be anything from 10 years till the human race dies out. Personally I would never assume a tape could retain recoverable data much longer than 10 years so the best way to retain data is to run full backups, incremental backups and archival backups (3 to 7 years) with data kept on the computer till it no longer is required. Of course decisions like this are dependent on what is required for the data on the computer.
One major problem in archiving data is how do you recover the data again particularly if the company that sold you a backup solution no longer exists or the the vendor no longer supports the recovery software. This is why IMHO open standards for backup solutions are the best, however many backup companies would disagree with me.
Once again, Reel-To-Reel computers are no longer anachronistic in 60's Sci-Fi shows.
Err! Yes they are anachronistic. No one in the IT industry uses reel to reel tapes any more. Tape cartridges for backup purposes are very much the norm and have been the norm from the mid to late 1990's on and are still in use today. One major item that has been added to the Enterprise backup solution is the Virtual Tape Library which really is a collection of RAID disks and inbuilt software that allows for many machines to backup to the one device and remain on disk for say 1 day to a week (recovery from a VTL is very fast) depending on its capacity and the amount of data to backup before being archived to tape. The cost for this type of backup solution this is normally in the region of $20k to $10m depending on your backup requirements.
The biggest cost to the enterprise is actually the backup media with cartridges costing from $22 up for 800GB to 1.6TB so having cartridges having 6TB capacity would be welcomed (depending on price of course). With some companies actually backing up Peta-Bytes on a daily basis the cost and capacity of the media costs can be very significant.
Yes gone are the days of the reel to reel tapes and the multiple blinking lights.
Just make your magnetic tape on a nitrocellulose base.
I was working for a Government scientific company back in the 1980's and was asked to purchase a years worth of backup tapes so I was pointed to a Government preferred company to purchase the reel to reel tapes (max capacity 100MB - not bad for the day). For a year the tapes worked flawlessly then the substrate started to flake off rendering the tapes useless. It seams either someone got a kick back or the people who make the recommendations for preferred Government purchases really stuffed up. Needless to say when we found out we had to repurchase tapes. Fortunately we were never asked to recover data from those tapes so it was not that serious, however it could have been.
If they were cheap, free of drm and free of region restrictions i would have lots of them.
The price of DVD and BD movies has dropped dramaticly over the last few years and for older movies the price between DB and DVD moves is normally a few cents. It is only new releases that you seen a huge price (20% plus) difference, As for DRM you do realise that DVD's have DRM as well and have more regions than BD. It is just that DVD's have had their DRM broken and you can buy region unlocked DVD players. I sometimes buy my PS3 software from overseas and have never had region lock issues. As for moves I have never purchased a BD or even DVD movie although I do rent on occasion. As for pirating I could do that but I could not be bothered waiting for the download since I have better things to do with my time.
The players would be considerably cheaper if they were not forced to both license and implement the drm schemes
As for the argument that BD players are too expensive you can get BD players under AU$100 (about the same for the US$) now although you can get DVD players at one third that but that is only a one-time purchase and if you have a HDTV you would be silly (or bloody minded) not to purchase one. Of course if you don't have a HDTV then purchasing a BD player is rather a waste.
I imagine the time and money spent on implementing these ridiculous schemes is massively more than what the cracking groups expend to break them
If you have a BD player you can play BD movies as well as unscaled DVD movies. What the movie makers are trying to prevent is copying of the media and selling that copy to the public. When DVD movies first came out it was quite expensive (burner and raw disk) to actually pirate a movie, however over time the price of the raw DVD disk and burner dropped and within a few years it is so easy to copy and re-burn a DVD movie. At the moment BD movies are IMHO still more expensive in capacity, media and burner, however that price is dropping dramatically.
If I want to copy a BD movie on my PC I would insert the BD disk in my PC BD player and using ripping software save that raw rip on my hard disk which would be in the order of 15GB to 35GB, then using software reprocess that into a container and then burn that onto a BD disk. This would take me quite a few hours to do and my machine is an i7. Personally I would rather stick that BD movie into my PS3 and watch that same move on my 55" 3D TV. Still if you are part of the "Green Parrot on Shoulder Brigade" I suppose you would be peeved with the DRM that BD disks have over the broken DRM on DVD's.
If blu-ray disks were $5 each I would have hundreds of them.
As it is, I have none.
A little Googling and I can find BD-R 25GB disk for AU$80/50 (that is AU$1.60 per disk). Yes you can get DVD 's (4.7GB) for as little as AU$0.22 per disk which works out cheaper however you do need over 5 DVD's to every BD-R disk so there is not that much of a price difference. One really big plus of BD over DVD is the fact the coating on the BD makes any scratching very difficult which is definitely not the case for DVD.
I have noticed that many older movies that are on BD are almost the same price as their DVD counterparts however if you have a HDTV the dollar extra is worth it especially considering the durability of BD disk compared to the DVD.
Personally I have never purchased a BD movie but then again neither have I ever purchased a DVD movie in the whole time movies have been available on both media, I think that is due to the fact that I rarely watch a movie more than once, with that in mind I don't mind renting a movie if I really want to watch one and most rental places in my area have BD or DVD rental at the same price. When backing up my computer I use a portable hard drive not BD or DVD disks since the overall capacity is too small.
Note: AU$1.00 equals US$1.05 so they are fairly close.
That is why I normally record a show and then when I do watch it I can skip the adds. Fortunately I don't watch much TV since I now find most shows on "Foxtel" are repeats and those new shows are basically a rehash of old shows. Start charging for skipping adds and I will stop my subscription.
I do remember when Foxtel came out and it was great that there were no commercials which was a massive improvement over Free to Air TV. Today while Foxtex has more channels and IMHO less choice there is little diference in the length of commercials for a given show on either Free to Air or Cable. I now spend most of my free time which a few years back would be spent watching TV either playing computer/console games or just surfing the web.
Even though many web pages have commercials I find it very easy to ingnore them and just read or view what I want. I wonder when someone comes up with a patent that determins if you the viewer of a web page has actually looked at the commercial and have some means of charging by micro payment for skipping the add. BTW this could be done if you allow monitoring of your web cam if you are stupid enough to have it activated while surfing the Web.
The difference is that the antialiasing filters are much simpler and have a gentler roll-off when sampling at 96kHz. The high-order filters necessary to ensure adequate attenuation at Nyquist and above when sampling at the lower rates have this tendency to ring.
I suggest doing a basic electronics course or even an Electrical engineering degree before posting a comment like this.
You don't. The whole point of sudo is that it gives you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user.
sudo, is used to run as root. The point is to allow the user to do a quick operation with root permissions, then go back to running as a normal user. It doesn't "give you fine-grained control over the privileges of each user."
No "sudo" is a means of adding elevated privilege to specific tools that will be used by trusted non System Admin users. It was never meant to be used as a means of allowing root access to a machine by just entering the user's own password. In many corporate environments using sudo to become root (unless specifically cleared with the Security Group) is a sure fire way of loosing your job.
The best way of using "sudo" is not to use it unless there is a compelling reason to do so (again see my corporate comments). As the System Admin on a home machine you should only use the root password to do System Admin tasks and the user password and the root password should be different.
I am quite sure many people will disagree with what I have said but I have never yet had to back-down on the above comments over the last 21 years.
Joining a wifi network also changes behavior for all users though, and so does "shutdown -r now". I doubt you want to ask an administrator to reboot your laptop :-)
Joining a wireless network is actually under user control for Fedora 15/16 which is very useful for a Laptop user who has to access different networks without needing the root password. As for shutting down the machine it is a very simple matter to power off a machine if you have access to it. In fact most (if not all) distributions of Linux allow the user to gracefully shutdown their Laptop via a GUI although running the "shutdown" command is still reserved for the System Admin.
Are you sure you understand how X works?
Mounting a CD drive or any mountable device for that matter has nothing to do with X11.
only the person who mounted the CD should have permission to eject the CD.
I agree with this sentence, but I still need clarification: If two people are logged into a computer, and a CD is inserted, and the CD is mounted automatically, who mounted the CD?
Does it matter? If a CD is mounted and a user is accessing the device it is difficult to un-mount. In a corporate environment (ie. server) normally root mounts the CD for specific tasks and then un-mounts it when finished. For a home Linux machine (ie. laptop/PC) the "eject" command will actually eject the CD and you don't have to be root to do this. Of course this won't work if someone or their application is accessing the CD mount point.
For Linux and some Unix machines you can run "lsof" on the CD mount-point to find who is actually using the CD.
The problem Linus seems to have is he finds that he would like to allow users to add printers without elevated privilege. Personally I don't have an issue with this however if you have a server (and yes a Linux/Solaris laptop/netbook/PC/tablet can be easily made into a server) then you want some control on what printers are added (or not added) to the server. Allowing all users access to change printers can be done, all that is needed is to modify the printer (normally CUPS) program to allow for system and user local printer setup. Of course the modifier would have to be careful not to compromise security.
I see this on Macs a lot. If you want to install anything, you have to type an administrator's password.
In theory, that's great. But in effect, you are giving that installer root access. So if I understand correctly, that installer could be putting any amount of spyware (or whatever) into your computer and nearly perfectly cover its tracks.
You are quite correct a Criminal System Admin could compromise a system, however on any corporate system you have to assume the designated System Admin(s) have some integrity and won't deliberately do the wrong thing. It all boils down to trust. If you don't trust your System Admin you may as well give up on having a computer.
As for giving out the root password to non System Admin users you are compromising your computing system. I am quite sure I will read how "sudo" (or other such division of privilege tool) is the best solution. My answer is "no it is not".
Personally on my machines I never use "sudo" although on corporate machines I sometimes have under my control I only use "sudo" to allow designated users access to tasks specific to their corporate requirements such as specific monitoring tasks which are normally required for professional databases such as Oracle and SAP and only after all requests are vetted by the corporate security team and appropriate change requests have been raised and approved. For people to be allowed "sudo" root access on any machines I control I want the reasons in writing which will be passed to the relevant security team where it normally is rejected.
The problem is that file storage is so dad-gum expensive these days. 15cents a gb at Amazon makes it $150 per month for a terabyte of storage. You're better off buying the 1TB drives yourself and rotating it to an employee's house every night. Sure there are some cheaper alternatives (nimbus.io) but even at 6cents a GB with Nimbus, you're still better off buying the external drives yourself.
Buying a 1TB drive for your backup may be fine for your home computer (I do that myself) but tell that to companies who backup peta-bytes of data a day. Don't know them try your local Telco's. Even local Councils require backups of many TB per week.
BTW. Can your 1TB backup solution allow for recovery of data that is 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months even up to 7 years or more old? By law many companies are required to keep data up to 7 years old.
A professional backup and recovery solution can range from a few 10's of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars with on-going costs ranging from a few hundred dollars per month to many thousands of dollars per month. It is not cheap but all companies must ask the question of "What price do you put on your data?". Those business that don't answer the question correctly and plan accordingly with the appropriately allocated budget are doomed to failure.
Good. Maybe this will teach future political leaders that censorship is a bad idea.
Oh who am I kidding, these idiots never learn anything.
Personally I am not against censorship per say, however there are certain classifications (the so called R, X and PG rating come to mind) which if properly implemented are quite reasonable. Unfortunately you always have parent groups who are not satisfied with any type of censorship classification who IMHO don't want to take responsibility for what their children see, hear and play.
In Australia we only have a R15 rating for video games, even though lobby groups have been pushing for an R18 rating for years there are always some "Holier than Thou" who oppose this by giving all sorts of "Think of the Children" excuses. Even with the stupid R15 category it is still illegal to sell to a person under this age group and the seller can be fined and I assume that would be the case in all countries. Of course that can't stop the kid from winging to his parents to get the game for him, but that's another story.
Putting laws in place of perfectly good existing laws seems to be an international pastime amongst politicians.
My eyesight is too crappy to take advantage of that. I don't think I would personally pay extra for that resolution.
The resolution would be great for a 55 inch or bigger screen but for a 9 to 10 inch tablet (assuming the screen size of the iPad 3) it would be wasted. Even a 720p (1280 x 720) resolution for the iPad 3 IMHO is still a waste since the majority of people wont be able to resolve that pixel density on a small screen. Of course you are going to get people say they can do it, you know the people who can hear above 25kHz :)
And every major version update still fucks up all my video card configurations (not to mention a bunch of other stuff). Try explaining to your wife over the phone: "Sorry baby, you shouldn't have hit update while I was at work. It's simple, just open up the terminal on the desktop, SSH to the laptop and replace xorg.conf with xorg.conf-backup". Her responding being, "This computer is stupid. Why can't we use windows like normal people?".
Wow you let your non-technical wife run updates you are brave :)
Linux suffers from being suffocated by geeks who really don't grasp that the user doesn't want to have to think, the user wants a magic box that adds value to their lives. This is why things like Steam took off and 'app stores'.
If you want to use the Linux command line (you know like the geeks do and and computer users back in the 1970/80/90's did) you could use "apt-get" (Debian and it's derivatives based) or "yum" (Redhat and it's derivatives based), however you can also use GUI tools as well and select packages to delete, install or upgrade which are so intuitive a 5 year old can use. Unfortunately over the last 30 years it appears that the so called "dumbing down of computers" has reduced most computer users knowledge to that of a 3 year old, however all is not lost you can even automate the update process so the very idea of thinking is removed :).
When you talk about Linux or even Unix you only have to look at the 100's of millions of smart phones on the market and most people seem to be quite happy with them especially with upgrading as well as application installation and removal. Even tablets (both Linux and Unix) appear to be selling well and these are more closer to the Linux/Apple PC than most people are aware. What can be done with a smart phone or tablet can also be done and is with a Linux or Apple (Unix) based PC and under a nice GUI if you want.
There is more to being an IT manager than just presenting pretty graphs.
Any professional IT manager should be capable of understanding technical matters raised by his colleagues (the word "underlings" is not something you should use in an IT environment) and how to present that information to non technical people in words or graphs that they can understand. In fact the IT manager must have a firm grasp on IT related matters which actually includes software, hardware, networks as well as being aware what each department in the firm does and their requirements. In addition the IT manager must be current with advances and changes to IT in that he/she can make informed recommendations as to their implementation or non-implementation.
This is not to say that a professional IT manger must be some sort of super guru, in fact they actually depend heavily on colleagues who have more specialized knowledge and can take that input and present it in a form that non technical managers can understand although each department manager must have some knowledge of what their department does and it's requirements be it IT or otherwise. Having an IT manager that has limited computer knowledge is asking for that company to stagnate although in the case of small companies they normally just just follow in the footsteps of larger companies or just hire consultants and implement what is recommended.
Personally an IT manager in a suit is someone I would look down on since casual clothing is much more practical and I am speaking from working with firms that have tens of thousands on employees and many departments. In fact many department heads I know prefer casual clothes to a suit so meetings while formal are fairly relaxed although mobiles are normally switched off or left in silent mode.
Shush! we don't want the Muggles finding out :)
C is great but really - those curly braces may seem like a sexy thing in a geeky way but they seriously decrease the legibility of the code. They may have been a poor design decision.
No the curly brackets in C and C++ are actually a very good design idea however if you don't like them you can easily replace them with "begin" and "end" or whatever words or symbols you want for a delimiter. The problem with doing that is your code is going to look strange to another programmer. Still if it's your own code and you are not going to have other people looking at it then you can do what you want.
And if the CEO of RedHat didn't travel to Munich to convince the city to convert to RedHat, he's an idiot.
Why would the CEO of Readhat travel to Munich? The Linux distribution the Council is using is called LiMux which is Debian based.